“You are greatly to be envied,” she said a little sadly, “for you are really young.  I am old, oh, very, very old!  You have trust and confidence.  I have not.  I can sympathize; I can understand.  But that is all.  There is something within me that binds all my emotions so fast that I can not give way to them.  I want to.  I wish I could.  But it is getting harder and harder for me to think of absolutely trusting, in the sense of giving out the self that is my own.  Ah, but you are to be envied!  You have saved up and accumulated the beautiful in your nature.  I have wasted mine, and now I sit by the roadside and cry for it.  My only hope and prayer is that a higher and better something will be given me in place of the wasted, and yet I have no right to expect it.  Silly, isn’t it?” she concluded bitterly.

Bennington made no reply.

They drew near the gulch, and could hear the mellow sound of bells as the town herd defiled slowly down it toward town.

“We part here,” the young man broke the long silence.  “When do I see you again?”

“I do not know.”

“To-morrow?”

“No.”

“Day after?”

The girl shook herself from a reverie.  “If you want me to believe you, come every afternoon to the Rock, and wait.  Some day I will meet you there.”

She was gone.

CHAPTER XII

OLD MIZZOU RESIGNS

Bennington went faithfully to the Rock for four days.  During whole afternoons he sat there looking out over the Bad Lands.  At sunset he returned to camp. Aliris:  A Romance of all Time gathered dust.  Letters home remained unwritten.  Prospecting was left to the capable hands of Old Mizzou until, much to Bennington’s surprise, that individual resigned his position.

The samples lay in neatly tied coffee sacks just outside the door.  The tabulations and statistics only needed copying to prepare them for the capitalist’s eye.  The information necessary to the understanding of them reposed in a grimy notebook, requiring merely throwing into shape as a letter to make them valuable to the Eastern owner of the property.  Anybody could do that.

Old Mizzou explained these things to Bennington.

“You-all does this jes’s well’s I,” he said.  “You expresses them samples East, so as they kin assay ’em; an’ you sends them notes and statistics.  Then all they is to do is to pay th’ rest of the boys when th’ money rolls in.  That ain’t none of my funeral.”

“But there’s the assessment work,” Bennington objected.

“That comes along all right.  I aims to live yere in the camp jest th’ same as usual; and I’ll help yo’ git started when you-all aims to do th’ work.”

“What do you want to quit for, then?  If you live here, you may as well draw your pay.”

“No, sonny, that ain’t my way.  I has some prospectin’ of my own to do, an’ as long as I is a employay of Bishop, I don’t like to take his time fer my work.”