“Thank God, I’ve struck it at last!”
He lit a candle and ran into the tunnel; he picked
up a piece of rubbish cast out by the last blast,
and said:
“This clayey stuff is what I’ve longed
for—I know what is behind it.”
He swung his pick with hearty good will till long
after the darkness had gathered upon the earth, and
when he trudged home at length he knew he had a coal
vein and that it was seven feet thick from wall to
wall.
He found a yellow envelope lying on his rickety table,
and recognized that it was of a family sacred to the
transmission of telegrams.
He opened it, read it, crushed it in his hand and
threw it down. It simply said:
“Ruth is very ill.”
It was evening when Philip took the cars at the Ilium
station. The news of, his success had preceded
him, and while he waited for the train, he was the
center of a group of eager questioners, who asked him
a hundred things about the mine, and magnified his
good fortune. There was no mistake this time.
Philip, in luck, had become suddenly a person of consideration,
whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks
were all significant. The words of the proprietor
of a rich coal mine have a golden sound, and his common
sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom.
Philip wished to be alone; his good fortune at this
moment seemed an empty mockery, one of those sarcasms
of fate, such as that which spreads a dainty banquet
for the man who has no appetite. He had longed
for success principally for Ruth’s sake; and
perhaps now, at this very moment of his triumph, she
was dying.
“Shust what I said, Mister Sederling,”
the landlord of the Ilium hotel kept repeating.
“I dold Jake Schmidt he find him dere shust
so sure as noting.”
“You ought to have taken a share, Mr. Dusenheimer,”
said Philip.
“Yaas, I know. But d’old woman,
she say ’You sticks to your pisiness. So
I sticks to ’em. Und I makes noting.
Dat Mister Prierly, he don’t never come back
here no more, ain’t it?”
“Why?” asked Philip.
“Vell, dere is so many peers, and so many oder
dhrinks, I got ’em all set down, ven he coomes
back.”
It was a long night for Philip, and a restless one.
At any other time the swing of the cars would have
lulled him to sleep, and the rattle and clank of wheels
and rails, the roar of the whirling iron would have
only been cheerful reminders of swift and safe travel.
Now they were voices of warning and taunting; and
instead of going rapidly the train seemed to crawl
at a snail’s pace. And it not only crawled,
but it frequently stopped; and when it stopped it
stood dead still and there was an ominous silence.
Was anything the matter, he wondered. Only a
station probably. Perhaps, he thought, a telegraphic
station. And then he listened eagerly.
Would the conductor open the door and ask for Philip
Sterling, and hand him a fatal dispatch?
