Nearly every night, when the depot work was over, Joey Trip would start off to the store in Camp’s Gulch Settlement, which was about three miles away, and he was rarely back much before midnight, when he came home primed with all the gossip of the mining-camps. He was a sociable old fellow, and loved nothing so much as gossiping with his neighbours; and the stories he had to tell Nell of the hardships endured by the miners often used to make her heart ache for the men who had to lose their health, and sometimes their lives, in their desperate efforts to wrest wealth from the hidden stores of the rugged mountain heights.
“It’s the food what kills most of ’em,” Joey used to say. “A good many of the poor fellows come out from England, and have been used to proper cooked food all their lives; but when they get up at the mines, and have to get along on hard tack and reesty bacon—that’s bacon gone wrong, you know—why, it ain’t long before they go wrong themselves, don’t you see?”
Nell did see, and very plainly too; but there seemed no way out of it, for an ordinary average woman would certainly not endure life in those lonely mining villages if she could get a chance of earning a living elsewhere.
One day, when Nell had been about six weeks in Camp’s Gulch, Joey Trip was talking enthusiastically of a successful American who had found a vein of copper so rich on the higher side of Donaldson’s ridge, that he was simply coining money.
“He spends it, too, like a gentleman; and it is drinks all round every night at the Settlement now, only I have to take mine in lemonade, because I’m too weak in the head to stand anything stronger,” Joey remarked, with a plaintive reflection on his infirmity which was irresistibly comic.
“It would be a good thing for the pockets of a great many of the miners if they also were weak in the head as you are,” said Nell, when she had done laughing; but she started and grew rather white at his next words.
“It would be a rather good thing for Mr. Brunsen, I make no doubt, for, poor young man, he drinks a terrible lot of one sort and another; but he is very good company, when he hasn’t had too much, leastways.”
“What Mr. Brunsen is that?” she asked brusquely, turning so that Joey Trip could not see her face, and moving bales of hessian and barrels of hard-tack biscuits with great energy.
She was helping him to stow away a lot of freight which had come up by the morning train, and was wearing a very big coarse apron which she had made herself for this kind of rough work, thus enabling her to render the old man valuable service without damaging her attire.
“Why, he’s just Mr. Brunsen, I suppose,” said Joey, with a cheerful cackle of laughter; “though the men at the Settlement call him Darling Dick when he treats them, and——Why, there he is over yonder, on the other side of the track, talking to a stranger!”