"Well, I'm goin' to rely on my heavenly Fawther," said Mrs. Dysart solemnly, from the quaking pantry.
Palmerston stood in the doorway, smiling. John jumped up and clapped his hand vigorously on his breast pockets.
"Well, now, there! I left your mail in the wagon in my other coat," he said, hooking his arm through the young man's and drawing him toward the barn. "Did you get him turned on?" he asked eagerly, when they were out of his wife's hearing. "How does he strike you, anyway? Doesn't he talk like a book? He wants me to help him find a claim—show him the corners, you know. He's got a daughter down at Los Angeles; she'll come up and keep house for him. He says he'll locate water on shares if I'll help him find a claim and do the tunneling. Emeline she's afraid I'll get left, but I think she'll come round. Isn't it a caution the way he talks science?"
Palmerston acknowledged that it was.
"The chances are that he is a fraud, Dysart," he said kindly; "most of those people are. I'd be very cautious about committing myself."
"Oh, I'm cautious," protested John; "that's one of my peculiarities. Emeline thinks because I look into things I'm not to be trusted. She's so quick herself she can't understand anybody that's slow and careful. Here's your letters—quite a batch of 'em. Would you mind our putting up a cot in your tent for the professor?"
"Not at all," said the young fellow good-naturedly. "It's excellent discipline to have a deaf man about; you realize how little you have to say that's worth saying."
"That's a fact, that's a fact," said Dysart, rather too cheerfully acquiescent. "A man that can talk like that makes you ashamed to open your head."
Palmerston fell asleep that night to the placid monotone of the newcomer's voice, and awoke at daybreak to hear the same conversational flow just outside the tent. Perhaps it was Dysart's explosive "Good-morning, professor!" which seemed to have missed the trumpet and hurled itself against the canvas wall of the tent close to the sleeper's ear, that awoke him. He sat up in bed and tried to shake off the conviction that his guest had been talking all night. Dysart's greeting made no break in the cheerful optimism that filtered through the canvas.
"Last night I was an old man and dreamed dreams; this morning I am a young man and see visions. I see this thirsty plain fed by irrigating-ditches and covered with bearing orchards. I am impatient to be off on our tramp. This is an ideal spot. With five acres of orange-trees here, producing a thousand dollars per acre, one might give his entire time to scientific investigation."