“My potentialities for evil?”
“Both ways. You are, or you have been, virgin ground. This gold hunt is the first thing that has ever put the plow into you. It remains to be seen what kind of soil it is going to turn up. Don’t you feel that, yourself?”
“I don’t know why it should turn up anything different.”
“I suppose you don’t: no man has ever seen the back of his own neck—or the close limitations of his own rut. But the furrow is already started. You are not the man you were when we took to the tall hills last summer.”
“Better, or worse?”
“Let us say different. The man you are now would never go back to school-teaching in New Hampshire.”
Philip nodded morosely. “I admitted that, a good while ago, if you’ll remember. But we were talking about Garth. What are we going to do with him after the winter is over? Pay him his wages and tell him to go?”
“I have been thinking about that. It occurs to me that we already owe him more than wages. If you hadn’t met him on the way out with the ponies and brought him back with you——”
“I know; you couldn’t have held out alone against the Neighbors gang very long; and if I had come back by myself, there might have been a different story to tell. When I made the bargain with Garth, he said all he’d ask would be a chance to locate a claim near ours.”
“Anybody who gets here first can have that.”