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does!"
Adams looked troubled. "Well, I don't like to feel that my salary's going on with me not earning it."
"Listen to him, Miss Alice! Wouldn't you think, now, he'd let me be the one to worry about that? Why, on my
word. if your daddy had his way, I wouldn't be anywhere. He'd take all my worrying and everything else off
my shoulders and shove me right out of Lamb and Company! He would!"
"It seems to me I've been soldiering on you a pretty long while, Mr. Lamb," the convalescent said,
querulously. "I don't feel right about it; but I'll be back in ten days. You'll see."
The old man took his hand in parting. "All right; we'll see, Virgil. Of course we do need you, seriously
speaking; but we don't need you so bad we'll let you come down there before you're fully fit and able." He
went to the door. "You hear, Miss Alice? That's what I wanted to make the old feller understand, and what I
want you to kind of enforce on him. The old place is there waiting for him, and it'd wait ten years if it took
him that long to get good and well. You see that he remembers it, Miss Alice!"
She went down the stairs with him, and he continued to impress this upon her until he had gone out of the
front door. And even after that, the husky voice called back from the darkness, as he went to his car, "Don't
forget, Miss Alice; let him take his own time. We always want him, but we want him to get good and well
first. Good-night, good-night, young lady!"
When she closed the door her mother came from the farther end of the "living-room," where there was no
light; and Alice turned to her.
"I can't help liking that old man, mama," she said. "He always sounds so--well, so solid and honest and
friendly! I do like him."
But Mrs. Adams failed in sympathy upon this point. "He didn't say anything about raising your father's salary,
did he?" she asked, dryly.
"No."
"No. I thought not."
She would have said more, but Alice, indisposed to listen, began to whistle, ran up the stairs, and went to sit
with her father. She found him bright-eyed with the excitement a first caller brings into a slow convalescence:
CHAPTER XII 74
his cheeks showed actual hints of colour; and he was smiling tremulously as he filled and lit his pipe. She
brought the crocheted scarf and put it about his shoulders again, then took a chair near him.
"I believe seeing Mr. Lamb did do you good. papa," she said. "I sort of thought it might, and that's why I let
him come up. You really look a little like your old self again."
Adams exhaled a breathy "Ha!" with the smoke from his pipe as he waved the match to extinguish it. "That's
fine," he said. "The smoke I had before dinner didn't taste the way it used to, and I kind of wondered if I'd lost
my liking for tobacco, but this one seems to be all right. You bet it did me good to see J. A. Lamb! He's the
biggest man that's ever lived in this town or ever will live here; and you can take all the Governors and
Senators or anything they've raised here, and put 'em in a pot with him, and they won't come out
one-two-three alongside o' him!
And to think as big a man as that, with all his interests and everything he's got on his mind--to think he'd
never let anything prevent him from coming here once every week to ask how I was getting along, and then
walk right upstairs and kind of CALL on me, as it were well, it makes me sort of feel as if I wasn't so much of
a nobody, so to speak, as your mother seems to like to make out sometimes."
"How foolish, papa! Of COURSE you're not 'a nobody.'"
Adams chuckled faintly upon his pipe-stem, what vanity he had seeming to be further stimulated by his
daughter's applause. "I guess there aren't a whole lot of people in this town that could claim J. A. showed that
much interest in 'em," he said. "Of course I don't set up to believe it's all because of merit, or anything like
that. He'd do the same for anybody else that'd been with the company as long as I have, but still it IS
something to be with the company that long and have him show he appreciates it."
"Yes, indeed, it is, papa."
"Yes, sir," Adams said, reflectively. "Yes, sir, I guess that's so. And besides, it all goes to show the kind of a
man he is. Simon pure, that's what that man is, Alice. Simon pure! There's never been anybody work for him
that didn't respect him more than they did any other man in the world, I guess. And when you work for him
you know he respects you, too. Right from the start you get the feeling that J. A. puts absolute confidence in
you; and that's mighty stimulating: it makes you want to show him he hasn't misplaced it. There's great big
moral values to the way a man like him gets you to feeling about your relations with the business: it ain't all
just dollars and cents--not by any means!"
He was silent for a time, then returned with increasing enthusiasm to this theme, and Alice was glad to see so
much renewal of life in him; he had not spoken with a like cheerful vigour since before his illness. The visit of
his idolized great man had indeed been good for him, putting new spirit into him; and liveliness of the body
followed that of the spirit. His improvement carried over the night: he slept well and awoke late, declaring that
he was "pretty near a well man and ready for business right now." Moreover, having slept again in the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
