The young fellow coloured deeply, the rush of blood passed over his face up to his light smooth hair and deep down into his neck till it was lost beneath his coat collar.
"No—yes—that is—well, I mean—I do mine now," he stammered after a minute.
The girl said nothing, and when Stephen glanced around at her he saw she was regarding him with astonished eyes under elevated eyebrows. This expression made the pretty oval face fairly beautiful, and the young man's heart opened to her.
"I came with the intention of doing some good here amongst the people—in a missionary, religious way I mean, but"—and he stopped again in painful embarrassment.
Katrine laughed.
"For the present you've laid religion aside and you're going to do a little mining and make a fortune, and then the religion can be taken up again," she said.
The young fellow only flushed deeper and turned his glass around nervously on the counter.
"That's all right," the girl said soothingly, after a second. "This place is a corner of the world where we all are different from what we are anywhere else. As soon as men come here they get changed. They forget everything else and just go in for gold. It's a sort of madness that's in the air. You'd be able to missionise somewhere else all right, but here you are obliged just to dig like the rest, you can't help it. Got a claim?"
The young man's face paled again.
"Yes," he answered in a low tone. "It was the claim that tempted me. It's one of the best, I believe, over in the west gulch, only about ten miles from here."