Mar studied him an instant with uncommon intentness.
“What is it?” laughed Cheviot. “You look as if you couldn’t make up your mind to trust me.”
“No, I’m making up my mind I will.” Again he paused for a moment, and then, “I am too old to do the thing alone,” he said.
“Well, I can manage the boat, anyhow.”
“Oh, the girl can row as well as a man, but I must have a partner.” And sitting there in the deserted cabin Nathaniel Mar, for the last time, told how a hundred and odd miles further up the coast he had panned out gold with a dead man’s help when he himself was young.
And when he had said it, that thing befell him that overtook any enthusiast in talking to Louis Cheviot. Mar saw his story on a sudden in a comic light. Clear now, its relationship to twenty “tall stories,” fit matter for a twitch of the humorous lip, a hitch of the judicial shoulder.
The unconscious Cheviot had choked off many a confidence just by that look of cool amusement.
“I’ve always said,” Mar wound up, preparing hastily to withdraw again into his shell, “I’ve always said it would ‘keep,’ and it has kept close on thirty years.”
“Well, it won’t keep much longer,” said Cheviot briskly.