Going back to his place, he picked up the menu card and asked her what she would like to eat.
“After a day’s work everything tastes good to me,” she answered, with the quick-flashing smile that carried him instantly back to a double seat in the Kansas Pacific day-coach and the spring-time afternoon when they had shared it together. “Won’t you order for both?”
He gave the dinner order, making it commensurate with the healthy appetite he had brought back from the mountains. After the waiter had left them, he said: “You asked me as we were coming in if I had gone back to work in the railroad office. I haven’t—as yet.”
“But you are meaning to?”
“Not exactly. You see, I have another job now. I am keeping personal books for a chap who owns a half-interest in a new mine on the other side of the main range.”
She was not so easily misled as Middleton had been.
“Oh!” she said, with a little gasp; “then you did find a mine?”
“Yes; after so long a time—after we had knocked about digging foolish holes in the hills nearly all summer.”
“‘We,’ you say. Did you really take the wild young man with you? I have thought about him so often.”
“You mean Bromley?—the fellow who tried to hold me up the night I went out to the tent colony to see you?”