"I'll make them; you wait and see."
She looked up with the violet eyes kindling.
"I told you once that you could do anything you wanted to—if you only wanted to hard enough. I believed it then; I believe it now."
"No," he denied with a smile that was half sorrowful, "I can't make two hills without a valley between them. I've chased down the back track like a little man,—for love's sake, Amy,—and I've burned all the bridges behind me as I ran; namely, the sham deeds to the pieces of reservoir bottom I'd been buying. But when it is all over I shall be just where I was when we began—exactly one hundred thousand dollars short of being able to say: 'Come, girl, let's go and get married.'"
"But father owes you a hundred thousand dollars," she said quickly.
"Not in a hundred thousand years, O most inconsistent of women! Didn't we agree that that money was poisoned? It was the purchase price of an immortal soul, and I wouldn't touch it with a pair of tongs. That is why your father couldn't use it; it belonged to the devil and the devil wanted it back."
"Father won't take that view of it," she protested.
"Then you'll have to help me to bully him, that's all. But I must go and relieve Grizzy, who is doing guard duty at the mixers.... Tell your father—no, that isn't what I meant to say, it's this—" and his arms went suddenly across the hundred-thousand-dollar chasm.
A little deeper in the night, when he was tramping back through the sleeping town and up to the mixers on the high bench of Jack's Mountain, Brouillard knew well enough that he was walking over a thin-crusted crater of volcanic possibilities. But to a man in the seventh heaven of love acknowledged without shame, and equally without shame returned,—nay, with the first passionate kiss of the love still tingling on his lips,—volcanic possibilities, or even the volcanoes themselves, figure lightly, indeed.