It was not long before Phil and Jim found out that although few people in Vernock were willing to lend hard cash, many of them were friendly, even indulgent, and quite ready to encourage any honest enterprise, and brotherly enough to give a new man a fighting chance.

A week had not gone before outsiders began to see that Jim Langford had at last found himself. He did not develop, but rather he utilised what he had always possessed, the powers of winning confidence, of persuasion, of argument; combined with a shrewdness for sizing up his clients and knowing instinctively what they wanted, what they were prepared to go in price, and consequently, what to show them.

And Phil was not a whit behind, for the spirit of emulation was rife in him. He had been born with a burning ambition to succeed, and now that he saw a lifetime chance, he exerted all his power of mind and body to take advantage of it to the full.

The banking account of the Langford-Ralston Company did not fall lower than that consternation mark of three thousand dollars, and it rapidly increased with the advent of the spring sunshine and the incoming settlers who in ever-increasing numbers had heard of the fertility and the climatic perfection of the Valley; and hearing, came to see; and seeing, succumbed to Dame Nature’s seductiveness. Sales increased; so did the new company’s listings. So rapidly did the Langford-Ralston 339 Financial Corporation go ahead that the other real-estate men in town began to sit up and gasp. They had given the “mushroom outfit” anything from a week to six weeks in which to crumple up, but they rapidly withdrew the time-limit, contenting themselves with wait-and-see, wise-acre nods of their heads.

For the first time since leaving his home, Jim took it upon himself to communicate with his father, who was the head of an old firm of Edinburgh Solicitors and Lawyers. True, his method of communication was somewhat impersonal, consisting as it did solely of a continuous weekly bombardment of pamphlets on the fruit-growing possibilities of the Okanagan Valley, with the Langford-Ralston Corporation writ large on the advertisements thereon; printed dodgers of sub-divisions and ranching first mortgage propositions issued by the Company every few days; and copies of the Vernock and District Advertiser containing the Langford-Ralston Company’s regular full-page advertisement.

“Why don’t you write to him?” asked Phil one day.

Jim laughed.

“Because I know him!” he answered. “If I wrote to him, he’d smell a rat. But the constant drip will have its effect, laddie. His firm has money by the train-load to lend out on good security,––but the security has got to be good. It won’t be long before he is making inquiries through some of the banks. Why, man!––I know that Fraser & Somerville placed a quarter of a million dollars for him on first mortgages a year or so ago. Why shouldn’t we have it?”

In response to Phil’s peculiar look, Jim went on.

“Oh, ay!––you may glower. I know I’ve been a rotter, and I don’t think I deserve any confidences from my old dad. I never played the game with him. All the same, I’m not going to crawl to him for all the money on 340 earth. I’ve come to myself at last and I mean to show him I am still worthy to be called his son,––as the Good Book says. If he is interested in our legitimate business and cares to get in touch in a business-like way, we’ll be mighty glad to show him what we’ve got and accept his fatted calf, or should I say, golden calf, with becoming dignity.”

“Well, Jim,––you’re lucky,” reflected Phil. “I doubt if my father knows now that I am alive. He was a mighty good dad to me, but he doesn’t seem to have allowed much for youthful impetuosity and indiscretion. Evidently, he has never forgiven me for refusing to accept a new mother on a moment’s notice. You may say what you like about Brenchfield, but if it hadn’t been for the kindness of his father and mother, God only knows what and where I would have been to-day.”

“Yes, Sentimental Tommy! And you paid all of it back, a thousand per cent,––so forget that part! A fat lot Graham Brenchfield did for you, personally.”

“Oh, yes!––but still–––”

“Oh, you make me tired with your excuses for that coyote;––forget it! But, if your dad was so good to you when you were a kiddie, for the life of me I’m darned if I can understand where his paternal instinct has got to. If I had a laddie,––God save me for indulging in such a fantasy!––but, if I did have, I’d go after him if he were in hell itself. Think o’ it, Phil! Your own flesh and blood, of the woman you have loved well enough to make your wife––the combination transfused––to grow, and develop, and work out to prove before God and his fellow-man the wisdom or folly of the choice the father and mother of him made when they took each other for better or worse.”

“Yes,––when you put it that way, Jim, it makes a man think hard of the tremendous seriousness of the step.”

Jim grinned again.

“You needn’t worry, anyway. If you keep on as you are doing, you’ll win the best and bonniest lassie in this Valley.”

Phil quickly changed the subject, but a tell-tale ruddiness added to the confirmations that Jim had been accumulating along that particular line.

“Talking about my dad, Jim!” reverted Phil, “it is strange the longings I have at times to see him and to patch up the old breach, even if I might never be permitted to see him again after that. But,––oh, well!––what’s the use? I won’t trouble inquiring about him now––it is too late. And I guess he isn’t worrying about me. All the same, I’d give my right hand to see my little sister, Margery. When I ran away, she was a bright, mischievous, fair-haired, little girl, just starting school. She and I were the great chums. She will be growing quite a young lady now.

“I fight the feeling, Jim,––but some day I fear the pulling from her end will be too strong for me and I’ll go back and hunt them up––if only to stand in the shadows and watch her pass.”

Jim looked at his watch and got up to fulfil a business engagement.

“Well, old man!––I never had a little sister. If I had had, I fancy I wouldn’t be here to-day. So that’s how it goes. But we have a good year ahead of us to buy and sell and loan for a fare-you-well; to make a stake as big as all the others have made together in the last three or four years. And we are going to do it, too. I feel it in the air.

“I don’t know what will happen after that––some of the big fellows, Royce Pederstone, Brenchfield and Arbuthnot are overloaded now, but they keep on mortgaging and buying more. The newer ranchers here have 342 planted their orchards and are sitting still for the ‘seven lean years’ till their orchards begin to bear, instead of getting busy with truck stuff, poultry and pigs to keep them going. Some of them are feeling the pinch already, for it costs like the devil to live here––especially the way these fellows insist on living. They also are mortgaging heavily. Man, if any kind of a slump came in realty, or a shortage of money, and the banks shut down and the money-lenders started to draw in their capital, there would be a veritable stampede.

“I give it a year, boy; then, if we’ve got the money, that’s the time to put it in, for, a few years more and all these baby orchards about the Valley will be paying for themselves over and over again.

“Half of the ranchers in the meantime are going to get cold feet, because they won’t be able to get their stuff to the paying markets, while, if they only organised––as they undoubtedly will do later––they could get their fruit anywhere and at a big price, too.

“But––that’s where we can get in.”

And as Jim went off, Phil sat for a while thinking––a dreamer and a visionary––until he was jolted out of his reverie by the pressing inquiries of his recently augmented staff.

One day the inevitable, according to Jim’s notion of things, happened. A letter arrived, bearing the heading of Langford & Macdonald, Solicitors and Attorneys, Princes Street, Edinburgh, making inquiry as to the possibility of placing trust funds on gild-edged first mortgage security, requesting bank references and inviting correspondence from the Langford-Ralston Financial Corporation.

The letter was straight business. There were no paternal greetings; not a word to suggest that either Langford had ever known of the other’s existence.

Jim, with his usual long-headedness, insisted on Phil replying to it and signing it on behalf of the firm.

Phil demurred.

“Why, man alive!––give me credit for knowing my own father. Do you suppose he doesn’t know all about us already?––more than we know ourselves. Just go ahead and answer that. Doing it that way will humour him.

“It is by far the biggest thing we have landed yet. Unlimited capital to lend on good security is a grand foundation for a Financial Corporation. But we have to see that everything is absolutely right––absolutely straight––absolutely secure. One mistake with Langford & Macdonald and that’s the end of it.”

And the banks knew of the stabilising of the Langford-Ralston Company almost before the L. R. Company realised it themselves, and they vied with one another for the privilege of handling their bank account, putting inquiring clients in touch with them direct as a sop for future business. What the banks did became the fashion in town. And in such days as the West was then passing through, that meant much indeed, for everyone was thinking, talking, handling and dreaming Real Estate. Even Percival DeRue Hannington forgot his former hurt and gave them his business. All were making money––nobody lost. They bought at a price and sold for more, and the difference in value was debited and redebited to old Mother Earth. Prosperity vaunted itself in rolling wheels, cigar smoke, late orgies and rare wines; costly winter trips to the South; dress, diamonds, foolishness and mining and oil stocks.

Yet through that wildest year of all, Phil and Jim stood firm to the principles of their business––they bought and sold for their clients, they loaned on first-class security––they paid as they went and they banked their 344 commissions. Not once, but a hundred times, could they have doubled their savings by speculation with a quick turn-over, but they held fast; and their savings increased faster than their wildest dreams had ever pictured.

They did more advertising than all the others combined. Their staff of salesmen and stenographers increased in numbers by rapid jumps. They had correspondents in every city of importance in the Dominion and the United States. They had the best stand in town. Anyone coming in by train could not fail to see it and could not fail to be impressed by its importance and apparent prosperity, even when they had not been previously apprised of it.

When early June arrived with its continuous sunshine, when the older ranches revelled in miles of pink and white apple blossom, when the small, wild sunflowers spread themselves like a sea of gold over the hills and valleys bursting in fairy splendour even through the hard roads and the rock fissures; when the air was redolent with the hypnotising, cloying sweetness of Nature’s perfume from a hundred million blossoms and charged with the melody of her gaily bedecked feathered choristers,––Eileen Pederstone came back to her beloved “Valley of Tempestuous Waters.”

In the six short months she had been away, she had written only occasionally to Phil and then it had been superficially, for she was not one given to expressing her feelings in pen and ink.

And Phil, in the rush of the new enterprise, had been something of a desultory correspondent. He had refrained from mentioning business in any of his letters to her––despite her many questions to him regarding his endeavours and his progress––intending, thereby, to spring the greater surprise when she should return. But he might have saved himself such thoughts, for Eileen 345 was fully posted on every move he and Jim had made.

She came in on them one day with the brightness and impetuosity of the June sun bursting through the early morning clouds over Blue Nose Mountain, causing everything but the sun she emulated to stand still for half an hour and breathe in the added sweetness in the atmosphere.

All the hunger in Phil’s being welled up at the very sight of her; smart, neat, healthy, radiant, vivacious, and pretty as the bursting red roses on her bosom.

He caught her two hands in his and looked down at her; and as she gave a little pleasure-laugh far down in her throat, he almost drew her up to his breast, when a cough from Jim startled him back to the cold truth that he was in the open office of the Langford-Ralston Financial Corporation, among half a dozen salesmen and as many stenographers.

Jim and Phil escorted Eileen into their private office, and there they fired back their answers to her queries until she gasped in sheer bewilderment at the tremendous success of their daring enterprise.

“And, oh, boys!––you’re making good. I knew you would. Glad!––I’m so glad, because you are just like two big brothers of mine.”

“Now, Eileen,” put in Jim, “kindly dispense with the ‘brother’ stuff. You can’t tell me that you are going to be a mere sister to both of us.”

She blushed.

“Does he know?” she queried at Phil.

“He thinks he does,” said Phil. “I haven’t told him a thing.”

“Oh, haven’t you?” remarked Jim.

“Shall we tell him, Phil?”

“Doesn’t look as if he required any telling,––but go on, fire away!”

“Well!” she commenced, nodding her head and putting out her lips, “some day––Phil and I––we two––both of us–––”

“Yes! Yes! Go on!” hurried Jim in mock excitement.

She sighed and sat back.

“That’s all! Just that, Jim!”

“Did you get it?” asked Phil, laughing.

Jim nodded quietly for a moment, then he bent over, with an expression of almost motherly softness in his big, rugged face. He got Eileen’s hand in his left hand and Phil’s in his right.

“The best of God’s good luck!” he said quietly.

He looked at his watch. “I have an appointment at three o’clock.

“Why don’t you take the lady for a spin, Phil?”

“Would you like to come, Eileen?” asked Phil.

“Would I? Oh, boy!”

Jim went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder as an older brother would do. He tilted up her chin, bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

“You don’t mind, old Phil!” he said.

He left her and jumped over to Phil with a laugh and a shout.

“And you beat him to it, laddie:––money, duplicity, hum-bug and all! You beat him! Man,––you’re great!”

And he was into the outer office, out on the street and away in his car before they could properly grasp his meaning.

Phil and Eileen followed out shortly afterwards, out into the sunshine, and soon they were driving up the steep hill from the town, leading to the Kelowna highway. It was some time before either spoke.

“I wonder what Jim meant by the remark he made when he left us, Eileen?”

“Don’t wonder about anything just now, boy,––excepting me. Don’t let us think about a thing that isn’t pleasant and in keeping with the glorious day. We can do our ‘trouble talks’ on the way back.”

She snuggled up close to her big companion who, as they reached the top of the hill, opened up and sent the car speeding along. At one of the sharp turns, he slowed up and stopped to admire the ever-changing delight of the scenery.

“Did you ever see anything so beautiful?” exclaimed Eileen, “and yet some folks want to go away from here when they have a holiday.”

They were on the thin line of roadway which was cut half-way on the face of the hillside. All the ranges were a spread of golden sunflowers; away below, sheer three hundred feet down, the blue waters of the Kalamalka Lake reflected the blue, cloudless sky, while here and there it seemed to throw back the sun’s rays in a golden spray.

On the other side of the water, as far as the eye could scan––until it rested again on the background of hills of gold, purple and green––the long, regular lines of old orchard-land shone a riot of pink and white. The air was laden with the perfume of bursting flowers.

Far up the Lake, alongside which the road ran in a brown, winding thread, were little wooded and grassy promontories sitting like islands upon the water and suggesting the last peaceful reservation of all the fairies, wood-elves and brownies who might be crowded out from the cities and the busy lands now over-run and exploited by the unpoetical humans.

A little, warm hand placed itself over Phil’s as he held the steering wheel and it roused him from his reverie. 348 He gazed at Eileen’s upturned face. He put his arms about her, drew her closer to him and kissed her on the lips.

She laughed––that same little, happy laugh away down in her throat, then she clapped her hands with pleasure.

“My, but I’m glad!” she cried. “My Phil is a dreamer after all.”

“Didn’t you know that before, girlie?”

“No! I always hoped––and fancied sometimes––but I know now and I am ever so glad about it.” Her face became solemn.

“Phil,––you won’t ever let money, and business, and success steal your love to dream away from you?”

“I should say not! Did you think I would?”

“Oh,––so many men lose their love for the beautiful things, for poetry, music, pictures, pretty scenery–––”

“And their sweethearts,” put in Phil.

“Yes,––sometimes. But more often their wives. They do not lose their love exactly, but rather they forget to use it in their over-absorption in business, and it gradually slips away from them like a child’s belief in fairies and in Santa Claus.”

Phil started up the car again and they bowled merrily along to the village of Oyama, the half-way rest between Vernock and Kelowna, at the division of the two lakes.

“Take Jim now,” said Phil, continuing the line of thought, “I’ll bet he believes in sprites, and ghosts, and Santa Claus, right to-day. He is the kind that never grows away from his boyhood.”

“And why should he? His boyhood was doubtless the happiest period of his life, and he is just staying with it like a wise man.”

Eileen sighed.

“Phil,––I wish Jim could get a real, nice sweetheart. Did you ever hear of him having one?”

“Never!––at least not a real one. Did you?”

“No! He doesn’t seem ever to get any further with the young ladies than mere acquaintance. Yet I know lots––and nice girls, too––who would be glad to have a man like Jim.”

“I guess he is just waiting on ‘’till the right girl comes along,’ as the poet says. I hope she will prove worthy of him. His kind are so apt to get fooled at the finish. What shall we do with him when we get married, Eileen?”

Eileen blushed. “It is a hard problem, but we’ve just got to mother, and sister, and brother him until he gets settled.”

“If he ever does!”

“If he doesn’t, I am going to keep on mothering him––that’s all. So it is up to you, Phil, to find him a real, nice girl.”

“No, thanks! It has been a hard job finding one for myself.”

“And you are quite satisfied?” she queried again, solemnly.

“Quite!”

“And you’ll never grow tired of me?”

“Never! Why, dearie,––how could I?”

“Oh, I don’t know! Men do, sometimes. I guess I am just foolish. But, if I don’t measure up, you will promise to be lenient with me?”

“You’ll always measure up with me, Eileen. It is my measuring up with you that I am afraid of.”

“And if I don’t just grasp things quickly;––if I can’t climb the mountains of thought and progress as fast as you can,––you won’t grow impatient?”

“No!”

“You’ll wait for me, and help me over the boulders, and even if I wish to sit down and rest for a while, you’ll sit down with me and rest also until I am ready to climb on? You won’t run ahead––as so many husbands do––so far ahead that I shall not be able to catch up?”

“No, dearie, no! Your speed is just going to be my speed unless it is too much for me, and we’ll both get up to the top of the hill together.”

“Kiss me then, Phil,––and let us turn for home. I am happy at last,––just ever so happy.”

“Eileen, I think I’d better come along and make my peace, et cetera, et cetera, with your dad,” said Phil, as they neared Vernock again. “Does he know anything of our plans?”

“No, Phil! I have told him of our good friendship, but I have been waiting and waiting in the hope that a chance would come for us to talk to him when he was not absorbed, body, soul and spirit, in business and politics. But the time seems to get farther and farther off than ever. I guess you had better come along now.

“And don’t I wish you could advise him to give up his silly notions for acquiring land. He might listen to you, Phil. You might be able to induce him to sell part of what he has in order to bolster up what remains. If a slump of any kind comes, he will be without a prop to lean on. No man has any right to involve himself in this way, no matter how good the ultimate prospects may look.”

“I can’t understand it, Eileen, for it appears to be a kind of contagious disease, attacking the ablest and otherwise most business-like men in the Province. Your father is by no means alone.”

“I know; Mr. Brenchfield, Mr. Arbuthnot, the Victoria and the Vancouver political gang,––they are all more or less in it the same way. I can’t think what has 351 come over them. The danger signals ahead stand out so brightly to me, although I may be wrong. I hope,––oh, I hope I am!

“They have got to think so much prosperity and progress that they have hypnotised themselves into believing that it is permanent. And they all imagine, whatever comes, that they will be able to see before the man in the street does and so be able to get out from under, leaving someone else with the load of unrealisable property.”

“I am afraid, though, your dad would hardly listen to me. He would put any advice I might give him down to gratuitous impertinence and cubbish presumption.”

Eileen sighed again.

“Don’t you worry though, dearie! If the opportunity turns up I will speak my mind.”

As they ran in at the gateway and up through the avenue of trees, they found John Royce Pederstone seated in a garden chair on the front lawn.

The old man’s greeting to his daughter and to Phil was cordiality itself, for John Royce Pederstone was always a cheerful man, believing good of all whom he met, shutting his ears to all slander and quick to recognise enterprise and ability.

“Well, young man!––you’ve been making rapid progress since I saw you last,” he remarked, by way of greeting.

“More ways than one,” put in Eileen a little shyly.

Phil lost no time in stating his case in plain words to the politician. And his very plain words were what struck the responsive chords, for John Royce Pederstone was of all things a plain man. And the great pity of it all was that he had not stayed with plain blacksmithing or plain ranching.

So many men find out after the act that they have left the substance to chase the shadow.

John Royce Pederstone, however, had not yet come to the point of recognising this very great truth.

“What does my Eileen say to all this?” he asked, by way of answer.

“Eileen says, ‘Ugh-huh!’ daddy,” she put in roguishly.

Royce Pederstone held out his hand and gripped Phil’s, with a slightly tired smile.

“If my Eileen says, ‘Ugh-huh!’ my son, then ‘Ugh-huh!’ it is.”

Eileen threw her arms round her father’s neck and hugged him.

“I don’t know anything much about you, Ralston, but your record is clean since you came here––despite some attempts to blacken it. I like your face––and if you can make my motherless girl happy when I’m gone, you’ll have an old man’s blessing.

“If you don’t, though” (his blue eyes flashed temporary fire), “God help you! There have been more than one who wanted my Eileen, but I have told all of them that the choice of a man must be Eileen’s.

“By the way, Phil,––is it true what they say,––that the Langford-Ralston Company buy and sell for everybody but themselves?”

“Yes,––quite true!” answered Phil.

The old man laughed. “Doesn’t seem much like being very fond of their own cooking, Eileen.”

“One doesn’t have to eat what he cooks, daddy,––and somebody’s got to cook.”

“That’s an old song of yours, girlie. But, seriously, Phil, you and Jim Langford could double and re-double your money if you only put it into some of the land you buy for others. You would save commission too, which is quite an item.”

“Well, sir!––it is a policy we settled on when we started in, and it is a policy that has gained for us very many 353 clients and has been the means of getting us considerable Old Country capital for investment in first mortgages. If we had not been on this conservative basis, we should never have received the agency for Langford & Macdonald’s wealthy clientele.”

“You would never have needed it, man.”

“But we are doing pretty well, and at the finish we shall be on top. That is more than every land speculator will be able to say when the finish comes.”

“If we ever see it! But meantime, you could make your stake and be out of it. That’s what I mean to do myself.”

“Don’t you think it is getting near to the time when one should start in unloading; at least when he should stop acquiring more? This has been a fairly long boom.”

“Boom? Did you say boom? Man, alive!––this isn’t a boom, it is the natural growth to real values. I saw this coming fifteen years ago. And it is good for a long time yet. Why!––this is an investment in industry. This is a Fruit Valley;––the best fruit growing country in British Columbia. This isn’t a mushroom townsite proposition. You can’t compare this with ordinary realty wild-catting.”

“I agree with you, sir, and I guess my puny opinion does not carry much weight, but the unfortunate thing is that we are beginning to produce the fruit here in the Valley and the harvest is becoming greater and greater every year, but Mr. Apple Grower has not created an outlet for his production; he has no great organisation to market for him; no central control for his prices;––and the result is that for years––unless he wakes up––he is going to get a miserable pittance for his crop from travelling jobbers, or it is going to rot on his hands. He is going to suffer loss and possible bankruptcy if we can’t 354 hold up until he co-operates, unionises, and makes his own market and prices from a central control.”

“All in due season, son, when the time comes. But that is away from buying and selling of land. Personally, I raise cattle, pigs, horses;––I never have any trouble finding a market.

“And trust me, when you see me getting quietly from under, follow suit and you won’t go far wrong. I am not in Victoria with both eyes shut. The upgrade is absolutely good for three more years and the big prices will be next year. Get in when you can and make what you can. It is a great life!

“However, this doesn’t interest Eileen a bit.”

“Oh, yes it does!” she put in quickly.

“Well,––it is business, and we fellows oughtn’t to talk shop in a lady’s company.

“Phil,––you won’t rob me of my little girl for a while yet? I require her badly when the House is sitting at Victoria. I’d like to have her with me next session at any rate.”

“We had thought of eighteen months from now, daddy dear. Will that do?” inquired Eileen.

The old man’s eyes brightened up and his ruddy cheeks curved in a smile.

“That will be just fine! I’ll have eighteen months of you in which to get used to doing without you. And, who knows, maybe that is all the time I shall want.”

“Now, daddy, don’t say that. Besides, you won’t be losing me; you’ll just be finding Phil.”

John Royce Pederstone put one arm on Phil’s shoulder and the other round his daughter’s slight waist, as he turned with them toward the house.

“Well, we’ll have dinner and a glass of wine over it, anyway.”