Jeffard blew a cloud of smoke toward the gray rock-beard hanging ghostly beneath the black mouth of the excavation in the opposite hillside, and was far from taking offense. "Meaning that I haven't been enthusiastic enough to fill the bill?" he asked. "I guess that's about it. And it always seemed sort o' cur'ous to me. Money'd do you a mighty sight more good than it would me." Jeffard smoked his pipe out, debating with himself whether it was worth while to try to explain his indifference to his companion. He did try, finally, though more for the sake of putting the fact into words than in any hope of making it understandable to Garvin. "I'm afraid it isn't in me to care very much about anything," he said, at the end of the reflective excursion. "Six months ago I could have come out here with you and given you points on enthusiasm; but since then I've lived two or three lifetimes. I'm a very old man, Garvin. One day, not so very long ago, if you measure by weeks and months, I was young and strong and hopeful, like other men; but instead of burning the candle decently at the proper end, I made a bonfire of it. The fire has gone out now, and I haven't any other candle." The big prospector was good-naturedly incredulous. "You've had the fever, and you're rattled, yet; that's all that's the matter with you. You've been flat down on your luck, like one or two of the rest of us; but that ain't any reason why you can't get up ag'in, is it?" Jeffard despaired of making it clear to any simple-hearted son of the wilderness, but he must needs try again. "That is your view of the case, and it would be that of others who knew the circumstances as well as you do. But it doesn't fit the individual. David said he would wash his hands in innocency, and perhaps he could, and did--though I doubt it. I can't. When you picked me up that night on the shore of the pond, I'd been wandering around in the bottomless pit and had lost my way. I knew then I shouldn't find it again, and I haven't. I seem to have strayed into a region somewhere beyond the place where the actual brimstone chokes you; but it's a barren desert where nothing seems quite the same as it used to--where nothing is the same, as a matter of fact. Do I make it plain?" "You bet you don't," responded Garvin, out of the depths of cheerful density. "You've been a mile or two out o' my reach for the last half-hour 'r so. Ther' ain't no use a-cryin' over spilt milk, is what I say; and when I go kerflummix, why, I just cuss a few lines and get up and mog along, same as heretofore." Jeffard laughed, but there was no mirth in him. "I envy you; you are a lucky man to be able to do it. I wish in my soul I could." "What's the reason you can't?"