It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship, with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try as he might. Little things, even the mountain man’s crudities of speech, jarred upon him. It was quite in vain that he called himself hard names, asking himself why he, of all men, should yield to the nudgings of an intellectual or social snobbishness. But the fact remained. Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and brooding. “How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat. “Do what--chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?” “Yes; but you and he have absolutely nothing in common. Garth washes his face occasionally and calls it a bath; keeps his fingernails in mourning; shovels his food with a knife; rolls into his bunk with his boots on if he happens to forget to take them off.” Bromley smiled and relighted his pipe. “You have some queer notions in that narrow old Puritan head of yours, Phil. Don’t you know that humanity is all common?” “Is it?--from your point of view?” “It’s the surest thing you know. ‘For a’ that an’ a’ that, a man’s a man for a’ that.’ Big Jim is a diamond; an uncut diamond, I grant you, but the pure quill is there, just the same.” “Think so? By his own tell he is a spendthrift drunkard and gambler when he has the means to buy or bet.” “Well, what of that? Does the foolish evil cancel all the wise good? When it comes to that, how many of us have a clean slate? I’m sure I haven’t, for one. How about you?” Philip was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say, rather complacently: “I think you have seen the worst of me, Harry.” Bromley smiled again and shook his head. “I’ve seen the best of you, Phil. I’m only fearing the worst.” “Thanks”--curtly; “you have said something like that before. Make it plainer.” “I don’t know that I can; or that you’d thank me if I could. It is merely the potentialities, I guess.” “My potentialities for evil?” “Both ways. You are, or you have been, virgin ground. This gold hunt is the first thing that has ever put the plow into you. It remains to be seen what kind of soil it is going to turn up. Don’t you feel that, yourself?”