"By Jove! but that sets it in motion again in good shape!" he groaned. "Sit down here and let's talk it out in the open. I don't care to burrow."
Denby pocketed his candle, and they sat together on the brink of the dump, with their backs to the opening; and thus it chanced that neither of them saw a shadowy figure skulking among the firs beside the tunnel's mouth. When they began to talk the figure edged nearer, flitting ghostlike from tree to tree, and finally crouching under the penthouse of the tunnel timbering.
The crimson and mauve had faded out of the western sky when the two at the dump-head rose, and Jeffard said: "Your alternative is fair enough. It's accepted, without conditions other than this—that you will advance me a few hundred dollars for my own purposes some time within thirty days."
"You needn't make that a condition; I should be glad to tide you over in any event. But I am sorry you won't let me buy in. As I have said, there is enough here for both of us."
The aftermath of the getting up was a sharp agony, and Jeffard had his hands to his head again. When he answered it was to say:—
"I sha'n't sell. There are reasons, and you may take this for the lack of a better. A while back, when a single meal in the day was sometimes beyond me, I used to say that if the tide should ever turn I'd let the money go on piling up and up until there was no possibility of hunger in an eternity of futures. You say the tide has turned."
"It has, for a fact; and I don't know that I blame you. If it were mine I should probably try to keep it whole."
Jeffard went on as one who follows out his own train of thought regardless of answers relevant or impertinent. "I said that, and I don't know that I have changed my mind. But before we strike hands on the bargain it may be as well to go back to the question which you were good enough to leave in abeyance yesterday."
"The question of ethics?"