He nodded faintly. “Ya-as, that’s what they all say. Every man believes in a Mother Lode. But what no man likes to believe is that another man’s found her.”
Again silence.
Vivid description would have failed to picture for this particular auditor what Blumpitty’s slow and clumsy words conveyed as though by chance. So little did he play the game in the usual way that Mrs. Mar felt the satisfaction of the discoverer in getting at the story through barriers and in despite of veils.
In the silence, up above—in Jacob Dorn’s sick chamber—some one was heard opening the window.
“And you think,” Mrs. Mar spoke very low, “you think you know where the Mother Lode is?”
“Pretty near every miner in the Northwest thinks he knows.”
“You mean you are sure?”
“I’m forty-eight,” said Blumpitty mournfully. “It’s twenty years since I liked sayin’ I was sure.”
“But” (he was the sort of man that needed reassuring) “you’ve got good ground for believing—” She waited.
“Last fall”—he looked round the red satin room as though for possible haunts of eavesdroppers, and then he further interrupted himself—“you mustn’t think I found it myself,” he said modestly. “I got a tip—a straight tip.”