Ernest looked at Charley--"I've got to talk about her, Charley, to make them understand."
Charley moistened her lips, but nodded and Dick put his hand over his eyes.
"She was like Charley too in that she was the kind of a girl that decent men instinctively love--not with one of these headlong, unreasoning loves, you understand. But with the kind of a deep-seated adoration for beauty and goodness and brain that gets a man where he lives and never leaves him. That's the way I got to caring for Charley and that's the way, in embryo, we all loved Felicia.
"In the meantime, you understand we were all working like the very devil to get the plant up and the alfalfa in. I wrote home of that. How difficult the work here in the desert was is beyond description. And, what made it more difficult, after the Smithsonian turned Roger down, he got to working against time, and though he never said much, he gave an atmosphere of desperate hurry and worry to the camp, that simply got us all strung up to the breaking point. At intervals, too, he lost that famous temper of his. These tempers upset Felicia terribly."
Roger filled his pipe with fingers that trembled a little. But Ernest was staring out the door now, with eyes that saw nothing.
"Dick varied the monotony two or three times by getting drunk. He is an ugly whelp when he's drunk. Once he knocked Charley down and Felicia saw it and Roger and he mixed up over it and Elsa finally straightened it out, and we let him out of Coventry. But the next time he got drunk, Felicia, in her fright, ran away into the desert and was killed by a rattler. Charley and Roger found her. It nearly killed us all. But it cured Dick of drinking--that's one reason why I'm telling you. Don't cry, Mütterchen."
"But you have Charley, Ernie! You have Charley!" sobbed his mother.
"No, I haven't Charley. Roger has Charley. None of us deserved her, but Roger is nearer fit than the rest."
"Don't, Ernest!" pleaded Charley.
"I must, Charley. You'll see in a few moments what I'm getting at. Well, Papa, in the meantime, there was no money and it looked as if there would be no food. Roger's plant didn't work out as we'd planned. I wrote home the difficulties even of hanging a door. You can picture Roger trying to build a new engine out of wire and a string he had tramped ten miles into the ranges to find and steal. The alfalfa was dying for lack of water and there was no adequate pumping system even if we'd had adequate water.