Winton flushed under the bronze.
“I suppose I don't need to ask which one.”
Adams' grin was a measure of his complacence.
“Well, hardly.”
“She took it away with her?”
“Took it, or tore it up, I forget which.”
“Tell me, Morty, was she very angry?”
The other took the last hint of laughter out of his eyes before he said solemnly: “You'll never know how thankful I was that you were twenty miles away.”
Winton's cup was full, and he turned the talk abruptly to the industrial doings and accomplishments of the day. Adams made a verbal report which led him by successive steps up to the twilight hour when he had stood with Branagan on the brink of the placer drain, but, strangely enough, there was no stirring of memory to recall the incident of the upward-climbing miners.
When Winton rose he said something about mounting a night guard on the engine, which was kept under steam at all hours; and shortly afterward he left the dinkey ostensibly to do it, declining Adams' offer of company. But once out-of-doors he climbed straight to the operator's tent on the snow-covered slope. Carter had turned in, but he sat up in his bunk at the noise of the intrusion.