“What are you going to do with her?” she asked, after a pause of astonishment.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Leave her in your charge for the present.”
He took some gold from his pocket and dropped it on the pile of baby’s clothes lying on the woman’s lap.
“You take care of her for me, will you? Some one may turn up and claim her. Until they do, she belongs to me.”
He went and looked at the child again and then went out.
They buried the nameless woman two days later. It was an imposing ceremony. The doctor read the service with so excellent an imitation of the clerical drawl that he was called the Parson ever afterward.
Every soul in the camp followed the corpse, and every man put on a clean shirt and brushed his hair as a mark of respect to the deceased. Mother Melinda walked next to the coffin with the child in her arms, and it sat up and crowed with delight at the long procession; and its laughter and childish unconsciousness were more pathetic than any tears could have been.
Mr. Varley Howard, in his tall hat and black suit of such unexceptionable fit as to fill Three Star Camp with honest pride, walked beside Mother Melinda, and occasionally took the child’s hand and touched its soft little cheek.
The funeral over, the men returned to the Eldorado saloon to assuage their thirst with Dan MacGrath’s infamous brand and to discuss the function. The child, dressed in a white frock, with a huge black sash constructed out of the remnants of an old black silk which had been purchased from Dog’s Ear at a fabulous cost, was brought in and exhibited very much as an extraordinary large nugget would have been.
Varley Howard took it from Mother Melinda. It went to him quite readily, as if it acknowledged his right of possession; and, crowing and chortling, played fearlessly with his diamond scarf-pin. The men gathered round, and looked on admiringly.