“Sometimes I feel the prospect in front of me is not a very attractive one,” she responded in answer to his thoughts. “Still, one can get over that by not regarding it as a prospect at all. It simplifies the thing when one takes it day by day.”
She smiled at him. “Derrick, you have done wisely. I think you need a sustaining purpose and a woman to work for.”
Nasmyth’s face paled. “Yes,” he agreed dryly; “it is, perhaps, rather a significant admission, but I really think I do.”
It was a relief to both of them that Wheeler came floundering along the shingle just then with a box and a coil of wire in his hand.
“I’ve brought you a little present, Nasmyth,” he announced. “Firing by fuse is going to be uncertain when there’s so much spray about, and I sent down for this electric fixing. We can charge it for you at any time at the mill. Have you put in any giant-powder yet?”
Nasmyth said they had not fired a heavy charge about the fall, but that there were several holes ready for filling, and Wheeler’s eyes twinkled.
“I’m quite anxious to try this little toy,” he said. “When I was young, a rancher gave me an old played-out shot-gun, and I was out at sun-up next morning to shoot something. That’s the kind of being a man is, Miss Waynefleet. Put any kind of bottled-up power in his hands, and he feels he must get up and make a bang with it. After all, I guess it’s fortunate that he does.”
“Are all men like that?” Laura asked with a strange undertone in her voice.
“Most of them,” said Wheeler, with an air of reflection. “Of course, you do run across one here and there who would put the bottled power carefully away 236 for fear that, when it went off, it might hurt him or somebody. The trouble is that when a man of that kind at last makes up his mind to use it he’s quite likely to find that the power has gradually leaked out of the bottle. Power’s a very curious thing. If you don’t use it, it has a way of evaporating.”
Gordon had joined them in the meanwhile, and Laura looked at him.