Smith closed his desk at six o'clock and went across to the hotel to dress for dinner. The day of suspense was practically at an end and disaster still held aloof; was fairly outdistanced in the race, as it seemed. Williams's final report had been to the effect that the concrete-pouring was completed, and the long strain was off. Smith went to his rooms, and, as once before and for a similar reason, he laid his dress clothes out on the bed. He made sure that he would be required to dine with Verda Richlander, and he was stripping his coat when he heard a tap at the door and Jibbey came in.
"Glad rags, eh?" said the blasé one, with a glance at the array on the bed. "I've just run up to tell you that you needn't. Verda's dining with the Stantons, and she wants me to keep you out of sight until afterward. By and by, when she's foot-loose, she wants to see you in the mezzanine. Isn't there some quiet little joint where we two can go for a bite? You know the town, and I don't."
Smith put his coat on and together they circled the square to Frascati's, taking a table in the main café. While they were giving their dinner order, Starbuck came in and joined them, and Smith was glad. For reasons which he could scarcely have defined, he was relieved not to have to talk to Jibbey alone, and Starbuck played third hand admirably, taking kindly to the sham black sheep, and filling him up, in quiet, straight-faced humor, with many and most marvellous tales of the earlier frontier.
At the end of the meal, while Jibbey was still content to linger, listening open-mouthed to Starbuck's romancings, Smith excused himself and returned to the hotel. He had scarcely chosen his lounging-chair in a quiet corner of the mezzanine before Miss Richlander came to join him.
"It has been a long day, hasn't it?" she began evenly. "You have been busy with your dam, I suppose, but I—I have had nothing to do but to think, and that is something that I don't often allow myself to do. You have gone far since that night last May when you telephoned me that you would come up to the house later—and then broke your promise, Montague."
"In a way, I suppose I have," he admitted.
"You have, indeed. You are a totally different man."
"In what way, particularly?"
"In every conceivable way. If one could believe in transmigration, one would say that you had changed souls with some old, hard-hitting, rough-riding ancestor. Mr. Stanton has just been telling me the story of how, when you first came here, you fought barehanded with three miners somewhere back in the hills."
A bleak little smile of reminiscence wrinkled at the corners of the fighter's eyes.