Helen saw her father, accompanied by young Barbee, emerge from behind the stable, and sighed.

‘I don’t believe you know what failure means,’ she said.

‘There isn’t any such bird,’ he laughed at her.

‘Not really.’

‘Then,’ her eyes still upon the pair talking together by the stable door, ’dear old dad should find his gold-mine.  He wants it with all his heart, Heaven knows.  And he has the faith that is supposed to move mountains.’

Howard scratched his head.  Within the few hours he had come to like the old professor, for Longstreet, though academic, was a straight-from-the-shoulder type of man, one of no subterfuges.  And yet he did not greatly inspire confidence; he was not the type that breathes efficiency.

‘Tell me about him,’ Howard urged.  ’What makes him so dead certain he can nail his Golconda out here?  I take it he has never been out this way before, and that he doesn’t know a whole lot of our part of the country.’

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.