On the sixth day Everton came across the spur. I think I should have known him anywhere, but he did not recognize me, though I stood and talked with him at the shaft mouth. His visit, as I took it, was not a spying one. On the contrary it appeared to be merely neighborly. After beating about the bush for a little time, he came down to particulars. We must surely know, he said, that we were on Lawrenceburg ground, and it was too bad we were throwing away our hard work. To this he added a vague warning. Blackwell had been taking our amateur effort as a good joke on Barrett, whom he had known only as a bank clerk. But the edge of the joke was wearing off, and the superintendent, who, as it seemed, had been watching us more closely than we had supposed, was beginning to wonder why we kept at it so faithfully; and why our camp was always guarded at night.
The following day was Sunday, and Everton came again, this time accompanied by his daughter. Gifford was windlass winder at the moment, and he let himself down into the shaft, swearing, when he saw them coming over the shoulder of the spur.
I left our carpenter-man busily covering up the lode while I scrambled out to meet and divert the visitors. My first sight of Mary Everton, grown, made me gasp. There had been no promise of her womanly winsomeness and pulse-quickening beauty in the plain-faced little girl with large brown eyes—the little girl who used to thrust her hand into mine on the way home from school and tell me about the unforgivable meanness of the boy who "cribbed" for his examinations.
Everton introduced me as "Mr. Bertrand," and for a flitting instant I saw something at the back of the brown eyes that made cold chills run up and down my spine. And her first words increased rather than diminished the burden of sudden misgiving.
"I knew a Bertrand once," she said, shaking hands frankly after the manner of the West. "It was when I was a little girl in school. Only Bertrand was his Christian name."
Without knowing that he was doing it, her father came to my rescue. "We haven't any near neighbors, Mr. Bertrand, and Polly wanted to see your mine," he said. And then: "Do you realize that it is Sunday?"
I led the glorified Polly Everton of my school days to the mouth of the shallow shaft. "Our 'mine,' as your father is polite enough to call it, isn't very extensive, as yet," I pointed out. "You can see it at a glance."
She took my word for it and gave the windlass-straddled pit only a glance. Barrett had had his nap out and was showing himself at the door of the shack. My companion nodded brightly at him and he joined us at once. "We are quite old friends, Mr. Barrett and I," she hastened to say, when I would have introduced him; and this left me free to attach myself to her father.
Phineas Everton had changed very little with the passing years. I remembered him as a sort of cut-and-dried school-man, bookworm and scientist, and, as I afterward learned, he was still all three of these. Partly because I was telling myself that it was safer for me to keep my distance from the girl who remembered the boy Bertrand, and partly because I wished to draw the assayer away from our dump, I took Everton over to the shack and we sat together on the door-step. For some little time I couldn't make out what he was driving at in his talk, but finally it came out, by inference, at least. Somebody—Blackwell, perhaps—had started the story that we were planning a raid on the Lawrenceburg.
"How could that be?" I asked, remembering that, only the day before, Everton had asserted that we were already trespassers on Lawrenceburg property.