Bromley’s laugh came back in cachinnating echoes from the gulch cliffs.
“Not on your life you wouldn’t, Philip. I can read your horoscope better than that. If it does happen to happen that we’ve really made a ten-strike, I can see you making the good old welkin ring till the neighbors won’t be able to hear themselves think, for the noise you’ll make.”
“I don’t know why you should say anything like that,” Philip objected morosely.
“Of course you don’t. You’d have to have eyes like a snail’s to be able to see yourself. But just wait, and hold my little prophecy in mind.”
Philip, still staring into the heart of the fire, remembered a similar prediction made by his desk-mate in the Denver railroad office. “I know your kind....” Middleton had said. What was there about his kind that made other people so sure that the good thread of self-control had been left out in his weaving?
“I’ll wait,” he said; and then: “You haven’t said what you’d do in case it should turn out that we’ve made the improbable ten-strike.”
“I?” queried the play-boy. “Everybody who has ever known me could answer that, off-hand. You know my sweet and kindly disposition. I wouldn’t want to disappoint all the old ladies in Philadelphia. And they’d be horribly disappointed if I didn’t proceed to paint everything within reach a bright, bright shade of vermilion.”
Philip looked at his watch.
“Nine o’clock,” he announced, “and we start at daybreak, sharp. I’m turning in.”
In strict accordance with the programme of impatience, the start was made at dawn on the Monday morning. Their map, though rather uncertain as to the smaller streams, seemed to enable them to locate their valley and its small river, and their nearest practicable route to Leadville appeared to be by way of the stream to its junction with a larger river, and then eastward up the valley of the main stream, which the map showed as heading in the gulches gashing the western shoulder of Mount Massive.