“He received some!” he cried, “but what good 18did it do him? Eells give him five hundred dollars when he demanded an accounting and he blowed it all in in one night. He was buying the drinks for every man in camp–your money was all counterfeit with him–and the next morning he woke up without a shirt to his back, having had it torn off in a fight. What kind of a man is that to be managing a mine or to be partners with a big banker like Eells? No, he walked out of camp without a cent to his name and I picked him up Tuesday over at Furnace Crick. All he had was his bed and a couple of canteens and a little jerked beef in a sack, but to hear the poor boob talk you’d think he was a millionaire–he had the world by the tail. And then, at the end of it, he’d be borrying your tobacco–or anything else you’d got. But I never would’ve thought that he’d steal Billy’s mule–that’s gitting pretty low, it strikes me.”
“He never stole my mule!” burst out Wilhelmina angrily. “I expect him back here any time. And when he does come, and you hear about his mine, I’ll bet you change your tune!”
“Ho! Ho!” shouted Rhodes, nodding and winking at Mrs. Campbell, “she’s getting to be growed-up, ain’t she? Last time I come through here she was a little girl in pigtails but now it’s done up in curls. And I can’t say a word against this no-account Wunpost till she calls me a liar to my face!”
“Billy is almost nineteen,” answered Mrs. Campbell quietly, “but I’m surprised to hear her contradict.”
19“Well, I didn’t mean that,” apologized Wilhelmina hastily, “but–well anyhow, I know he’s got a mine! Because he showed me a piece of quartz that he’d carried all the way, and he must have had a reason for that. It was just moonlight, of course, and I couldn’t see the gold, but I know that it was quartz.”
“Ah, Billy, my little girl,” returned Dusty indulgently, “you don’t know the boy like I do. And the world is full of quartz but you don’t find a mine right next to a well-worn trail. Have you got that piece of rock? Well now you see the p’int–he took it away! Would he do that if his mine was on the square?”
“Well, I don’t know why not,” answered Billy at last and then she bowed her head and turned away. They gazed after her pityingly as she ran along the ditch and up to the mouth of her tunnel, but Billy did not stop till she had threaded its murky passageway and come out at her gate of dreams. It was from there that she had seen him when he was lost in the Sink, and she knew her dream of dreams would come true. He was going to come back, he was going to bring her mule, and make her his partner in the mine. She looked out–and there was his dust!
20CHAPTER III
DUSTY RHODES EATS DIRT
Billy gazed away in ecstasy at the dust cloud in the distance, and at the white spot that was Tellurium, her mule; and when the rider came closer she skipped back through the tunnel and danced along the trail to the house. Dusty Rhodes was still there, describing in windy detail Wunpost’s encounter with one Pisen-face Lynch, but as she stood before them smiling he sensed the mischief in her eye and interrupted himself with a question.