“A week! Do you intend to send for other folks, then?” and her tone was one of regret. “Oh, it would be all different, then. My pretty camp would be spoiled for me if folks should come talking and whistling up our creek. Don’t let any one know so soon!”
“You don’t know what you are talking of,” he answered, a little roughly. “This is a business trip. We did not come up here just because we were looking for a pretty picture of a place to camp in.”
“Oh!” and surprise and dismay were in the exclamation. “Then you don’t care for it—you want other people just as soon as you find the rich streak where the gold is? Well”—and she looked again over their little chosen valley—“I almost hope you won’t find it very soon—not for several days. I would like to live just like this for a whole week. And I thought—I was so sure you liked it, too.”
“Oh, yes,” he answered, indifferently enough, evidently giving his whole attention to examining the soil he had commenced to dig up again, “I like the camp all 166 right, but we can’t just stand around and admire it, if we want to accomplish what we came for. And see here, ’Tana,” he said, and for the first time he looked at her with a sort of unwillingness, “you must know that this gold is going to make a big change in things for you. You can’t live out in the woods with a couple of miners and an Indian squaw, after your fortune is made—don’t you see that? You must go to school, and live out in the world where your money will help you to—well, the right sort of society for a girl.”
“What is the use of having money if it don’t help you to live where you please?” she demanded. “I thought that was what money was for. I’d a heap rather stay poor here in the woods, with—with the folks I know, instead of going where I’ll have to buy friends with money. Don’t think I’d want the sort of friends who have to be baited with money, anyway.”
He stared at her helplessly. She was saying to him the things he had called himself a fool for thinking. But he could not call her a fool. He could only stifle an impatient groan, and wonder how he was to reason her into thinking as other girls would think of wealth and its advantages.
“Why were you so wild about finding the gold, if you care so little for the things it brings?” he demanded, and she pointed toward the tents.
“It was for him I thought at first—of how the money would, maybe, help to make him well—get him great doctors, and all that. The world had been rough on him—people had brought him trouble, and—and I thought, maybe, I could help clear it away. That was what I had in my mind at first.” 167
“You need things, too, don’t you?—not doctors, but education—books, beautiful things. You want pictures, statues, fine music, theaters—all such things. Well, the money will help you get them, and get people to enjoy them with you. I’ve heard you talk to Max about how you would like to live, and what you would like to see; and I think you can soon. But, ’Tana, you will live then where people will be more critical than we are here—”
“More like Captain Leek?” she asked, with a deep wrinkle between her brows; “for if they are, I’ll stay here.”