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Any sermon on the prodigal always touches men; even if it does not prick their memories, it can always stir their imaginations. Whenever he heard one, his mind went back to the years when she who afterwards became Rowan's mother had cast him off, so settling life for him. For after that experience he had put away the thought of marriage.
To his delight, Tom was not in the room, and no one representing her. If he had had any lingering suspicion of her bidding, her non-appearance allayed it. He knew now that she was out of the race. Moreover, no New Brighton people had come. He whispered this information to Justice Rowan's brother behind his big, speckled hand covered with its red, spidery hair.
A few good sailors were obtained from those who escaped to Norfolk after the destruction of the Confederate flotilla at Elizabeth City by Capt. Rowan's squadron. They had but little chance for drills and exercise on the new ship, for up to the very hour of sailing she was crowded with workmen getting her ready for the task of breaking down the Yankee blockade.
His mind, while remaining the mind of a friend, almost the mind of a father toward a son, became also the mind of a lawyer, a criminal lawyer, with the old, fixed, human bloodhound passion for the scent of crime and the footsteps of guilt. It was with both attitudes that he himself answered Rowan's ring; he opened the door half warmly and half coldly.
This pleased him evidently more than his hope of cutting the contract pie. McGaw began to regain some of his color and lose some of his nervousness. Rowan's speech had quieted him. The president gravely rapped for order.
I didn't stop to analyze my feeling toward him, just then; but I had the impulse to keep what little I knew to myself, and I obeyed the promptings of the sixth sense. "He did," I answered. "But we can take a chance. Send men that know the country. Lyn Rowan's kinfolk are few and far between, now; that gold means a good deal to her, in her present circumstances." "H m-m." He mused a few seconds.
All the love that he had any right to pour into any life, he had always poured with passionate and useless yearnings into Rowan's son, of the only woman he had ever loved the boy that should have been his own. There came an interruption. A light quick step was heard mounting the stairs. A latch key was impatiently inserted in the hall door.
A brother of Rowan's, a contractor, who was finishing some grading at Quarantine Landing, had also consented, for a consideration, to loan McGaw what extra teams he required.
This watch-the-other-fellow business is making me nervous as an old woman. Once we had those two dead to rights they might let out something that would enable us to land the whole bunch, and the plunder besides; once we had them rounded up we could come back here and hunt for Hank Rowan's gold-dust in peace."
The failure of Rowan's love affair was a blow to him: it had so linked him to the life of the young was the last link.
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