“It's a year since there was a Chinaman chased by some Irishmen from the Crossing into the brush about yer, and he was too afeered to come out, and nigh most starved to death in thar. I had to drag him out and start him on the mountain, for you couldn't get him back to the road. He was the last one but YOU.”
“Do you reckon it's the right thing for a girl like you to run about with trash of this kind, and mix herself up with all sorts of rough and bad company?” said Lance.
Flip stopped short. “Look! if you're goin' to talk like Dad, I'll go back.”
The ridiculousness of such a resemblance struck him more keenly than a consciousness of his own ingratitude. He hastened to assure Flip that he was joking. When he had made his peace they fell into talk again, Lance becoming unselfish enough to inquire into one or two facts concerning her life which did not immediately affect him. Her mother had died on the plains when she was a baby, and her brother had run away from home at twelve. She fully expected to see him again, and thought he might sometime stray into their canyon. “That is why, then, you take so much stock in tramps,” said Lance. “You expect to recognize HIM?”
“Well,” replied Flip, gravely, “there is suthing in THAT, and there's suthing in THIS: some o' these chaps might run across brother and do him a good turn for the sake of me.”
“Like me, for instance?” suggested Lance.
“Like you. You'd do him a good turn, wouldn't you?”
“You bet!” said Lance, with a sudden emotion that quite startled him; “only don't you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously.” He was half-conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy, as he asked if any of her proteges had ever returned.
“No,” said Flip, “no one ever did. It shows,” she added with sublime simplicity, “I had done 'em good, and they could get on alone. Don't it?”
“It does,” responded Lance grimly. “Have you any other friends that come?”