Page:Dave Porter in the Gold Fields.djvu/102

88 mind that I had been a big fool. And then I made a resolve" Nat stopped and gave a gulp.

"A resolve?"

"Yes. I resolved that, the first time I met you, Dave, and the others, I was going to eat humble pie and tell you just what I thought of myself." The son of the money-lender was in a perspiration now and mopped his face with his handkerchief.

Dave hardly knew how to reply. Here was Nat Poole in certainly an entirely new rôle.

"I am glad to know you are going to turn over a new leaf," he returned. "I hope you make a success of it."

"Do you really, Dave?" There was an eager note in Nat's voice.

"Sure I do, Nat. You'd be all right, if—if"

"Go ahead, give it to me straight, just as Uncle Tom did."

"Well, if you wouldn't be quite so conceited and stuck-up, and if you'd buckle down a bit more to studying."

"That's what I am going to do—buckle down to study next fall. And if I show any conceit in the future, well, I want you and Ben Basswood, and Roger and Phil, and all the others, to knock it right out of me," went on the money-lender's