"Still," said Brooke, very slowly, while his face grew set, "you don't know why I came here to build that flume for you."
Then he gasped with astonishment, for Devine laughed.
"Well," he said, drily, "I guess I do."
Brooke, who lost command of himself, rose abruptly, and stood looking down on him, with one quivering hand clenched on the edge of the table.
"You know I meant to jump the claim?" he said.
"I had a notion that you meant to try."
Then there was a curious silence, and the two men remained motionless, looking at one another for a space, the younger one leaning somewhat heavily upon the table, with the crimson showing through the bronze in his face, the elder one watching him with a little grim smile. There was also a suggestion of sardonic amusement in it at which the other winced, as he would scarcely have done had Devine struck him.
"And you let me stay on?" he said at length.
"I did. It was plain you couldn't hurt me, and there was a kind of humor in the thing. I had just to put my hand down and squelch you when I felt like it."
Brooke recognized that he had deserved this, but he had never felt the same utter sense of insignificance that he did just then. His companion evidently did not even consider it worth while to be angry with him, and he wondered vacantly at his folly in even fancying that he or Saxton could prove a match for such a man.