The drizzling rain that had marred the day had ceased during the afternoon. The late October sun had set in a golden glory while yet Westover lingered by the side of Millicent Danvers in the porch of the Magister homestead. The evening that followed was irresistibly tempting to lovers of the out of doors. Two men sat in converse in the porch at Wanalah. Two women sat in converse in the porch at The Oaks. The two men were Boyd Westover and Jack Towns. The two women were Margaret Conway and Millicent Danvers. The conversations in the two porches were utterly unlike in substance, in tone and in effect. Nevertheless they were not unrelated--in part at least. Jack Towns had come to give an account of his stewardship, but Westover, with his habitual indifference to petty details, insisted upon it that the report should be broadly general. "When a man has arranged a matter," he said, "involving nine seven times over, I like him to say sixty-three at the outset, instead of seven times nine. I hate to multiply and divide and add and subtract." "Why the deuce are you doing it, then?" demanded Jack. "As how?" "Why by making the wholly needless and utterly idle computation that seven times nine is sixty-three. Why didn't you just say you liked totals rather than the factors producing them?" "I suppose it is because I never studied law and therefore haven't a well ordered mind." "And I don't suppose anything of the sort. I suppose it's because your mind is fascinated with some other subject--and by the way she really is charming--so that it wearies you to think of anything else. Perhaps you'll feel otherwise when you hear what I have to tell you. Are you ready to listen?" "Yes, certainly. Go on." "Very well then. That father of yours was never so wise in all his life as when he bought all that mining land up in the Rocky Mountains. I don't know and I can't even guess how he found out the value of what he was buying." "Perhaps he didn't," said Boyd. "May be he was simply coppering on the ace and taking the chances." "I had thought of that. It's the most probable solution. However that may be, he managed to buy Golconda and Ophir and California and Australia and the mint and the assay office all in one when he disbursed a few thousand dollars for about the most desolate spot on earth, a place where you not only can't raise a potato but can't even boil one because of the altitude. It takes half an hour up there to produce a soft-boiled egg. You can boil water in two minutes, and as it boils it is so cool you can bathe in it half a minute later. I have some counterfeit continental currency in a cabinet at my house, and upon my word, if anybody had offered me all the land your father bought for you up there in exchange for one of those old and doubly discredited shin-plasters, I wouldn't have made the trade." "Then the whole thing--"