“It means we’ll have to marry earlier than you planned,” was Ernest’s comment when we told him.
I could not follow his reasoning, but I was soon to learn it. It was at this time that the quarterly dividend of the Sierra Mills was paid—or, rather, should have been paid, for father did not receive his. After waiting several days, father wrote to the secretary. Promptly came the reply that there was no record on the books of father’s owning any stock, and a polite request for more explicit information.
“I’ll make it explicit enough, confound him,” father declared, and departed for the bank to get the stock in question from his safe-deposit box.
“Ernest is a very remarkable man,” he said when he got back and while I was helping him off with his overcoat. “I repeat, my daughter, that young man of yours is a very remarkable young man.”
I had learned, whenever he praised Ernest in such fashion, to expect disaster.
“They have already walked upon my face,” father explained. “There was no stock. The box was empty. You and Ernest will have to get married pretty quickly.”
Father insisted on laboratory methods. He brought the Sierra Mills into court, but he could not bring the books of the Sierra Mills into court. He did not control the courts, and the Sierra Mills did. That explained it all. He was thoroughly beaten by the law, and the bare-faced robbery held good.
It is almost laughable now, when I look back on it, the way father was beaten. He met Wickson accidentally on the street in San Francisco, and he told Wickson that he was a damned scoundrel. And then father was