He caught her in his arms and swept her into the cabin and danced her about until the place shook.
“Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say you’d ride in your own auto yet? It had to come, old lady, it jest nacherally had to come!”
He gave her a hug and turned her loose.
“I knowed it,” he said solemnly. “I’ve allus knowed it. Away down deep in there—” he tapped his breast—“I’ve had a hunch.”
He flung himself into a chair and looked at her hard. “‘Ain’t you glad?” he said suddenly.
She was like a boat that has luffed into the wind. For a moment her mental sails hung flapping. Then they filled and strained and she set out before this new cold breeze. She told him as best she could that she was glad.
“To look at you a feller might think you was kinder sorry like,” he said quizzically. “What’s the matter?”
“I was thinkin’ a little about how happy we’d been right here—just you and me and the house you made yourself.”
“’Twarn’t a patch on what it’s gonna be,” he said, and jumped up and was off with his samples to the assayer’s in Gray Dome. He stepped strongly, as a young man does. Half the stoop was gone from his shoulders.
Rosie turned back slowly and sat down heavily at the kitchen table, her occupation gone. Jim didn’t need a grubstaker now. She sat there a long time, while memories of other miners who had got rich swarmed in her brain like little devils that fell over each other in their eagerness to stab her: Senator Sherrill, and Tom Potts, the hotel man, and Hooker Bates, who took his flier in Wall Street; and Mike Watson, who divorced his wife for Dora Schoonmaker, and a dozen others. They made their money and then were gathered in by women like the Schoonmakers. She had seen so many of them. They always left the women they had picked up when they were poor. Especially dance hall women. Even when they were their wives.