"No," she insisted. "Take a good, deep breath of this pure, clean, high-mountain air and think again. Mirapolis is dying, even now, though nobody dares admit it. But it is. Tig Smith hears everything, and he told father last night that the rumor about the Quadjenàï placers is true. They are worked out, and already the men have begun to move up the river in search of new ground. Tig said that in another week there wouldn't be a dozen sluice-boxes working."
"I have known about the Quadjenàï failure for the past two weeks," Brouillard put in. "For at least that length of time the two steam dredges have been handling absolutely barren gravel, and the men in charge of them have had orders to go on dredging and say nothing. Mirapolis is no longer a gold camp; but, nevertheless, it will boom again—long enough to let Mr. J. Wesley Cortwright and his fellow buccaneers loot it and get away."
"How can you know that?" she asked curiously.
"I know it because I am going to bring it to pass."
"You?"
"Yes, I. It is the final act in the play. And my part in this act is the Judas part—as it has been in the others."
She was looking down at him with wide-open eyes.
"If any one else had said that of you ... but I can't believe it! I know you, Victor; I think I must have known you in the other world—the one before this—and there we climbed the heights, in the clear sunlight, together."
"There was one thing you didn't learn about me—in that other world you speak of," he said, falling in with her allegory. "You didn't discover that I could become a wretched cheat and a traitor for love of you. Perhaps it wasn't necessary—there."
"Tell me," she begged briefly; and, since he was staring fixedly at the scored slopes of Jack's Mountain, he did not see that she caught her lip between her teeth to stop its trembling.