"More," he replied laconically. "I have prospected over every foot of it, and I know that it contains a fortune. A fortune"—he struck the table with the palm of his hand—"beyond the dreams of avarice."
There were dancing sparkles in her green eyes. "Let me congratulate you, 'O gallant knight, gaily bedight, in sunshine or in shadow,' that you have been lucky enough to find Eldorado."
She rose in a sweeping impetuosity, drew up her slender height, and made him a curtsy, a flower bending buoyantly to the breeze, and springing upright again.
"But"—two or three sliding steps of the fandango, and then in her chair—"where did you find Eldorado? That's the history a daughter of the road wants to know. Is it truly 'over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow?'"
She swept him along on the tide of her high spirits; her laughter ran silver cascades down to the ocean of melody; her sun‑flecked eyes held the heart‑warming glow, the stimulation of wine. She was a breeze blowing from the South.
"The romance!" she cried. "Behold an anomaly! Some one actually longing for a traveler's tale. Begin!" Her voice rang imperious, alluring.
Hayden almost caught at the table, a giddiness of the mind, perhaps of the senses, confused him. His face was a shade paler.
"It is too plain and rough a tale to be told except as a matter of business. You are kind; but I should not venture to bore you."
She accepted temporary defeat nonchalantly. "But you"—she did not change her position even by the movement of a finger, and yet, the whole expression of her figure became suddenly tense as a strung bow—"are you so sure that you could ever find your way thither again?"
He looked at her in surprise. "You give me very little credit for ordinary common sense, mademoiselle," he said shortly. "Of course, I made a map, and have any number of photographs." Immediately, he could have bitten his tongue.