Prendergast laughed in an ugly, derisive way. "I suppose you've forgotten the half-year we've lived here together, and the gold-dust we've gathered in now and again—slipped it all, have you?"
Harry stood up. The motion brought a temporary dizziness, but it passed. He walked to the door and gazed out on the pleasant green of the hillside. On a tree near-by was nailed a rough, weather-beaten board on which was scrawled "The Little Paymaster Claim." He saw the grass-grown gravel-trenches, evidence of abandoned work. He had been a miner. That in itself was honest toil. Across the waving foliage he could look down to the distant straggling street with its huddles of houses and its far-off swinging signs. Some of these signs hung above resorts of clicking wheels and green baize tables; more than once in the past month on such tables he had doubled many times over a paltry stake with that satiric luck which smiles on the uncaring. His eye ran back up the slope.
"The claim is good, then," he said over his shoulder. "We found the pay?"
Prendergast contemplated him a moment in grim silence, with a scowl. "You're either really fuddled, Hugh," he said then, "or else you're a star play-actor, and up to something deep. Well, have it your own way—it's all the same to me. But you can't pull the wool over my eyes long!"
There was mockery and threat in his tone, but more than both, the evil intimacy in his words gave Harry a qualm of disgust. This man had been his associate. That one hour in the town had shown him what his own life there had been.
What should he do? Forsake for ever the neighborhood where he had made his blistering mark? Fling all aside and start again somewhere? And leave behind this disgraceful present, with that face that had looked into his from above the dusty street?
If fate intended that, why had it turned him back? Why had he been plucked rudely from his purpose and set once more here, where every man's hand was against him—every one but this sorry comrade? There was in him an intuitive obstinacy, a steadfastness under stress which approved this drastic coercion. If such was the bed he had made, he would lie in it. He would drink the gall and vinegar without whimpering. Whatever lay behind, he would live it down. This man at least had befriended him.
He turned into the room. "Perhaps I shall remember after a while." He took the saucepan from Prendergast's hand. "I'll cook the breakfast," he said.
Prendergast filled his pipe and watched him. "I guess there are bats in your belfry, sure enough, Hugh," he said at length. "You never offered to do your stint before."