Besides that, the boys generally insisted on everybody's playing cards, and if any one refused they had a playful trick of throwing things at him." The girl, who had imagination, could picture the dimly-lighted shanty and the bronzed and ragged men flinging their long boots, as well as very pointed badinage, at the comrade who tried to read.

It would, she admitted, certainly be a little difficult to study trigonometry in such surroundings.
"You see, I wanted to go into the thing systematically," continued Weston, who felt that he was safest when he kept on talking.

"We have decided that Verneille couldn't have made more than forty miles from the lake, and, as he was heading south, that gives us at most a sweep of about a hundred and twenty miles to search, though the whole of it is practically a nest of mountains.

As I wasn't able to read up the subject quite as much as I should have liked, we have thought of hiring a professional surveyor and raising money enough to spend the whole summer over the thing, even if we have to let the men who help us take a share in the mine." "I wonder whether you would be very much offended if some of your friends were to offer to bear part of the expense ?" Ida asked quietly.
"I'm afraid I couldn't permit it." The man's face flushed.

"They probably would never get their money back.