ail, leaving Denver
with something to think about.

CHAPTER XIV

THE STRIKE

Denver Russell _was_ young, in more ways than one, but that did not
prove he was wrong. Perhaps he was presumptuous in trying to tell an
artist how to gain a foothold on the stage, but he was still convinced
that, in grand opera as in mining, there was no big demand for a
quitter. As for that swift, back stab, that veiled intimation that he
might live to be a quitter himself, Denver resolved then and there not
to quit working his mine until his last dollar was gone. And, while he
was doing that, he wondered if Drusilla could boast as much of her
music. Would she weaken again, as she had twice already, and declare
that she was a miserable failure; or would she toil on, as he did, day
by day, refusing to acknowledge she was whipped?

Denver returned to his cave in a defiant mood and put on a record by
Schumann-Heink. There was one woman that he knew had fought her way
through everything until she had obtained a great success. He had read
in a magazine how she had been turned away by a director who had told
her her voice was hopeless; and how later, after years of privation and
suffering, she had come back to that same director and he had been
forced to acknowledge her genius. And it was all there, in her voice,
the sure strength that comes from striving, the sweetness that comes
from suffering; and as Denver listened to her "Cradle Song" he
remembered what he had read about her children. Every night, in those
dark times when, deserted and alone, she sang in the chorus for her
bread, she had been compelled for lack of a nursemaid to lock her
children in her room; and evening after evening her mother's heart was
tormented by fears for their safety. What if the house should burn down
and destroy them all? All the fear and love, all the anguished
tenderness which had torn her heart through those years was written on
the stippled disc, so deeply had it touched her life.

Denver put them all on, the best records he had by singers of world
renown, and then at the end he put on the "Barcarolle," the duet from
the "Love Tales of Hoffmann." For him, that was Drusilla's song, the
expression of her gayest, happiest self. Its lilt and flow recalled her
to his thoughts like the embroidered motifs that Wagner used to
anticipate the coming of his characters. It was a light song, in a way,
not the greatest of music; but while she was singing it he h