He wondered miserably why he had told her. “Of course it was all long before anybody had heard of the Klondike,” he said, and he drew a heavy breath. “The theory was, that geologically speaking, gold couldn’t exist up there, and even people who weren’t geologists agreed it couldn’t be got out if it was there”—all the confidential earnestness had vanished out of the voice, and he paused like one very weary. “Nobody believed—” He tried to go on, and to speak as usual, but memory, master of the show, brought up Trenn—Trenn with the look he had worn the day his father had told him the great secret. Mar drew back into the deeper shadow. But the critical boy face found his father out, and stung him in the dark.
He was an old fool. What had possessed him to rake it all up again. Oh, yes, he said bitterly in his heart, there was one member of his family who hadn’t yet smiled and said, “Show me. I’m from Missouri.” It was Hildegarde’s turn.
“Well, my girl,” he ended miserably, “that’s the story that nobody believed.”
Hildegarde lifted her head and put up her two hands, feeling in the dark for his. But Mar shrank back. Not from Hildegarde herself could he in that hour take mere sympathy, craving hopelessly as he did with the long thirst of years a thing more precious than pity—the thing that he once had had and had no more.
Like a man who utters his own epitaph, “I lost faith myself,” he said.
“But I have found it, father!” and there was joy as well as the sound of tears in the thrilling young voice.
“Found—what did you say, Hildegarde?”
“That I believe the gold’s there, waiting!”
“Ah—h—h!” He bent over her with a sound that was almost a sob. “Then I—I believe it, too!”