"Oh, Tom! and with such a father!"
"Wait a minute. You spoke of heredity and environment. I'm giving you all sides, except anything more about my mother. Her father was a cranky inventor … Well, inside six months we were living in a tenement. I was a little shaver of six. The younger of my sisters was a baby. Talk about environment! Wasn't many years before I was known as the toughest kid in Rat Alley."
"Don't dwell on that, Tom. Don't even speak of it," begged Genevieve.
He shook his head. "I want you to know just what I've been. It's your right to know. I wasn't one of the nasty kind and I wasn't a sneak. But I was the leader of my gang. Maybe you know what that means. Of course the police got it in for me. Finally they made it so hot I had to get out of Chicago. I took to the road—became a bum."
"Not that!—surely not that!"
"Well, no, only a kid hobo. But I'd have slid on down if I hadn't dropped into a camp of surveyors who were heading off into the mountains and had need of another man. Griffith, the engineer in charge, talked me into joining the party as axman. I took a fancy to him. He proved himself the first real friend I'd ever had—or was to have till I met Jimmy Scarbridge."
"A man's worth is measured by the friends he makes," she observed.
"Not always. Well, Griffith got me interested. I joined the party. Whew!—seven months in the mountains, and not a saloon within fifty miles any of the time. But I stuck it out. Nobody ever called me a quitter."
"And now, Tom, you'll not quit! You'll win!"
"I'll try—for you, girlie! You can't guess how that braces me—the thought that it's for you! You see, I'm beginning to count on things now. I'm not even afraid of your money now. Good old Grif—Griffith, you know—has given me a shy at a peach of a proposition—toughest problem I was ever up against. It's a big irrigation dam that has feazed half a dozen good engineers."