Nell gave one look at the two men who were talking at a little distance; then, with a half-articulate cry, she turned and fled out of the freight-shed by a small door in the rear, and, darting round the empty freight wagons, succeeded in reaching her office unnoticed by the two men, who were still talking, both of them now having their backs turned in her direction.
Her cheeks were burning and her heart was fluttering wildly, for in one of the men who stood talking she had recognized the stranger who had arrived at the Lone House in a state so near to utter collapse.
Very wretched she felt as she bent over the instrument table, dusting where no dust was to be seen. She had regarded that exhausted stranger as the most courteous and polished gentleman she had ever seen, so it came as a crushing blow to her that he was just a vulgar drunken fellow who would treat a low saloon rabble until they all became intoxicated together.
The sounder began its insistent call at that moment, and a message began to come through from Vancouver City regarding a consignment of copper. It was a long message, and was followed by one from New Westminster, both of them having reference to the same business.
As the telegraph wires went no farther than the rail, Nell had to take and send all messages from her office. But she never had to trouble about delivering them, as they were left until called for, like letters in a country store.
Half an hour later a man on horseback rode down from the smelter with a sheaf of messages to be sent off, and, as some of them would bring speedy answers, he lounged away an hour talking to Joey, and coming at intervals to stare at Nell through a pane of glass let in at the upper half of the office door.
She had made it a hard-and-fast rule to allow no one inside her office, and the miners, even the roughest of them, had speedily come to understand that this rule must on no account be infringed.
It was an unusually busy morning, and she had no time to think in the pauses of her work, which was perhaps a good thing, her thoughts being in a state of turmoil because of that incident of which Joey had told her, and which her own eyes had so unexpectedly confirmed when she looked from the open doors of the big shed and saw Dick Bronson standing on the opposite side of the railway track.
Unconsciously, she had made a hero of the stranger who had come to the Lone House, and she had credited him with almost every virtue under the sun. His face had looked good, his manners were refined, and to her he had been exceedingly gentle and courteous.
The rush of her work ended at noon; and the long hours of the spring afternoon were uninterrupted in their slumbrous quiet.