"The hardship of having too much money is one which I never experienced, so I can't say as to that," he said, moved to smiles by the humor of it. "But to understand what I mean by hardship you must know how I've struggled in the ruts and narrow traditions of my profession, and fought, hoped, and starved. Why, I tell you that black hole over there looks like an open door with a light inside of it compared to some of the things I've gone through in the seven years that I've been trying to get a start. Money? I'll tell you how that is, Miss Horton; I've thought along that one theme so confounded long that it's worn a groove in my brain. "Here you see me tonight, a piece of driftwood at thirty-five, and all for the want of money enough to buy an automobile and take the darned-fool world by storm on its vain side! You can't scratch it with a diamond on its reasoning side--I've scratched away on it until my nails are gone. "I've failed, I tell you, I've botched it all up! And just for want of money enough to buy an automobile! Brains never took a doctor anywhere--nothing but money and bluff!" "I wonder," she speculated, "what will become of you out here in this raw place, where the need of a doctor seems to be the farthest thing in the world, and you with your nerve all gone?" It would have reassured her if she could have seen the fine flush which this charge raised in his face. But she didn't even look toward him, and couldn't have noted the change if she had, for the moonlight was not that bright, even in Wyoming. "But I haven't lost my nerve!" he denied warmly. "Oh, yes, you have," she contradicted, "or you wouldn't admit that you're a failure, and you wouldn't talk about money that way. Money doesn't cut much ice as long as you've got nerve." "That's all right from your view," said he pettishly. "But you've had easy going of it, out of college into a nice home, with a lot of those pink-faced chaps to ride you around in their automobiles, and opera and plays and horse-shows and all that stuff." "Perhaps," she admitted, a soft sadness in her voice. "But wait until you've seen somebody drunk with the passion of too much money and crazy with the hunger for more; wait until you've seen a man's soul grow black from hugging it to his heart, and his conscience atrophy and his manhood wither. And then when it rises up and crushes him, and all that are his with it----" He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to round it out with a personal citation. But she said no more. "That's why you're here, hoping like the rest of us to draw Number One?" "Any number up to six hundred will do for me," she laughed, sitting erect once more and seeming to shake her bitter mood off as she spoke. "And what will you do with it? Sell out as soon as the law allows?"