“Well, no doubt you have read a great deal of poetry, little as one would suspect it.”
“Never read a line of it except when I had to decline it at school—any more than I’ve ever read a line of fiction.”
“Well, you’ve missed a great deal,” said Ora tartly. “Poetry is an essential part of the beauty of the world, which you seem to appreciate. And the best of fiction is the best expression of current history. What do you think when you star-gaze?”
“You mean, can I think at all when I haven’t read what other men have thought?”
“No.—No doubt the most original brains are those that have not read too much, are not choked up.” Ora made this admission reluctantly, but he had caught her fairly. “Tell me at least what the stars suggest to you. About everything has been said of them that can be said. The poor old stars have been worked to death.”
“The stars above Montana are watchfires protecting the treasure below. Perhaps they are bits of her treasures, gold, silver, copper, sapphire, that flew upward in the final cataclysm.”
“I don’t know whether that is poetical or gross materialism.”
“No mines, no poets. Nearly all conquest from the dawn of history down to the Boer War has had the acquisition of mineral wealth as its real object. The civilisation that follows is incidental; it merely means that the strongest race, which, of course, knows the most, wins. If ever we have a war with Mexico, what will be the cause? Mines. Incidentally we will civilise her. Peru, Mexico, India, the Americas—all have been invaded in their turn by more civilised nations, and all after plunder. They gave as much as they took, but little they cared about that. What opened up California? This great Northwest? Prospectors in search of gold. Excuse this lecture. I am the least talkative of men, but you have jarred my brain, somehow. Read the history of mines and mining if you want romance.”
“As a matter of fact few things interest me more. I am so glad my mine has been leased for a year only. When that is up I am going to mine it myself. I’ll build a bungalow out there and go down every day. Perhaps in time I could be my own manager. At all events, think of the excitement of watching the ore as it comes up the shaft; of running through a lean vein and coming suddenly upon a chamber of an entirely different kind of ore from what you had been taking out. Great shoots full of free gold! Wire gold! Or that crisp brown-gold that looks as if it were boiling out of the ore and makes one want to bite it! Why are you staring so at me?”
His eyes were more widely opened and brilliant than she had seen them. “Do you mean that?” he asked. “I’ve a great notion to tell you something that I’ve not told anyone.”