“I’ve got a notion,” said the attorney, after another plodding mile of reflection; but what it was he did not say.

Ford and his companion reached Copah in the afternoon of the third day out from Saint’s Rest, and, singularly enough, the mine owners who were disputing the extension right-of-way were found amenable to reason.  What Kenneth did to secure the P. S-W. right-of-way across the mining claims, Ford did not know, or seek to know; though a word or two let fall by the attorney led him to believe that the Transcontinental encouragement was not quite specific enough in dollars and cents to warrant the obstructors in holding out.

Ford was for starting back the next morning:  he had missed Brissac and both of the Bensons on the way over.  But Kenneth confessed to being saddle-sore, and begged for another day’s respite.  Ford agreed without giving the matter a second thought.  Upon such unconsidered trifles—­an indifferent “yes” or “no”—­turn the poised scales of life.  For one other day the two Southwestern representatives put up at the Grand Union, Copah’s tar-paper-covered simulacrum of a hotel; and during that day Ford contrived to sell his birthright for what he, himself, valued at the moment as a mess of pottage.

It was in this wise.  At this period of its existence Copah, the future great, was merely a promise; a camp of magnificent prospects.  Isolated by one hundred and fifty miles of wagon-road and pack-trail from one railroad base, and by forty miles of mountains from the other, its future turned upon the hope of cheaper transportation.  As a gold camp it was an anomaly.  With a single exception its ores were low grade, and the wagon-road and pack-trail freightage made them practically profitless to the miners.

The single exception was the “Little Alicia,” and it was the coincidence of the name, rather than the eloquence of its impoverished owner, that first attracted Ford.  From first to last he did not know the exact location of the mine.  It was somewhere in the hills back of Copah, and Grigsby, the prospector who had discovered and opened it, had an office in the camp.

It was in Grigsby’s town office that Ford saw the ore specimens and the certified assays, and listened not too credulously to Grigsby’s enthusiastic description of the Little Alicia.  To be a half-owner in this mine of mines was to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice—­when the railroad should come:  if one might take Grigsby’s word for it.

It is a curious fever, that which seizes upon the new-comer in an unexploited mining field.  Ford was far from being money-mad; but there were times when he could not help contrasting a railroad salary with Miss Adair’s millions.  True, he had once said to her, in the fulness of confident belief, that the money of the woman he loved would make no difference—­to her or to him.  But the point of view, wise or foolish, is not always the same.  There were moments when the Adair millions