settling--but you
wouldn't enjoy not caring about anybody at all, yourself, would you?"

Garry admitted that he wouldn't.

"Well, then, don't waste your time pitying him." A cold gleam
flickered in those bleached blue eyes. "Don't you suppose I'd have
taken apart long ago this animated ice-chest who is making all the
trouble, just to see what makes him so cold, if I didn't know I'd be
spoiling the big show? Couldn't you see, without my tellin' you, that
I'd rise up some day and leave him looking like a premature blast,
after all I've learned he's plannin' to slip us, if I wasn't sure that
he's going to get it, worse than I could ever give it to him, from that
girl herself? Well, I would. He makes me shiver, that man; makes me
crawl and itch to take his head in one hand and his throat in the other
and exert a little strength in opposite directions. Give our entry
time! The game is running dead against him at present, I'll admit, but
he's husbanding his chips. He ain't drawing wild and squandering his
chances. And he's only _begun_ to play."

Which, in part, was very, very true; in part not so close to the facts.
Before snow came that fall Steve had recovered his outward confidence,
at least; he had begun to hope again, while he waited and labored
prodigiously against the coming of spring. But in his heart he was no
longer sure; he could not summon back that serene self-surety which,
toward the end, had shaken even the girl's certainty in herself. He
could no longer argue convincingly with a vision of her, as he had
often argued with Barbara herself, that his way would be her way in the
end. For he had begun to realize the width of that gulf which he knew
must seem to exist between them, if not to her then to the eyes of
others of her world.

It was his memories which gave him consolation those long nights, but
they also gave him doubt. Remembering the daintiness of her as she had
come to him, the night of her party, recalling the things to which she
had been accustomed since she had opened her eyes on the first light of
day, he began to ask himself as every man like him has asked who ever
loved a woman, how in any fairness he could expect her to accept the
little which he could offer in return. To Steve and Fat Joe, to the
men of his gang, his confidence was that of the old, old Steve who, ten
years before, had cocked his head at one of Allison's switch engines
and promised gravely, "I'll hev to be gitt