"There's only one thing to do," he said, "and that is to go ahead. We must go ahead. Of course the hazard is against us. Let us face the chance that Bangs was only a clever romancer. Well, we've already discounted that. Then let us face the discrepancy in our two maps. It's bad, I'll admit. It almost knocks the last atom of confidence out of me. It has floored you. But you must not take the count. You must get up."
He paused, looking around him with troubled eyes; then somehow the sight of her pathetic figure—the[285] soft, helpless youth of her—suddenly seemed to prop up his back-bone.
"Miss Sandys, I am going to stand by you anyway! I suppose, like myself, you have invested your last dollar in this business?"
"Y-yes."
He glanced at the pick, shovel and spade in the corner of her tent, then at her hands.
"Who," he asked politely, "was going to wield these?"
She let her eyes rest on the massive implements of honest toil, then looked confusedly at him.
"I was."
"Did you ever try to dig with any of these things?"
"N-no. But if I had to do it I knew I could."