“You’ve no evidence to prove that the woman came from Dog’s Ear,” remarked, with a judicial air, the lawyer of the camp. “Did you find any papers on her?”
“I didn’t find anything but this,” replied Bill, nodding at the child. “I didn’t look. I was late a’ready. There may be papers, or there mayn’t be.”
There was a pause, then Varley Howard said in his slow, languid voice:
“Let three or four of the men go and bring the woman here.”
His leadership was never disputed, and four men started to obey him, carrying for a bier the top of a table from which they had knocked off the rickety legs.
“Meanwhile,” said Dan MacGrath, “what’s to be done with the kid?”
The question, though addressed generally, was answered by Varley Howard.
“Send for one of the women,” he said.
The female sex were in a minority at Three Star; there were only three women in the camp. After a conference, conducted in eager but hushed tones, an old woman, who went by the name of Mother Melinda—though why “Mother” and why “Melinda” no one knew—was chosen and sent for.
She arrived, and at once took possession of the child, and by her gentle handling of it, and the tender smile with which she viewed it as she pressed it against her battered old heart, proved her right to the maternal title. When she had disappeared with the orphan, the saloon resumed its business; but the men drank and played in a half-hearted way and with an air of expectancy, and when the four men returned, the crowd collected round them with eager curiosity. They had taken the woman to Mother Melinda’s hut, and the spokesman of the four announced that not only were there no papers upon the body, but nothing of any kind—no mark upon the linen either of the mother or the child—by which to identify them.