Philip forgot his New England insularity for a moment and put his hand on the play-boy’s knee. “It was angelic pity, Bromley. Surely that needn’t hurt your pride.” “Angels,” was the half-musing reply. “They can rise so much, so infinitely much, higher than a man when they hold on, and sink so much lower when they let go. This angel you speak of--is she yours, Trask?” “No; only an acquaintance. I have met her only twice. But you haven’t said what you think of my proposal. It is made in good faith.” “Don’t you see how impossible it is?” “Why is it impossible?” “A partnership presupposes mutual contributions. I have nothing to contribute; not even skill with a miner’s pick.” “You have yourself and your two hands--which are probably not more unskilled than mine, for the kind of work we’d have to do.” “But the outfit--the grub-stake?” “I have money enough to carry the two of us through the summer. If we strike something, you can pay me back out of your half of the stake.” For quite a long time Bromley sat with his head thrown back, and with the half-burned cigar, which had gone out and was cold and dead, clamped between his teeth. And his answer, when he made it, was strictly in character. “What a hellish pity it is that I didn’t find you and try to hold you up weeks ago, Trask--while I had some few ravellings of the thousand left. Will you take a beggar with you on your quest of the golden fleece? Because, if you will, the beggar is yours. We mustn’t disappoint the angel.” IV THE August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.