“The ‘angel’ you spoke of, the night you fed a hungry hold-up?”
“Don’t get it wrong. She is not so angelic that she can’t be perfectly human.”
“But didn’t you say you’d met her only twice?”
“I did; and the saying still holds true.”
“Bowled you over like a shot, did she? I’d never have believed it of you, Philip.”
“You needn’t believe it now. There was no ‘bowling over’ about it. I first met her on the train coming to Denver—with her family; sat with her for part of an afternoon. She isn’t like any other girl I’ve ever known.”
“And that is as far as you’ve gone? You are a cold-blooded fish, Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if our mine keeps its promise?”
“Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure that I want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing truer than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here—that the West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be as homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. But this is all dream stuff—this talk. We haven’t got the millions yet. Even if the mine is as rich as it seems to be, we may find jumpers in possession, and so many of them that we can’t get away with them.”
“That’s so. ‘There’s many a slip,’ as we read in the copy-books.”
For a time the high-mountain silence, a silence curiously bereft of even the small insect shrillings of the lower altitudes, enveloped them. The cheerful fire was beginning to fall into embers when Philip began again.