"You did this deliberately, Victor, weighing all the consequences? Mirapolis is already a city of frenzied knaves and dupes; did you realize that you were taking the chance of turning it into a wicked pandemonium? Oh, I can't believe you did!"
"Don't look at me that way, Amy," he pleaded. Then he went on, with curious little pauses between the words: "Perhaps I didn't think—didn't care; you wanted something—and I wanted to give it to you. That was all—as God hears me, it was all. There was another thing that might have weighed, but I didn't let it weigh; I stood to lose the money that will set me free—I could have lost it without wincing—I told Cortwright so. You believe that, Amy? It will break my heart if you don't believe it."
She shook her head sadly.
"You have thrown down another of the ideals, and this time it was mine. You don't understand, and I can't make you understand—that is the keen misery of it. If this ruthless thing you tried to do had succeeded, I should be the most wretched woman in the world."
"If it had succeeded? It has succeeded. Didn't I say just now that the town was crazy with excitement when I left to come up here?"
The girl was shaking her head again.
"God sometimes saves us in spite of ourselves," she said gravely. "The excitement will die out. There are no placers in the Niquoia. The bars have been prospected again and again."
"They have been?——"
Brouillard turned on his heel and choked back the sudden malediction that rose to his lips. She had called Mirapolis a city of knaves and dupes; surely, he himself was the simplest of the dupes.
"I see—after so long a time," he went on. "Your brother merely 'salted' a few shovelfuls of sand for my especial benefit. Great Heavens, but I was an easy mark!"