Confidence inspires confidence. Howard had hardly finished sketching for her his own plans and hopes; he had gone succinctly and openly into detail concerning his deal with John Carr. Now Helen, glad to talk with some one, answered in kind.
'The University elected a young president, a New Broom,' she said bitterly. 'He is a man of more ambition than brains. His slogan is "Young Men." He ousted father together with a dozen other men of his age. I thought father's heart would be broken; he had devoted all of the years of his life, all of his best work, to his University. But instead he was simply enraged! Can you imagine him in a perfectly towering rage?'
Howard grinned. 'Go ahead,' he chuckled. 'He's a good old sport and I like him.'
'Well,' said Helen, without meeting his smile, 'father and I went into business session right away. We had never had much money; father had never cared for wealth measured in money; had always been richly content with his professor's salary; had never saved or asked me to save. When the thing happened, all we had in the world was a little over seven hundred dollars. I was right away for economizing, for managing, for turning to some other position. But father, I tell you, was in a perfect rage. When I mentioned finances to him he got up and shouted. "Money!" he yelled at me. "What's money? Who wants money? It's a fool's game to get money; anybody can do it." When he saw that I doubted he told me to pack up that very day and he'd show me; he'd show the world. The new University man named him an old fogy, did he? He'd show him. Didn't he know more than any other man living about geology? About the making of the earth and the minerals of the earth? Was it any trick to find gold? Not in the dribbles, but such a mine as never a miner drove a pick into yet?'
She sighed again and grew silent. Howard, toying idly with the spurs in his hands, could at the moment find nothing to say.
'Dear old pops,' she said more softly in a moment. 'I am afraid that his heart-breaking time is coming now--when he learns that it isn't so easy to find gold, after all.'
'No,' said Howard slowly. 'No. It doesn't break a man's heart, for he is always sure that it is coming the next day and the next and the next. I've known them to go on that way until they died, and then know in their hearts that they'd make a strike the next day--if only the Lord would spare them twenty-four hours more.'