Through the meal they talked of the others, of who had come to Meander, who had gone home; of June and her mother and the miller’s wife. Nothing was said of the cause of his absence nor of his spectacular arrival just in the second remaining to him to save his chance.
“I noticed a road running up toward the mountain,” said he when they had finished. “Shall we walk up that way?”
Out past the little cultivated gardens, where stunted corn was growing in the futile hope that it might come to ear, they followed the road which led into the mountain gorge. A rod-wide stream came plunging down beside the way, bursting its current upon a thousand stones here and there, falling into green pools in which the trout that breasted its roaring torrent might find a place to pant.
Here, in an acre of valley, some remnant of glacier had melted after its slow-plowing progress of ten million years. The smooth, round stones which it had dropped when it vanished in the sun lay there as thickly strewn as seeds from a gigantic poppy-boll. And then, as the gorge-wedge narrowed, there were great, polished boulders, like up-peeping skulls, and riven ledges against which Indian hunters had made their fires in the 190 old days. And on the tipping land of the mountainside, and the little strips where soil lodged between the rocks, the quaking-asp grew thick and tall.
There in a little nook among the trees, where trampling tourists had eaten their luncheon upon a flat stone and left the bags and pickle-bottles behind them, they sat down. At that altitude the sunshine of an afternoon in late August was welcome. A man whipping the stream for trout caught his tackle in some low branches not ten feet from where they sat, and swore as he disentangled it. He passed on without seeing them.
“That goes to illustrate how near a man may be to something, and not know it,” said the doctor, a smile quickening his grave face for a moment. “This time yesterday I was kicking over the rubbish where a gambling-tent had stood in Comanche, in the hope of finding a dime.”
He stopped, looked away down the soft-tinted gorge as if wrapped in reminiscent thought. She caught her breath quickly, turning to him with a little start and gazing at his set face, upon which a new, strange somberness had fallen in those unaccounted days.
“Did you find it?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t,” he answered, coming out of his dream. “At that hour I knew nothing about having drawn the first number, and I didn’t know that I was the lucky man until past midnight. I had just a running jump at the chance then, and I took it.” 191
“And you won!” she cried, admiration in her eyes.