“Yes, I've got him down to fifty. We'll split even on the patent.”
“And your work?” said Tommy, shaking his head.
“And yours?” shrieked Bill, excitedly. “Whose idea was it? I won't go on any other basis.”
“You are a d--d fool,” said Tommy, severely.
“So are you!” retorted Bill, so pugnaciously that Tommy laughed and said, soothingly:
“Let's not hoodoo the thing by counting the chickens before they are hatched. You wait here.”
Tommy went into his room, unlocked his trunk, and found the little package of gold coins his mother had wrapped up. He read the faint but still legible inscription: “For Tommy's first scrape.”
In that shabby room in a strange city she came to him, the mother he had never known, who had paid for his life with her own, the mother who had loved him so much, whose love began before he was bora.
“Poor mother!” he muttered. And he tried to see--in vain!--a mother's smile on her lips and the blessed light in her eyes. He could not see them, but he felt them, for he felt himself enveloped by her love as though she had thrown a warm cloak about his chilled soul. A great yearning came over him to love her.
He raised the little package to his lips instinctively and kissed the writing. And then, not instinctively, but deliberately, that his love might go from him to her, he kissed it again and again, until the sense of loss came and his eyes filled with tears for the mother he now not only loved, but did not wish to lose.
She had loved him without knowing him. She had planned for him--plans that had come to naught notwithstanding his father's efforts to carry them out.
“Poor father!” he said. He heard his own words. He understood now that his duty to his mother was his duty to his father. He must plan for his father as his mother had planned for him. His father must come first in everything! It was his father, not Tommy Leigh, whom he must save from disgrace.
The money must go to New York. It was not much, but it would help. It was as much as he could save in thirty weeks.
He hesitated. He saw his duty to his father. Then with the package still unbroken in his hand he went back to Bill's room.
“Bill!” said Tommy. His throat was dry. It made his voice husky.
“What's the matter? Is it stolen?” asked Bill in alarm. Tommy's voice had told him something was wrong.