He shouldered the willow hamper.
“Come along, Jinny,” he said, without looking around again, and in the gathering dusk the outfit took its way down the dry wash to the desert.
END OF BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
THE SIN-BUSTER
CHAPTER I
It was supper-time at the Sylvania Palace Grille. Sylvania was an outfitting town for prospectors and cow-punchers, and the occupants of the little oilcloth-covered tables in the “Grille” were almost exclusively of these two classes. The telephone operator and the express-agent had already taken their meal, and their departure, and this was not the day for the tri-weekly stage, the driver of which sometimes patronized Mrs. Hallard’s rotisserie.
Sing Fat and Sing Gong, the two Chinese waiters, slipped about attending to the demands of patrons, and Mrs. Hallard herself, from behind a counter, kept tabs on the room and set out the liquid refreshments that the various customers called for.
The place was full of noise and bustle. The rattle of heavy crockery, the clink of steel knives and forks, the raking of boots and spurs over the plank floor, the clamor of voices and the monotonous sing-song of the two Chinese calling orders to the cook, made up a medley in which, Mrs. Hallard was wont to declare, she could hardly hear herself think.
Despite this handicap, however, very little escaped her. She managed to hear, with no apparent difficulty, Steve Salton’s gently preferred request that she “chalk up” the amount of his bill, and to catch his mumbled replies to her swift interrogatories as to his prospects for paying.
“It’s all right if you’re going to have it,” she said, with business-like crispness. “But I ain’t here for my health, you know. I want to see the color of your dust before too long.”