A week passed like a day, full of dreams and half-uttered confidences and long, contented silences; and then, as they sat in the shade of the giant sycamore Denver let his eyes that had been fixed upon Drusilla, stray and sweep the lower road.
“What are you looking for now?” she demanded impatiently and he turned back with a guilty grin.
“McGraw,” he said and she frowned to herself for at last the world had come between them. For a week he had been idle, a heaven-sent companion in the barren loneliness of life; but now, when his powder and mining supplies arrived, he would become the old hard-working miner. He would go into his dark tunnel before the sun was up and not come out till it was low in the west, and instead of being clean and handsome as a young god he would come forth like a groveling gnome. His face would be grimy, his hands gnarled with striking, his digging-clothes covered with candle-grease: and his body would reek with salty sweat and the rank, muggy odor of powder fumes. And he would 141crawl back to his cave like an outworn beast of burden, to sleep while she sang to him from below.
“Will you go back to work?” she asked at last and he nodded and stretched his great arms.
“Back to work!” he repeated, “and I guess it’s about time. I wonder how much credit Murray gave me?”
Drusilla said nothing. She was looking far away and wondering at the thing we call life.
“Why do you work so hard?” she inquired, half complainingly. “Is that all there is in the world?”
“No, lots of other things,” he answered carelessly, “but work is the only way to get them. I’m on my way, see? I’ve just begun. You wait till I open up that mine!”
“Then what will you do?” she murmured pensively, “go ahead and open up another mine?”
“Well, I might,” he admitted. “Don’t you remember that other treasure? There’s a gold-mine around here, somewhere.”