He held on to her hand but she wrested it away and turned blushing to her work.
"Don't be foolish!" she said, but her feelings were not hurt for she was smiling again in a minute. "Don't you know," she confided, "I feel utterly helpless when it comes to this matter of the mine. Everything about it seems so absolutely preposterous that I'm glad I'm not going to be a Director."
"But you are!" came back Rimrock, "now don't tell me different; because you're bull-headed, once you've put yourself on record. There ain't another living soul that I can trust to take that directorship. Even Old Hassayamp down here—and I'd trust him anywhere—might get drunk and vote the wrong way. But you——"
"You don't know me yet," she replied with decision. "I won't get drunk, but I've got to be convinced. And if you can't convince me that your way is right—and reasonable and just, as well—I give you notice that I'll vote against you. Now! What are you going to say?"
"All right!" he answered promptly, "that's all I ask of you. If you think I'm wrong you're welcome to vote against me; but believe me, this is no Sunday-school job. There's a big fight coming on, I can feel it in my bones, and the best two-handed scrapper wins. Old W. H. Stoddard, when he had me in jail and was hoping I was going to be sent up, he tried to buy me out of this mine. He started at nothing and went up to twenty million, so you can guess how much it's worth."
"Twenty million!" she echoed.
"Yes; twenty million—and that ain't a tenth of what he might be willing to pay. Can you think that big? Two hundred million dollars? Well then, imagine that much money thrown down on the desert for him and me to fight over. Do you think it's possible to be pleasant and polite, and always reasonable and just, when you're fighting a man that's never quit yet, for a whole danged mountain of copper?" He rose up and shook himself and swelled out his chest and then looked at her and smiled. "Just remember that, in the days that are coming, and give me the benefit of the doubt."
"But I don't believe it!" she exclaimed incredulously. "What ground have you for that valuation of the mine?"
"Well, his offer, for one thing," answered Rimrock soberly. "He never pays what a thing is worth. But did you see Mr. Jepson when I went into the assay house and began looking at those diamond-drill cores? He was sore, believe me, and the longer I stayed there the more fidgety Jepson got. That ore assay's big, but the thing that I noticed is that all of it carries some values. You can begin at the foot of it and work that whole mountain and every cubic foot would pay. And that peacock ore, that copper glance! That runs up to forty per cent. Now, here's a job for you as secretary of the Company, a little whirl into the higher mathematics. Just find the cubic contents of Tecolote mountain and multiply it by three per cent. That's three per cent. copper, and according to those assays the whole ground averages that. Take twenty claims, each fifteen hundred feet long, five hundred feet across and say a thousand feet deep; pile the mountain on top of them, take copper at eighteen cents a pound and give me the answer in dollars and cents. Then figure it out another way—figure out the human cussedness that that much copper will produce."
"Why—really!" cried Mary as she sat staring at him, "you make me almost afraid."