"I must leave here at half past and if you have not finished what you have to say I thought you might walk with me to the office."
"The office?" It shocked him that she should have to go to an office, that she had hours, that anybody should have a claim upon her time by paying for it.
Quizzically: "Did you think I was an heiress!"
"Last night you looked as though you might be." His tone told her of his admiration.
"Relics of past greatness," Helen replied smiling. "A remodelled gown that was my mother's. One good street suit at a time and a blouse or two is the best I can do. I am merely a wonderful bluff in the evening."
Bruce felt that it was a sore spot although she was smiling, and he could not help being glad, for it meant she needed him. If he had found her in prosperous circumstances the success or failure of the placer would have meant very little to her. He must succeed, he told himself exuberantly; his incentive now was to make her life happier and easier.
"If everything goes this summer as I hope--and expect--" he said slowly, "you need not be a 'bluff' at any hour of the day."
Her eyes widened.
"What do you mean?"
Then Bruce described the ground that he and Slim had located. He told of his confidence in it, of his efforts to raise the money to develop it, and the means by which he had accomplished it. Encouraged by her intelligent interest he talked with eager enthusiasm of his plans for working it, describing mercury traps, and undercurrents, discussing the comparative merits of pole and block, Hungarian and caribou rifles. Once he was well started it seemed to him that he must have been saving up things all his life to tell to this girl. He talked almost breathlessly as though he had much to say and an appallingly short time to say it in.
He told her about his friend, Old Felix, and about the "sassy" blue-jays and the darting kingfisher that nested in the cut-bank where he worked, of the bush-birds that shared his sour-dough bread. He tried to picture to her the black bear lumbering over the river bowlders to the service berry bush across the river, where he stood on his hind legs, cramming his mouth and watching over his shoulder, looking like a funny little man in baggy trousers. He told her of his hero, the great Agassiz, of his mother, of whom even yet he could not speak without a break in his voice, and of his father, as he remembered him, harsh, silent, interested only in his cattle.