ped through the bayberry bushes to the lighthouse, and lay down on
the big red boulders and laughed themselves hungry. Harvey had shown
Dan a telegram, and the two swore to keep silence till the shell burst.

"Harve's folk?" said Dan, with an unruffled face after supper. "Well, I
guess they don't amount to much of anything, or we'd ha' heard from 'em
by naow. His pop keeps a kind o' store out West. Maybe he'll give you
's much as five dollars, Dad."

"What did I tell ye?" said Salters. "Don't sputter over your vittles,
Dan."

CHAPTER IX

Whatever his private sorrows may be, a multimillionaire, like any other
workingman, should keep abreast of his business. Harvey Cheyne, senior,
had gone East late in June to meet a woman broken down, half mad, who
dreamed day and night of her son drowning in the gray seas. He had
surrounded her with doctors, trained nurses, massage-women, and even
faith-cure companions, but they were useless. Mrs. Cheyne lay still and
moaned, or talked of her boy by the hour together to any one who would
listen. Hope she had none, and who could offer it? All she needed was
assurance that drowning did not hurt; and her husband watched to guard
lest she should make the experiment. Of his own sorrow he spoke
little--hardly realized the depth of it till he caught himself asking
the calendar on his writing-desk, "What's the use of going on?"

There had always lain a pleasant notion at the back of his head that,
some day, when he had rounded off everything and the boy had left
college, he would take his son to his heart and lead him into his
possessions. Then that boy, he argued, as busy fathers do, would
instantly become his companion, partner, and ally, and there would
follow splendid years of great works carried out together--the old head
backing the young fire. Now his boy was dead--lost at sea, as it might
have been a Swede sailor from one of Cheyne's big teaships; the wife
dying, or worse; he himself was trodden down by platoons of women and
doctors and maids and attendants; worried almost beyond endurance by
the shift and change of her poor restless whims; hopeless, with no
heart to meet his many enemies.

He had taken the wife to his raw new palace in San Diego, where she and
her people occupied a wing of great price, and Cheyne, in a
veranda-room, between a secretary and a typewriter, who was also a
telegraphist, toiled along wearily from day to day. There was a war of
rates among four Wes