“I am both,” he boasted gravely. Then in a quick shift to safer ground: “You told me once that you enjoyed going out on the work with your father—is there any chance that you may come to the Timanyoni this summer?”
“Maybe. I liked it when I was out there last year—for some things.”
“And for some other things you didn’t? What were they?”
“I’d rather not talk about them. But there was one thing.... Do you know anything about Powder Can?”
“Less than nothing beyond what your father has just told me. He says it’s a mining-camp.”
“It is worse than the usual mining-camp, or it was when I saw it. It is the only place where the workmen can go to spend their pay, and you know what that would mean.”
“I can visualize it pretty well; whiskey, dance-halls and gambling dens, and all that.”
“Yes. We saw little of it at the hotel; the Inn is quite a distance from the town and on the other side of the river. But once I went there with—with a man. I didn’t know where he was taking me—or us; there was a party of us from the hotel, you know; slummers, you’d call us.”
“I don’t know the man, but he ought to have been murdered,” said David.
“Something like that, yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant to speak about particularly. One of the places where he tried to take us—only we wouldn’t go in—was a dance-hall. There was a girl at the piano; I could see her from where I was standing on the sidewalk. She was beautiful, David, and it made my heart ache to see her in such a place.”