Jim would give anybody anything she had—he possessed nothing himself—and be perennially surprized if she objected. Usually she didn’t, but if it was something she wanted she went after it and got it back if she could. Any bum or crook or sharper could win his friendship and pick his mind or his pocket if either happened to have anything in it.
But Rosie’s mind was her own, and instead of a pocket she used the Conifer County Savings Bank. She met him at all points as shrewdly as if he had been an opponent—which in a sense he was—but she loved him. And she knew that he loved her, and counted on it, but only for what it was worth.
She put more trust in his poverty. Every day, of course, he expected to strike it. And for a while she had thought he might. But gradually as the days lay themselves down in long, pleasantly monotonous rows until the sum of them made many years, she came to know that he wouldn’t. And that, far more than his love, was the foundation of her content. While he was poor he was hers—wholly, unqualifiedly, unthinkingly hers.
Poor was scarcely the word, though. Jim lived in a moneyless world. Out of the little she made she supplied the simple necessities of both of them, and he was willing to wait for everything else until he struck it. “Then—! Then—!” was what he thought of as he made his slow way up and down the mountainside. To him the thought was roseate, luminous, rejuvenescent.
But Rosie hated it. If for nothing else, because it held the seeds of possible change. After a chancy life, she valued most, of things attainable by human beings, a life that was free from chances.
On this morning in spring an eagle slanted down the sky on wide, still wings; the ice broke up and tinkled in Little Cub Creek in the cañon; the orange and yellow shoots of the willows swelled out toward catkins; and Rosie washed her clothes contentedly, secure in the knowledge that there was no “then”; while over in his hole in the side of Old Baldy Jim broke up her world with quick excited blows of a short-handled miner’s pick.
She was hanging out the clothes on the squawberry bushes at the back when she heard the impatient crash of his elk hide boots. She went quickly through the house and stopped in the front door at sight of him.
When he swung up his heavy bag of samples for a signal, she knew. Knew before she heard his whoop. And when it cut across the stillness like the whistle of a locomotive it struck her cold. It chilled the core of her spirit, as an icy wind loosed in the tropics would chill a naked native.
“Struck it, by thunder! Two hundred dollars to the ton, if it’s worth a cent! An’ the vein as plain as a layer ’o choc’late in a cake!”
He fell into a chair on the porch. Rosie stood and stared at him. The one thing he knew was ore. He had the kind of knowledge that men had been willing to pay for when he’d sell it. His “then” had come. The realization went through her consciousness in widening rings. Whatever else it meant, it meant the end of this; the beginning of uncertainty.