“Hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.”
At these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward, peered ahead. As they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger.
“So that’s Rocky Bar!” she cried. “Have we really got there at last?”
The driver chuckled.
“That’s Rocky Bar all right. Now get your appetite good and ready.”
“No need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours. I was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.”
“Me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “Ah, get out! How does it come, Governor, that Bill Cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these parts than a young lady from New York?”
“She’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat, beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “I’ve brought her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa used to work round with the boys, long before she was ever thought of.”
A loud barking of dogs broke out as they approached the first detached houses of the settlement. Shapes appeared at the lighted doorways, and as the surrey drew up at the hotel balcony a crowding of heads was seen in the windows. The entire population of Rocky Bar spent its evenings at this hospitable resort, in summer on the balcony under the shade of the locust trees, in winter round the office stove, spitting and smoking in cheery sociability. But at this hour the great event of Rocky Bar’s day was over. The eight stages, the passengers of which dined at the hotel, had long passed onward on their various routes up and down the “mother lode” and into the camps of the Sierra. That the nightly excitement of the “victualing up” was to be supplemented by a late arrival in a surrey, driven by Jake McVeigh, the proprietor of the San Jacinto stables, and accompanied by a woman, was a sensational event not often awarded to Rocky Bar, even in the heyday of summer-time.
The occupants of the office crowded into the doorway and pressed themselves against the windows. They saw that the man who alighted was a thick-set, portly figure, with a short, gray beard and a suggestion of gray hair below the brim of a black wide-awake. Of the lady, shown but dimly by the light of the open door, only a slim, cloaked outline and a glint of fair hair were discernible. But, anyway, it was a woman, and of a kind unusual in Rocky Bar, and the men stared, sunk in bashful appreciation of a beauty that they felt must exist, if it were only to be in keeping with the hour, the circumstances, and their own hopeful admiration.