It was rather a difficult question. Weston could not very well tell her, even had he quite realized it, that there was in him a vein of rudimentary chivalry that had been carefully fostered by his mother.
The males of the Weston line had clung to traditions, but they had for the most part been those of the Georgian days, when very little refinement of sentiment was expected from the country gentleman. The traditions Agnes Weston had held by, however, went back to an earlier age. She had been High Church and imaginative, a woman of impracticable as well as somewhat uncomfortable ideals, and finding her husband proof against them she had done what she could with her son. The result was a somewhat happy one, for in the Kid, as his comrades termed him, her fantasies and extravagances had been toned down by the very prosaic common sense of the Weston male line. They were full-fleshed, hard-riding Englishmen who lived on beef and beer.
Though Weston was naturally not aware of it, there were respects in which Ida Stirling was like his mother. Ida, however, usually kept her deeper thoughts to herself, which Mrs. Weston had seldom done, but she shaped her life by them, and they were wholesome.
"Well," he said diffidently, "it was quite a humiliating situation for the old man. He was a person of some consequence once--a rather famous a.s.sayer and mineralogist--and I think he felt it."
"That is not what I asked you," said Ida, with a trace of dryness.
Weston spread out his hands as though to excuse himself.
"Then," he said, "they were all against him, and I think Jake--I mean the big chopper--would have forced the stuff down his throat. It was horribly burnt. There are," and he hesitated, "things one really has to do."
His companion nodded. She liked his diffidence, which, while very evident, was wholly genuine, and the faint color in his face gave him an appearance of boyish candor.
"Even when the odds against you are quite steep?" she said. "In the case we are discussing the result was no doubt that bruise on your face." Then she changed the subject. "If he was a famous mineralogist, why is he cooking in a railroad camp?"
"Everybody knows," said Weston. "The usual trouble--whisky."
The girl made a little gesture of comprehension that had in it also a hint of disgust, and then seeing that he would say nothing further until she gave him a lead she spoke again.
"What brought you out here?" she inquired.
Weston had been asked the same question several times before, and had never answered it. In fact, he did not know why he did so now.
"I quarreled with my people. In one respect, anyway, I don"t regret it. It"s rather a beautiful country."
He sat, with his wide hat tilted back and the sun on his face, looking out upon the blue lake between the towering pines. Their shadows floated in it, and tremendous slopes of rock ran up toward the gleaming snow on the farther side. The bush lay very silent under the scorching sun, and it was filled with the heavy odors of the firs, in which there was a clogging, honey-like sweetness.
"It"s a little difficult to understand why you seem to be content with track-grading. One would fancy it to be unusually hard work," said the girl.
"Oh, yes," agreed Weston, laughing. "Still, you see, I don"t intend to remain a track-grader indefinitely."
"No?" said Ida, inquiringly. "What do you mean to do?"
Weston saw that she was interested, and he was still young enough to be willing to discuss his own plans and projects--though for that matter one comes across older men who can talk of nothing else.
"This country is full of gold and silver," he said. "Other men strike it now and then, and I really don"t see why I shouldn"t."
"When they do, haven"t they usually to sell it for almost nothing to somebody who gets up a company? Besides, do you know anything about prospecting?"
Weston laughed.
"A little. It"s my one dissipation; and it"s rather an expensive one.
You have to work for months to save enough to buy a camp outfit and provisions, and if you mean to stay any time in the ranges you have to hire a horse. Then you come back in rags with a bagful of specimens that prove to be of no use at all; and you go to work again."
"You have done that often?"
"Three or four times."
"Then," asked Ida, "isn"t it foolish to go back again?"
Weston looked at her a moment hesitatingly, and then made a little gesture of deprecation.
"It sounds absurd, of course, but I have a fancy that if I keep it up long enough I shall strike gold. You see I"m a water-finder, anyway."
"A water-finder?"
Weston nodded.
"It"s an old English idea. Water evidently used to be scarcer there, and even now there are places where good wells aren"t plentiful. You go along with a hazel twig, and it dips when you cross water running underground. That is, if you have the gift in you. Anybody can"t do it. You think that quite foolish, don"t you?"
Ida really did, though she did not seem to admit it.
"Have you ever tried the gift out here?" she asked.
"On the prairie, quite often. A good deal of it is burnt up and dry. I generally found water."
"You turned the--power--to account? I mean--you made--money out of it?"
There was a sudden change in Weston"s face.
"No," he said, "I never took a cent."
"But why?"
"Well," replied the man slowly, "my mother had some old-world belief, and she said it was a special gift. She knew I had it. She said a thing of that kind should never be used for money."
"But haven"t all those who claimed special powers--priests, magicians, medicine-men--always been willing to sell them?"
Her companion"s eyes twinkled.
"Well, I dare say they have. Still, you see, it"s possible that they never really had the gifts they claimed at all. Now I--can--find water, and I have a notion that I can find the precious metals too.
Quite absurd, isn"t it?"
Ida thought it was, but the quiet confidence behind his whimsical manner appealed to her. He was, it seemed, a man of simple character and few ideas, but she knew that he had nerve and vigor, and, after all, the western Dominion is the land of strenuous, all-daring, simple men. Besides, she had watched the resolution flash into his young face when he stood facing the angry crowd of track-graders with the ax in his hand, and she had seen very much the same tenacity and steadfastness stamped on the faces of successful men. Her father was one, and he was a man who had scarcely been educated, and was certainly devoid of any complexity of character. Stirling had made his mark by smashing down opposition, and, when that was not possible, grimly holding on and bearing the blows dealt him. There was, as she recognized, something to be said in favor of that kind of man.
Then Kinnaird came up through the bush with his rod and a few troutlings, dry-shod and immaculate in a jacket that fitted him like a uniform, and Ida went back to camp with him. She fancied, however, that her father or Weston, who sat still and filled his pipe again, would have come back with a heavy fish, or at least thorn-rent and dripping wet.
CHAPTER IV
IDA"S FIRST ASCENT
The party had spent another day or two beside the lake when, one drowsy afternoon, Kinnaird, who sat on the hot, white shingle by the water"s edge, with a pair of gla.s.ses in his hand, sent for Weston.
Miss Kinnaird and Ida Stirling were seated among the boulders not far away.