Bromley got up and kicked a half burnt log into the heart of the fire.
“How nearly broke are we, Phil?” he asked.
The financing partner named the sum still remaining in the partnership purse, which, as he had intimated, was pitifully small.
“You said, just now, if we had a mine to sell, instead of a bare prospect,” Bromley went on.... “We’ve got nerve, and two pairs of hands. Suppose we stay with it and make it a mine? I know good and well what that will mean: a freezing winter in the mountains, hardships till you can’t rest, half starvation, maybe. Just the same, I’m game for it, if you are.”
Philip rapped the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. From the very beginning of the summer Bromley had been offering a series of grateful surprises: dogged endurance, cheerfulness under privations, willingness to share hard labor—a loyal partner in all that the word implied. Slow to admit any one to the inner intimacies of friendship, as his Puritan heritage constrained him to be, Philip had weighed and measured the play-boy coldly, impartially, and before they had been many weeks together he was honest enough to admit that Bromley was as tempered steel to his own roughly forged iron; that it had been merely a lack of an adequate object in life that had made him a spendthrift and a derelict.
“You’d tackle a winter here in these mountains rather than let go?” he said, after the refilled pipe was alight. “It will be hell, Harry. You remember what those fellows in Chalk Creek told us about the snows on this side of the range.”
“I’m discounting everything but the kind of hell that will be ours if we should let go and see somebody else come in and reap where we’ve sown.”
“All right; let’s see what we’ve got to buck up against. First, we’ll have to go out for the recording, the assays, and the winter’s provisions. We’d have to buy at least one more burro to freight the grub-stake in; and then one of us will have to take the jacks out for the winter. They’d starve to death here. All this is going to take time, and the summer is already gone. And that isn’t all; we’ll have to build a cabin and cut the winter’s wood. It will be a fierce race against time to get holed in before we’re snowed under.”
“Still I’m game,” declared Bromley stoutly. “If it turns out that we have something worth fighting for—and the assays will say yes or no to that—I’m for the fight.”
Philip scowled amiably at the transformed play-boy. “You nervy little rat!” he exclaimed in gruff affection. “Think you can back me down on a fighting proposition? I’ll call your bluff. We’ll put in one more day setting things to rights, and then we’ll pull out for Leadville and that starvation winter grub-stake.”