He had taken up his work at Copper Rock exactly as he had taken up his practice under the athletic coaches.  He gave all the best of him, from the earliest to the latest possible hours; and night saw him stretched on a bunk which would have made his mother wince, but upon which he slept the sleep of healthy, tired youth.

Three years he had spent in this place.  Twice in that time furnace explosions had sent him home to be nursed.  But he suppressed the horrors and related only enthusiastic tales of metallurgical possibilities.  In the main, however, he was strong enough to stand it.  It did him a vast amount of good; and the end of three years saw him saying good-by with something akin to regret to the bleak shacks on the bleaker hills, and to the men he had grown to know and appreciate.

An improved form of blast furnace that he had patented, eased his first strenuous need of money.  And the present moment found him vice-president of a mining and smelting company, temporarily back among his old friends, and somewhat in his old life again.  He was too busy and too interested in his work to spend any effort outside of it; but there were one or two houses where he went, and one of them was the Randolphs’.  The Randolph and Derby country places adjoined, and since early boyhood he had been as much at home in one house as in the other.

Mrs. Randolph had taken his college achievements complacently as a tribute to her discernments in having nurtured an eagle in her own swan’s nest.  But his work at Copper Rock seemed to her a fanatical whim.  She no more appreciated the benefit of the experience than she understood the persevering grit that was the real reason for her liking him.  Nina, having adored him as a Greek god, continued her allegiance to the workman at Copper Rock.  She had written him letters regularly; she had even sent him provision baskets.  To herself she questioned whether the end he was striving for might not be reached by smoother roads; but if any one else suggested that he was doing an irrational thing, she flew up in arms.  And now as he came into the dining-room his “Hello, Nina!” was much as a brother’s might have been, and he kissed Mrs. Randolph’s cheek.

“Will you have lunch, John?” she smiled up at him.  “It is all cold by now, I dare say!”

“No, thanks, I lunched downtown; but I’ll sit here if I may.”  He picked up a knife from the table and cut the string of a package he held in his hand.  “I brought you these, Nina.  Have you read all of them?”

Nina finished a mouthful of nectarine and picked up the books one by one.

No, she had not read any of them.  So he went on to explain:  he knew the cowboy story was a corker, and another, of Arizona, described an Indian fight in the Bad Lands that was capital.  He did not know much about the others, but the man at the shop had told him two were very funny; he had bought the rest on account of their illustrations.