“Where do you live?”
“Cabin up the mountain a little ways.”
“Cabin up the mountain a little ways,” echoed Johnson, reflectively. The next instant the little figure before him had faded from his sight and instead there appeared a vision of the little hut on the top of Cloudy Mountain. Only a few hours back he had stood on the precipice which looked towards it, and had felt a vague, indefinable something, had heard a voice speak to him out of the vastness which he now believed to have been her spirit calling to him.
“You’re worth something better than this,” after a while he murmured with the tenderness of real love in his voice.
“What’s better’n this?” questioned the Girl with a toss of her pretty blonde head. “I ain’t a-boastin’ but if keepin’ this saloon don’t give me sort of a position ’round here I dunno what does.”
But the next moment there had flashed through her mind a new thought concerning him. She came out from behind the bar and confronted him with the question:
“Look ’ere, you ain’t one o’ them exhorters from the Missionaries’ Camp, are you?”
The road agent smiled.
“My profession has its faults,” he acknowledged, “but I am not an exhorter.”
But still the Girl was nonplussed, and eyed him steadily for a moment or two.