the trail from Hoskins, its rider as gaily dressed as a Mexican vaquero – a splotch of color against the background of the evergreens almost startling to his vision. But it was the identity of this rider that invigorated the tone of the mining man’s reflections.
“Nell Blossom! The only sure-enough cure for ophthalmia! Am I going to have the pleasure of being your escort back to Canyon Pass? It will sure do me proud. The Passonians are honing for you, Nell.”
“I’m going back to the Pass – yes, Mr. Hurley,” she said, pulling down her pony to the more sedate pace of his big bay.
“Where you been since you left us all in the lurch? There was almost a riot at the Grub Stake when Tolley found out you had gone.”
“Boss Tolley hasn’t got anything on me,” she said defensively. “I’d never sing there again, anyway.”
“Somebody said you’d lit out for the desert with Steve Siebert and Andy McCann,” and he chuckled. “They started the same day you vamoosed.”
“I might just as well have gone with those old desert rats. Pocket hunting couldn’t be much worse than Hoskins.”
“Great saltpeter! What took you to Hoskins?” exclaimed Hurley. “Where’s your local pride? If you weren’t born at Canyon Pass, you’ve lived there most of your life. You shouldn’t encourage a dump like Hoskins to believe for a moment that it has greater attractions than the Pass.”
“If I thought it might be more attractive, I learned better,” she said shortly.
“Mother Tubbs got a letter from you, but she wouldn’t tell us where you were.”
“No,” Nell said. “I didn’t want the boys riding over there and starting a roughhouse at the Tin Can Saloon.”
“Great saltpeter!” exclaimed Hurley again. “You don’t mean to say you been caroling your roundelays in that place?”
“A girl has to work somewhere, and I was sick to death of the Grub Stake.”
“Boss Tolley is no pleasant citizen and his joint is no sweet-scented garden spot, I admit,” Hurley agreed. “Personally I’d like to see Tolley run out of town and the Grub Stake eliminated. But Colorado Brown has opened a new place and is going to run it right – so he says.”
“That’s what is bringing me back,” Nell confessed. “He got word to me by Mother Tubbs, and he made me a better offer than Tolley ever would. But I expect one cabaret is about like another in these roughneck towns.”
“I don’t know about that,” the man said defensively. “We mean to try to clean up Canyon Pass. The boys have got to have amusement. Colorado Brown is a white man, and, if he gets the backing of the better element, he can give a good show and sell better hootch and better grub than ever Boss Tolley dared to.”
“Hootch is hootch,” Nell interrupted. “It’s all bad. There’s nothing good about a rotten egg, Mr. Hurley. And the men’s money is wasted in all those places – plumb wasted!”
He had been watching her closely as they talked. He had been watching Nell closely, off and on, for several years. Like many of the other young and unattached men of Canyon Pass, Joe Hurley had at one time attempted to storm the fortress of Nell Blossom’s heart. Finally he had become convinced that the girl was not for him.
Joe Hurley neither wore his heart on his sleeve nor was he unwise enough to anger Nell by forcing his attentions beyond that barrier she had raised between them. His were merely the objections of any clean-minded man when he had seen her yielding to the machinations of Dick the Devil. Joe knew the gambler’s kind.
He had felt no little anxiety when, with the usual spring exodus of the two old desert rats, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann, Nell and Dick Beckworth had likewise disappeared from the Grub Stake. Dick, of course, had settled with Boss Tolley; he intimated that he was starting north for the railroad at Crescent City. The hour had been so early that nobody else had chanced to see the gambler and the girl ride away. Nell was missed later, and all the right thinking men of the town, although they said little, feared the worst for Nell Blossom.
Nell had displayed at the last some little interest in Dick the Devil. The other girls at the Grub Stake gossiped about it.
Then came Mother Tubbs with a bona-fide letter from the girl to dam the flood of gossip. Nell was working as usual in a cabaret. She had left Boss Tolley because she could not stand him any longer. She was bitter about the Grub Stake and its proprietor. And not a word in the letter about Dick Beckworth. It was plain, even to the most suspicious, that Dick had not gone with her after all.
These few facts colored Joe Hurley’s thoughts as they rode along the track. What colored Nell’s?
When the sprightly talk lapsed between them, the girl’s face fell into unhappy lines. She who had been as blithe as a field lark all her life was showing to Joe Hurley for the first time a most unnatural soberness of spirit. Her eyes, their gaze fixed straight ahead, were filmed with remoteness that his friendly glance could not penetrate.
Something had changed Nell Blossom. She was no longer the happy-go-lucky girl she had been heretofore. He wondered if, after all, her affair with Dick Beckworth was serious.
They skirted the Overhang, their horses now at a canter. Nell suddenly pulled in her mount at a place where a patch along the brink of the treacherous cap had recently crumbled.
“Looks as if there might have been a small slide,” observed Hurley cheerfully.
“Was – was anybody hurt?”
“Reckon not. Just about where the big slide was years ago. There are always bits dropping down this cliff. I tell ’em there’s bound to be another landslip some time that will play hob with Runaway River and maybe flood out the town again. It’s like living over a volcano.”
Nell still looked back at the broken edge of the cliff. “Nobody missing, then? Nobody – er – left town?”
He laughed. “Nobody but you and old Steve and Andy McCann. Those old desert rats lit out the same morning you left town. Hold on! I don’t know as you know it; but Dick Beckworth went about that time. He’s gone to Denver, so Tolley says, to deal faro at a big place there.”
He could not see the girl’s face. As far as he knew the statement made no impression upon her. They jogged on practically in silence until they came to the point where the wagon-track plunged steeply to the ford of the West Fork, and from which spot the squalid town was first visible.
“Ugh!” Nell shuddered and glanced at Joe again. “It is such an ugly place.”
“Where’s your civic pride, Nell?” and the other chuckled.
“What is there to be proud of?” was her sharp demand.
“It’s a money-making town.”
“Money!”
“Quite a necessary evil, that same money,” he rejoined. “Gold is a good foundation to build a town upon. Canyon Pass has ‘got a future in front of it,’ as the feller said. Business is booming. Bank deposits are increasing. Three families have bought piano-players, and there are at least a dozen talking machines in town – besides the female citizens,” and he laughed again.
“All that?” in a sneering tone. “Still, the bulk
