"I--oh, I--let's see. Well, mostly an address from which to have word sent to folks I didn't want to see that--I was out. I used to find it useful that way." Mallinsbee's chuckle amused Gordon, but Hazel assumed an air of judicial severity. "A spirit not to be encouraged." Then, at the sound of her father's chuckle, "My daddy, you are as bad as he. Now food's ready, so please sit in. We can talk easier around a table than when people are dreaming somewhere in the distance on the horizon, or walking about a room that isn't bigger than the bare size to sit in. Anyway, Mr. Van Henslaer, this office is for business. I won't have it disparaged by my daddy, or--or anyone else. It serves a great purpose so far as we're concerned." Then she added slyly, "You see, we're in the throes of the great excitement of making a huge pile, for the sheer love of making it. Aren't we, Daddy, dear?" Silas Mallinsbee looked up from the food he was eating with the air of a man who only eats as a matter of sheer necessity. "Say, Mr. Van Henslaer," he said in his deep tones, "I've been a rancher all my life. Cattle, to me, are just about the only things in the world worth while, 'cept horses. I've never had a care or thought outside 'em, till one day I got busy worrying what was under the ground instead of keeping to the things I understood above the ground. Y'see, the trouble was two things," he went on, smiling tenderly in his daughter's direction. "One was I'd fed the ranch stoves with surface coal that you could find almost anywheres on my land, and the other was the fates just handed me the picture of a daughter who caught the dangerous disease of 'notions' way down east at school in Boston. Since she's come along back to us I've had coal, coal, coal all chasin' through my head, an' playing baseball with every blamed common-sense idea that ever was there before. Wal, to tell things quick, I made a mighty big pile out of that coal just to please her. We didn't need it, but she guessed it was up to me to do this. But that didn't finish it. This gal here couldn't rest at that. She guessed that pile was made and done with. She needs to get busy in another direction. Well, she gets to work, and has all my land on the railroads staked out into a township, and reckons it's a game worth playing. The other was too dead easy. This time she reckons to measure her brains and energy against a railroad! She reckons to show that we can match, and beat, any card they can play. That's the reason of this office." Hazel laughed and raised an admonishing finger at the smiling face and twinkling eyes of her father.