“You forget to mention the raw hands and the galled shoulders, as well as the snow-slush and the rain. However, that’s not quite the point. As I said, all that leads to nothing. Are you too proud to take a trifling favor because it comes through me?”
Weston met her gaze, and there was a grave forcefulness in his manner which almost astonished her. He evidently for once had suffered his usual self-restraint to relax, and she felt it was almost a pity that he had not done so more frequently.
“Miss Stirling,” he said, “you are, as it happens, one of the few people from whom I could not take a favor of that kind.”
She understood him, and for a moment a flicker of color crept into her cheek. It was, she felt, a clean pride that had impelled him to the speech. There were, she admitted, no benefits within her command that she would not gladly have thrust upon him; but, for all that, she would not have had him quietly acquiesce in them. Perhaps she was singular in this, but her forebears had laid the foundations of a new land’s future with ax and drill, clearing forest and breaking prairie with stubborn valor and toil incredible. They had flung their wagon roads over thundering rivers and grappled with stubborn rock, and among them the soft-handed man who sought advancement through a woman’s favor was, as a rule, regarded with quiet scorn. She said nothing, however, and it was a few moments before Weston looked at her again.
“Anyway,” he said, “I couldn’t do what you suggest. I am going back into the ranges with Grenfell to look for the mine.”
“Ah,” said Ida, “you haven’t given up that notion yet?”
The man smiled grimly.
“I am keener about it than ever. Perhaps it’s somewhat curious, but I seem certain that we shall strike that quartz lead one of these days.”
Ida was glad to let the conversation take this new turn, for she understood his eagerness now, and she had felt that they were skirting a crisis each time she had talked with him of late. She had the courage to make a sacrifice, and, indeed, had the occasion arisen, would probably have considered none too costly; but it seemed due to him as well as to her that he should at least make some strenuous effort to pull down the barriers between them.
“Well,” she said quietly, “it is very curious that you discovered no trace of it. You said you found Grenfell’s partner lying dead upon the range, and, as their provisions were running out when he left the lake, he could not have gone very far. Was it a big lake?”