"Look here, Jim, I didn't say all I ought to have said in there with your wife and the girls—somehow I couldn't. For I let you say you would stand by me and have faith in me when all the time I knew I wasn't worth it."
Then Ralph made the same confession to his man friend and employer as he had to Jean earlier in the day. He told him that he had been speculating steadily for the past six months. To Jim's question as to why he felt he had to grow rich in such a hurry, again Ralph made no reply. When the older man put out his hand to say good-night, Ralph Merrit held it for a moment longer than usual.
"Jim," he asked, "may I make a promise to you? This has been one of the biggest days in my life. I came home this afternoon pretty well down-and-out, intending to give up my work and pretty much everything I want to attain in the world. Then—well, wonderful, unexpected things began to happen. Now I hope I am a man again. So I want to promise, not so much you as myself, that I am going to cut this speculating business out absolutely and that I am going to keep on being a man if I can manage it, no matter what happens."
There was something in Ralph's words and in his manner that made Jim's blue eyes shine and gave the extra warmth and heartiness to the farewell clasp of his hand. Moreover, he had suddenly recalled a confidence that Jack had made to him in regard to Ralph Merrit's feeling for Jean. And if ever there was a man who knew how to offer sympathy and understanding to a discouraged lover, that man was Jim Colter.
CHAPTER IX
A DILEMMA AND A VISITOR
"GREAT SCOTT," muttered Jim Colter at the breakfast table some days later, "if there was only another man around this place to take care of you women, I would not let Ralph Merrit carry so much of this burden alone. It's getting past a one-man's game to manage our present affairs."
In return Jack shook her fist at him with what was not all a pretense of indignation. "Ruth, you may not object to hearing your husband speak of you as a burden," she protested, "but I can't say I ever like hearing that I am not able to look after myself. Oh, yes, I know what the family thinks of my vanity! But seriously, Jim, there isn't any danger, no matter what goes on down at the mine, of anybody's annoying us. You need not worry over leaving us alone. I am quite sure we don't need 'another man.' The ranch is too full of them already!" And Jack shrugged her shoulders in the face of her guardian.