"Great gosh!" said the man who was crunching the burnt bacon. "Say, that's tough, Bixby! I don't care what he'd run away from back East; he was a man, right. Harding has been telling everybody how Smith wouldn't let the posse open fire on that gang of hold-ups last Friday night; how he chased across on the dam stagings alone and unarmed to try to serve the warrants on 'em and make 'em stop firing. It was glorious, but it wasn't war."
To this the other mining man added a hard word. "Dead," he gritted; "and only a few hours earlier the girl had taken snap judgment on him and married somebody else! That's the woman of it!"
"Oh, hold on, Stryker," the ranch broker protested. "Don't you get too fierce about that. There are two strings to that bow and the longest and sorriest one runs out to Colonel Baldwin's place on Little Creek, I'm thinking. The Richlander business was only an incident. Stanton told me that much."
As the event proved, the seller of ranch lands would have lost his bet on the funeral attendance. For some unknown reason the notice of Smith's death did not appear in the afternoon papers, and only a few people went out in autos to see the coffin lowered by Williams's workmen into a grave on the mesa behind the construction camp; a grave among others where the victims of an early industrial accident at the dam had been buried. Those who went out from town came back rather scandalized. There had been a most hard-hearted lack of the common formalities, they said; a cheap coffin, no minister, no mourners, not even the poor fellow's business associates in the company he had fought so hard to save from defeat and extinction. It was a shame!
With this report passing from lip to lip in Brewster, another bit of gossip to the effect that Starbuck and Stillings had gone East with the disappointed sheriff, "to clear Smith's memory," as the street-talk had it, called forth no little comment derogatory. As it chanced, the two mining speculators and Bixby, the ranch seller, met again in the Hophra House café at the dinner-table on the evening of the funeral day, and Stryker, the captious member of the trio, was loud in his criticisms of the High Line people.
"Yes!" he railed; "a couple of 'em will go on a junketing trip East to 'clear his memory,' after they've let their 'wops' at the dam bury him like a yellow dog! I thought better than that of Billy Starbuck, and a whole lot better of Colonel Dexter. And this Richlander woman; they say she'd known him ever since he and she were school kids together; she went down and took the train with her father just about the time they were planting the poor devil among the sagebrush roots up there on that bald mesa!"
"I'm disappointed, too," confessed the dealer in improved ranch lands. "I certainly thought that if nobody else went, the little girl from the Baldwin place would be out there to tell him good-by. But she wasn't."
Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by without incident other than the indictment by the grand jury of Crawford Stanton, Barney M'Graw, and a number of others on a charge of conspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of the grand battue in which Sheriff Harding had figured as the master of the hunt, had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery in the lately finished power-house.
Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni a wandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike in Sunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty years earlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely, the tale-bringer confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike; but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading to the old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he had seen smoke arising.