第23章

Clay walked out upon the veranda and stood with his back to one of the pillars.MacWilliams and his pleasantries disturbed and troubled him.Perhaps, after all, the boy was right.It seemed absurd, but it was true.They were only employees of Langham--two of the thousands of young men who were working all over the United States to please him, to make him richer, to whom he was only a name and a power, which meant an increase of salary or the loss of place.

Clay laughed and shrugged his shoulders.He knew that he was not in that class; if he did good work it was because his self-respect demanded it of him; he did not work for Langham or the Olancho Mining Company (Limited).And yet he turned with almost a feeling of resentment toward the white yacht lying calmly in magnificent repose a hundred yards from his porch.

He could see her as clearly in her circle of electric lights as though she were a picture and held in the light of a stereopticon on a screen.He could see her white decks, and the rails of polished brass, and the comfortable wicker chairs and gay cushions and flat coils of rope, and the tapering masts and intricate rigging.How easy it was made for some men! This one had come like the prince in the fairy tale on his magic carpet.If Alice Langham were to leave Valencia that next day, Clay could not follow her.He had his duties and responsibilities; he was at another man's bidding.

But this Prince Fortunatus had but to raise anchor and start in pursuit, knowing that he would be welcome wherever he found her.

That was the worst of it to Clay, for he knew that men did not follow women from continent to continent without some assurance of a friendly greeting.Clay's mind went back to the days when he was a boy, when his father was absent fighting for a lost cause; when his mother taught in a little schoolhouse under the shadow of Pike's Peak, and when Kit Carson was his hero.He thought of the poverty of those days poverty so mean and hopeless that it was almost something to feel shame for; of the days that followed when, an orphan and without a home, he had sailed away from New Orleans to the Cape.How the mind of the mathematician, which he had inherited from the Boston schoolmistress, had been swayed by the spirit of the soldier, which he had inherited from his father, and which led him from the mines of South Africa to little wars in Madagascar, Egypt, and Algiers.It had been a life as restless as the seaweed on a rock.But as he looked back to its poor beginnings and admitted to himself its later successes, he gave a sigh of content, and shaking off the mood stood up and paced the length of the veranda.

He looked up the hill to the low-roofed bungalow with the palm-leaves about it, outlined against the sky, and as motionless as patterns cut in tin.He had built that house.He had built it for her.That was her room where the light was shining out from the black bulk of the house about it like a star.And beyond the house he saw his five great mountains, the knuckles of the giant hand, with its gauntlet of iron that lay shut and clenched in the face of the sea that swept up whimpering before it.Clay felt a boyish, foolish pride rise in his breast as he looked toward the great mines he had discovered and opened, at the iron mountains that were crumbling away before his touch.

He turned his eyes again to the blazing yacht, and this time there was no trace of envy in them.He laughed instead, partly with pleasure at the thought of the struggle he scented in the air, and partly at his own braggadocio.

``I'm not afraid,'' he said, smiling, and shaking his head at the white ship that loomed up like a man-of-war in the black waters.

``I'm not afraid to fight you for anything worth fighting for.

He bowed his bared head in good-night toward the light on the hill, as he turned and walked back into his bedroom.``And Ithink,'' he murmured grimly, as he put out the light, ``that she is worth fighting for.''