Smith sat back behind the pilot-wheel of the runabout and waited. Not for a king's ransom would he have joined the group on the dam. He suspected shrewdly that Verda had already heard of Corona through the Stantons; that she was inwardly rejoicing at the new hold upon him which chance had flung in her way. At the end of Williams's fifteen minutes the rattle and grind of the mixers began. When the stream of concrete came pouring through the high-tilted spouts, Smith looked to see the colonel and Williams bringing the two women back to the camp level. What the light of the masthead arcs showed him was the figure of one of the women returning alone, while the two men and the other woman went on across the stagings to the farther river bank where the battery of mixers fed the swiftly moving lift.
Smith did not get out to go and meet the returning figure; his courage was not of that quality. But he could not pretend to be either asleep or dead when Corona came up between the two cars and spoke to him.
"You have nothing whatever to take back," she said, smiling up at him from her seat on the running-board of the roadster. "She is all you said she was—and more. She is gorgeously beautiful!"
Smith flung his freshly lighted cigar away and climbed out to sit beside her.
"What do you think of me?" he demanded bluntly.
"What should I think? Didn't I scold you for running away from her that first evening? I am glad you thought better of it afterward."
"I am not thinking better of it at all—in the way you mean."
"But Miss Richlander is," was the quiet reply.
"You have a right to say anything you please; and after it is all said, to say it again. I am not the man you have been taking me for; not in any respect. Your father knows now, and he will tell you."
"Colonel-daddy has told me one thing—the thing you told him to tell me. And I am sorry—sorry and disappointed."