"It might be called that; but it dates back to my—to a time long before I came to Cripple Creek."
"You gave me to understand yesterday that she had a hold of some sort upon you. Were you under promise to marry her?"
"No, indeed; never in this world!"
He was sitting back in his chair and regarding me gravely.
"I am an old-fashioned man, Bertrand, as I told you yesterday. I have always entertained an idea—which may seem archaic to the present generation—that a young man intending to marry ought to be able to give as much as he asks. You haven't made a very good beginning."
I admitted it; admitted everything save the imputation that my relations with Agatha Geddis had been in any sense wilfully immoral.
He gave a wry smile at this, as if the distinction were finely drawn and the credit small.
"Because it fell to my lot to be a schoolmaster in her native town, I had an opportunity of observing Miss Geddis while she was yet only a young girl, Bertrand," he remarked. "She gave promise, even then, of becoming a disturbing element in the affairs of men. As a school-girl she had a following of silly boys who were ready to take her at her own valuation of herself. There are times when you remind me very strongly of one of them, though the resemblance is only a suggestion: the boy I speak of was a bright young fellow named Weyburn, who afterward became a clerk in Mr. Geddis's bank."
There are moments when the promptings of the panic-stricken ostrich lay hold upon the best of us. Since I could not thrust my head into the sand, I wheeled quickly to stare at a framed photograph of Bull Mountain and the buildings of the Little Clean-Up hanging on the laboratory wall.
"He was one of the fools, too, was he?" I said, without taking my eyes from the photograph.