“You're workin' too many hours in the shaft,” continued Rand. “You're always up to some such d—n fool business when I'm not yer.”
“I dipped a little west to-day,” Ruth went on, without heeding the brotherly remonstrance, “and struck quartz and pyrites.”
“Thet's you!—allers dippin' west or east for quartz and the color, instead of keeping on plumb down to the 'cement'!”*
* The local name for gold-bearing alluvial drift,—the bed
of a prehistoric river.
“We've been three years digging for cement,” said Ruth, more in abstraction than in reproach,—“three years!”
“And we may be three years more,—may be only three days. Why, you couldn't be more impatient if—if—if you lived in a valley.”
Delivering this tremendous comparison as an unanswerable climax, Rand applied himself once more to his repast. Ruth, after a moment's pause, without speaking or looking up, disengaged his hand from under his chin, and slid it along, palm uppermost, on the table beside his brother. Thereupon Rand slowly reached forward his left hand, the right being engaged in conveying victual to his mouth, and laid it on his brother's palm. The act was evidently an habitual, half mechanical one; for in a few moments the hands were as gently disengaged, without comment or expression. At last Rand leaned back in his chair, laid down his knife and fork, and, complacently loosening the belt that held his revolver, threw it and the weapon on his bed. Taking out his pipe, and chipping some tobacco on the table, he said carelessly, “I came a piece through the woods with Mornie just now.”
The face that Ruth turned upon his brother was very distinct in its expression at that moment, and quite belied the popular theory that the twins could not be told apart. “Thet gal,” continued Rand, without looking up, “is either flighty, or—or suthin',” he added in vague disgust, pushing the table from him as if it were the lady in question. “Don't tell me!”
Ruth's eyes quickly sought his brother's, and were as quickly averted, as he asked hurriedly, “How?”
“What gets me,” continued Rand in a petulant non sequitur, “is that YOU, my own twin-brother, never lets on about her comin' yer, permiskus like, when I ain't yer, and you and her gallivantin' and promanadin', and swoppin' sentiments and mottoes.”