“California Bill dropped in on me a few days before I left the hospital,” said Joshua. “It was he who warned me against the coming hard winter. Bill is something of a scientist himself, but he doesn’t realize it. He told me about the millions of yellowjackets that he had seen hovering over the mud on the lakeshore. That, he says, is one sure sign of a hard winter in the San Antonios. Also, he says that the ground squirrels are burrowing far back from the water, in anticipation of a rise in the lake, I suppose—and that’s another sign.
“Now, by the time snow flies, the steel won’t be laid on the new railroad. So that means that we’ve got to depend on freighters coming from Spur to Ragtown for our supplies. Unless we have a team of our own and can freight them in ourselves. That would save us money, of course. First, though, we’ll have to bring in lumber for the cabins—and for stables, for I’m going to have one horse at least. All my life I’ve wanted a saddle horse. Now, Madge, what are you going to have left from the wreck of your fortunes?—if you’ll forgive me for bringing up a painful subject.”
“It’s hard to tell just now,” she replied absently, her eyes fixed on the floor. “But the slide has put us so badly in debt that I imagine it will take about everything to square us with the world. Mr. Demarest and I will get at it to-morrow. Ugh! How I dread it!”
“And to think,” mused Joshua, “that if I hadn’t stopped that thirty-thirty bullet I could have saved your outfit for you! It seems to me that some subtle power was at work to make things turn out as they did. Your mother wanted you to stop railroading. And I’m afraid that I did too. And—”
“And I don’t give a whoop—now,” Madge interrupted.
All three were silent after this, each wrapped in his or her own thoughts.
“You, though, Joshua, failed to-day to show the same common sense that stopped the slide,” said Madge at last. “You are a man—a young man at that—just making a start. You earned a neat little piece of money and a big reputation in one fell swoop. And then Demarest offers you anything you want in the way of a position—and that doesn’t mean a mere job—and you turn him down. Why, boy—kid, I mean—he would have made you! I failed because I’m only a girl. You are a man; and with your brains and ability to figure things out, there’s no limit to what you might attain in big construction.”
“But the fact remains,” he pointed out, blissfully warmed by her praise, “that I have no inclination for construction work. I have set my heart on astronomy. That’s what I’m fitted for. When all’s said and done, it was the fact that my parents and old Silvanus Madmallet, my teacher, tried to make me learn something for which I was not fitted that sent me to the House of Refuge. No, my path is laid out for me—I’ll follow it to the bitter end.”
Madge repeated the question that she had put to him when he first called at the Mundys’ camp: “But is there any money in it?”
“As I told you before,” he replied, a trifle nettled, “I don’t know. Nor do I care. I’m not out for money.”