"He doesn't; that's the only hitch."
Miss Verda's smile across the little table was level-eyed.
"I could be lots of help to you, Montague, in this fight you are making, if you'd only let me," she suggested. "For example, I might tell you that Mr. Stanton has exhausted his entire stock of ingenuity in trying to make me tell him where father has gone."
"I'll fight for my own hand," was the grating rejoinder. "I can assure you, right now, that Kinzie's messenger will never reach your father—alive."
"Ooh!" shuddered the beauty, with a little lift of the rounded shoulders. "How utterly and hopelessly primitive! Let me show you a much simpler and humaner alternative. Contrive to get word to Mr. Kinzie in some way that he might send his messenger direct to me. Can you do that?"
"You mean that you'd send the clerk on a wild-goose chase?"
"If you insist on putting it in the baldest possible form," said the young woman, with a low laugh. "I have a map of the mining district, you know. Father left it with me—in case I should want to communicate with him."
Smith looked up with a smile which was a mere baring of the teeth.
"You wouldn't get in a man's way with any fine-spun theories of the ultimate right and wrong, would you? You wouldn't say that the only great man is the man who loves his fellow men, and all that?"
Again the handsome shoulders were lifted, this time in cool scorn.