discovery, its extent, and its probable effect upon the fortunes of the locality.He noticed, abstractedly, that both Mrs. Bradley and her cousin showed a real or assumed scepticism of its value.This did not disturb him greatly, except for its intended check upon Minty's enthusiasm.He was more conscious, perhaps,--with a faint touch of mortified vanity,--that his own contemplated departure was of lesser importance than this local excitement.Yet in his growing conviction that all was over--if, indeed, it had ever begun--between himself and Louise, he was grateful to this natural diversion of incident which spared them both an interval of embarrassing commonplaces.And, with the suspicion of some indefinable insincerity--either of his own or Louise's--haunting him, Minty's frank heartiness and outspoken loyalty gave him a strange relief.It seemed to him as if the clear cool breath of the forest had entered with her homely garments, and the steadfast truth of Nature were incarnate in her shining eyes.How far this poetic fancy would have been consistent or even coexistent with any gleam of tenderness or self-forgetfulness in Louise's equally pretty orbs, I leave the satirical feminine reader to determine.
It was late when Bradley at last returned, bringing further and more complete corroboration of the truth of Sharpe's good fortune.
Two experts had arrived, one from Pine Flat and another from the Summit, and upon this statement Richardson had offered to purchase an interest in the discovery that would at once enable the blacksmith to develop his mine."I shouldn't wonder, Mainwaring,"he added cheerfully, "if he'd put you into it, too, and make your eternal fortune."
"With larks falling from the skies all round you, it's a pity YOU couldn't get put into something," said Mrs. Bradley, straightening her pretty brows.
"I'm not a gold-miner, my dear," said Bradley, pleasantly.
"Nor a gold-finder," returned his wife, with a cruel little depression of her pink nostrils, "but you can work all night in that stupid mill and then," she added in a low voice, to escape Minty's attention, "spend the whole of the next day examining and following up a boy's discovery that his own relations had been too lazy and too ignorant to understand and profit by.I suppose that next you will be hunting up a site on the OTHER SIDE of the Canyon,where somebody else can put up a hotel and ruin your own prospects."
A sensitive shadow of pain quickly dimmed Bradley's glance--not the first or last time evidently, for it was gradually bringing out a background of sadness in his intelligent eyes.But the next moment he turned kindly to Mainwaring, and began to deplore the necessity of his early departure, which Richardson had already made known to him with practical and satisfying reasons.
"I hope you won't forget, my dear fellow, that your most really urgent business is to look after your health; and if, hereafter,you'll only remember the old Lookout enough to impress that fact upon you, I shall feel that any poor service I have rendered you has been amply repaid."
Mainwaring, notwithstanding that he winced slightly at this fateful echo of Louise's advice, returned the grasp of his friend's hand with an honest pressure equal to his own.He longed now only for the coming of Richardson, to complete his scheme of grateful benefaction to his host.
The banker came fortunately as the conversation began to flag; and Mrs. Bradley's half-coquettish ill-humor of a pretty woman, and Louise's abstracted indifference, were becoming so noticeable as to even impress Minty into a thoughtful taciturnity.The graciousness of his reception by Mrs. Bradley somewhat restored his former ostentatious gallantry, and his self-satisfied, domineering manner had enough masculine power in it to favorably affect the three women, who, it must be confessed, were a little bored by the finer abstractions of Bradley and Mainwaring.After a few moments,Mainwaring rose and, with a significant glance at Richardson to remind him of his proposed conference with Bradley, turned to leave the room.He was obliged to pass Louise, who was sitting by the table.His attention was suddenly arrested by something in her hand with which she was listlessly playing.It was the stone which he had put on his letter to her.
As he had not been present when Bradley arrived, he did not know that this fateful object had been brought home by his host, who,after receiving it from Richelieu, had put it in his pocket to illustrate his story of the discovery.On the contrary, it seemed that Louise's careless exposure of his foolish stratagem was gratuitously and purposely cruel.Nevertheless, he stopped and looked at her.
"That's a queer stone you have there," he said, in a tone which she recognized as coldly and ostentatiously civil.
"Yes," she replied, without looking up; "it's the outcrop of that mine."She handed it to him as if to obviate any further remark.
"I thought you had seen it before."
"The outcrop," he repeated dryly."That is--it--it--it is the indication or sign of something important that's below it--isn't it?"
Louise shrugged her shoulders sceptically."It don't follow.It's just as likely to cover rubbish, after you've taken the trouble to look."
"Thanks," he said, with measured gentleness, and passed quietly out of the room.
The moon had already risen when Bradley, with his brierwood pipe,preceded Richardson upon the veranda.The latter threw his large frame into Louise's rocking-chair near the edge of the abyss;
Bradley, with his own chair tilted against the side of the house after the national fashion, waited for him to speak.The absence of Mainwaring and the stimulus of Mrs. Bradley's graciousness had given the banker a certain condescending familiarity, which Bradley received with amused and ironical tolerance that his twinkling eyes made partly visible in the darkness.