Her face took on a look of aroused interest, different from the casual look she had been giving him in the brief minute of their meeting.
“Oh,” she said, “then you must be the Mr. Townsend of the Croix d’Or. I learned of your arrival last night after I came home. You are rehabilitating the old mine?”
“Yes,” he answered, smiling. “At least we are trying to. As to the outcome––I don’t know.”
“You mustn’t say that!” she protested. “Faith in anything is the first requisite for success. That’s what it says in the copybooks, doesn’t it?”
She laughed again in her clear, mezzo voice, and then with a resumption of gravity gathered her reins into a firmer grip, and, as her horse lifted his head in response to the summons, said: “Anyway, I thank you for volunteering to rescue me, Mr. Townsend, and wish you lots of good luck, but please don’t start any more bowlders down the hill, because if you do I shall be robbed of my most enjoyable trip each day. Good-by.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he called to her, as she started away. “There are no more bowlders to roll.”
He stood and watched her as she rode, masterfully seated on the black horse, around a crag that stuck out into the trail.
“‘Faith in anything is the first requisite for success,’” he repeated to himself, striving to recall whether or not it was, as she had intimated, a hackneyed proverb for the young; yet there was something bracing in it, coming from her calm, young, womanly lips. “That’s it; she has it,” 104 he again said to himself. “‘Faith.’ That’s what I need.” And he resumed his tramp up the mountainside with a better courage and more hope for the Croix d’Or. He was still vaguely troubled when he made his way back past the power-house, in a sliding, scrambling descent, his boots starting tiny avalanches of shale and loose rock to go clattering down the mountainside.
The new men were proving competent under the direction of a boss pipeman who had been made foreman, and Dick trudged away toward the mine, feeling that one part of the work, at least, would be speedily accomplished.