Amanda Higgins had gone home for the day to help her mother, so there were only Jack and Pam with Mrs. Buckle when George Lester began to state his errand.
“I think you used to know a man named Mose Paget?” He was looking at Mrs. Buckle as he spoke, and Pam felt a queer contraction of her heart as she told herself that Mose was dead; she was sure of it from the stranger’s manner of speaking.
“Yes, I knew him, but I’m sorry to say he was not very well worth knowing,” answered Mrs. Buckle. “He was downright good to my poor husband when he was dying, but the fellow played me rather a dirty trick afterwards in going off and leaving me in the lurch just at seeding time. I can’t think how I would have got through if it had not been for Miss Walsh and her brother. The way Mose treated that poor little half-brother of his was just shameful, too, so I’m not to say proud of his acquaintance.”
“The man is dead.” George Lester spoke in a quiet tone, but his voice sounded loud in the ears of Pam, who had difficulty in suppressing a sob. She was thinking of all the tragedies that lay behind the wasted days of Mose Paget, and of Galena’s spoiled life, for spoiled it had been to a certain extent.
Mrs. Buckle threw up her hands in surprise.
“Dead, is he? Well, the world isn’t much the poorer anyhow. Not but what he had his good streaks; but there! a man would be bad indeed if there was not some good in him.”
“Did you know that he had a quarrel with your husband?” asked George Lester, who had opened a bulky pocket-book, and was busy sorting papers.
“Why, no, Sam never told me anything about it,” replied Mrs. Buckle.
Pam gave a sudden start as a wonderful possibility flashed upon her mind. She went rather white, too, and there was a sound of surging waters in her ears, so that the voice of George Lester seemed to come to her from a great distance.
“Two nights before I left on furlough,” he was saying, “we had word brought us of a shooting affray at a saloon in the mining town at the bottom of Black Cow Pass. Things are pretty lively down there as a rule, and we have to go fully armed; we have to use our weapons, too, for mostly that man is safest who is first in with the shooting irons. On this night I went down with one other man, and we found that there had been a fight between two of the miners, and the one getting the worst of it had pulled out his revolver, shooting wildly. He did not hit the man with whom he had been fighting, but another man sitting in a far corner got the bullet in his chest. It was easy to see the poor fellow had been badly hit, and one of the boys started to ride for the doctor; fifteen miles he would have to ride, on a bad trail, and the rain coming down at a pour.