"Poor Dick!" says he, pushin' back his demitasse and lightin' up a big perfecto. "Now if he'd been my boy, things might have turned out differently. But my respected brother--well, you knew Richard, Martha. Not at all like me,--eminently respectable, a bit solemn, and tremendously stiff-necked on occasion. The way he took on about that red-headed Irish girl, for instance. Irene, you know. Why, you might have thought, to have heard him storm around, that she was a veritable sorceress, or something of the kind; when, as a matter of fact, she was just a nice, wholesome, keen-witted young woman. Pretty as a picture, she was, and as true as gold too,--a lot too good for young Dick Ballard, even if she was merely a girl in his father's office. You couldn't blame her for liking Dick, though. Everyone did--the scatter-brained scamp! And when my brother went through all that melodramatic folly of cutting him off with a thousand a year--well, we had our big row over that. That was when I took my money out of the firm. Lucky I did too. When the panic came I was safe."
"Let's see," says Zenobia, "Dick and the girl ran off and were married, weren't they?"
"Yes," says Ballard. "It's in the blood, you see. They went to Paris, to carry out one of Dick's great schemes. He had persuaded some of his friends, big real estate dealers, to make him their foreign agent. His idea was, I believe, to catch Western millionaires abroad and sell 'em Fifth-ave. mansions. Actually did land one or two customers, I think. But it was his wife's notion that turned out to be really practical,--leasing French and Italian villas to rich Americans. Something in that, you know, and if Dick had only stuck to it--but Dick never could. He got in with some mine promoters, and after that nothing would answer but that he must rush right back to Goldfield and look over some properties that were for sale dirt cheap. As though Dick would have been any wiser after he'd seen 'em! But his biggest piece of folly was in taking the little boy along with him."
"What! Away from his mother?" says Martha.
"Just like Dick," says Ballard. "They couldn't both leave the leasing business, and as she knew more about it than he did--well, that's the way they settled it. He persuaded her it would be a fine thing for the youngster. Huh! I came over on the same boat with them, and I want to tell you that little chap simply owned the steamer! Bright? Why, he was the cutest kid you ever saw,--red-headed, like his mother, and with his father's laugh. Spent most of his time on the bridge with the first officer, or down in the engine room with the chief. Dick never knew where he was half the time.