Howard grinned. 'Go ahead,' he chuckled. 'He's a good old sport and I like him.'
'Well,' said Helen, without meeting his smile, 'father and I went into business session right away. We had never had much money; father had never cared for wealth measured in money; had always been richly content with his professor's salary; had never saved or asked me to save. When the thing happened, all we had in the world was a little over seven hundred dollars. I was right away for economizing, for managing, for turning to some other position. But father, I tell you, was in a perfect rage. When I mentioned finances to him he got up and shouted. "Money!" he yelled at me. "What's money? Who wants money? It's a fool's game to get money; anybody can do it." When he saw that I doubted he told me to pack up that very day and he'd show me; he'd show the world. The new University man named him an old fogy, did he? He'd show him. Didn't he know more than any other man living about geology? About the making of the earth and the minerals of the earth? Was it any trick to find gold? Not in the dribbles, but such a mine as never a miner drove a pick into yet?'
She sighed again and grew silent. Howard, toying idly with the spurs in his hands, could at the moment find nothing to say.
'Dear old pops,' she said more softly in a moment. 'I am afraid that his heart-breaking time is coming now—when he learns that it isn't so easy to find gold, after all.'
'No,' said Howard slowly. 'No. It doesn't break a man's heart, for he is always sure that it is coming the next day and the next and the next. I've known them to go on that way until they died, and then know in their hearts that they'd make a strike the next day—if only the Lord would spare them twenty-four hours more.'
'I wanted father to bank our money,' went on Helen, her eyes darkening. 'I wanted to go to work, to earn something. I can teach. But he wouldn't hear of it. He said—he said that if the time had come when he couldn't support his own daughter it was high time he was dead.'
Howard nodded his understanding. 'He's a good sport, I tell you,' he maintained warmly. 'And I like him. Who knows but that he may make his ten-strike here after all? Or,' as he marked the droop of the girl's mouth and understood how she must be thinking of how little was left of their pittance, he added briskly, 'this is a better place than the East any day; there are more chances. If a man is the right sort there is always a chance for him. If you want to teach—— Well, we've got schools out here, haven't we?'
Helen's eyes rounded at him. 'Have you? Where?'
'And bully good schools,' he insisted. 'There's the Big Springs school not over ten miles off, over that way. You could have a job there to-morrow, if you said the word.'
Her eyes brightened. 'There is a vacancy, then?'