“I confess that they are,” replied Adam. “I’ve lived a lonely life. Few women have crossed my trail.”
“You don’t realize your good fortune—if you tell the truth.”
“I would not lie to any man,” returned Adam, bluntly.
“Bah! Men are all liars, and women make them so.... You’re hanging round my camp, making a bluff of work.”
“I deny that. Heaving these stones is work. You lift a few of them in this hot sun.... And my packing you on my back for ten miles over the floor of Death Valley—was that a bluff?”
“You saved my life!” exclaimed the man, stung to passion. There seemed to be contending tides within him—a fight of old habits of thought, fineness of feeling, against an all-absorbing and dominating malignancy. “Man, I can’t thank you for that.... You’ve done me no service.”
“I don’t want or expect thanks. I was thinking of the effort it cost me.”
“As a man who was once a gentleman, I do thank you—which is a courtesy due my past. But now that you have put me in debt for a service I didn’t want, why do you linger here?”
“I wish to help your wife.”
“Ah! that’s frank of you. That frankness is something for which I really thank you. But you’ll pardon me if I’m inclined to doubt the idealistic nature of your motive to help her.”