“Besides, there may be nothing to that story of nuggets. That may be just one of these western yarns,” she added.
“Well, in any case, there’s the five hundred the Denver paper offers, besides what I could make by syndicating the account of my adventure among the Sunday papers. I used to do quite a lot of that when I was in college.”
“But you don’t need money badly enough to go into that place after it. Nobody ever needed it that badly,” she declared.
“Don’t I?” he answered, a little biting of bitter sarcasm in his tone. “Well, you don’t know, my lady, how easy that money looks to me compared to my ordinary channels of getting it.”
“It can’t be so very hard in your profession,” she doubted, as if a bit offended by his attitude of martyrdom before an unappreciative world. “I don’t believe you have half as hard a time of it as some who have too much money.”
“The hardship of having too much money is one 37 which I never experienced, so I can’t say as to that,” he said, moved to smiles by the humor of it. “But to understand what I mean by hardship you must know how I’ve struggled in the ruts and narrow traditions of my profession, and fought, hoped, and starved. Why, I tell you that black hole over there looks like an open door with a light inside of it compared to some of the things I’ve gone through in the seven years that I’ve been trying to get a start. Money? I’ll tell you how that is, Miss Horton; I’ve thought along that one theme so confounded long that it’s worn a groove in my brain.
“Here you see me tonight, a piece of driftwood at thirty-five, and all for the want of money enough to buy an automobile and take the darned-fool world by storm on its vain side! You can’t scratch it with a diamond on its reasoning side–I’ve scratched away on it until my nails are gone.
“I’ve failed, I tell you, I’ve botched it all up! And just for want of money enough to buy an automobile! Brains never took a doctor anywhere–nothing but money and bluff!”
“I wonder,” she speculated, “what will become of you out here in this raw place, where the need of a doctor seems to be the farthest thing in the world, and you with your nerve all gone?”
It would have reassured her if she could have seen the fine flush which this charge raised in his face. But she didn’t even look toward him, and couldn’t have 38 noted the change if she had, for the moonlight was not that bright, even in Wyoming.