“Perhaps I did at first. But now I’m glad you came.”
She smiled indulgently at him as though he were a sick child.
“I should think you wouldn’t have wanted me. You must be so tired of people coming in and out. Those days when you were so bad the doctor had the greatest difficulty in keeping men out who didn’t know you and had never seen you. Everybody in the hotel wanted to crowd in.”
“What did they want to do that for?”
“To see you. We were the sensation of Antelope first. But then you came and put us completely in the shade. Antelope hasn’t had such an excitement as your appearance since the death of Jim Granger, whose picture is down stairs in the parlor and who comes from here.”
“I don’t see why I should be an excitement. When I was up here fishing last summer nobody was in the least excited.”
“It was the way you came—half-dead out of the night as if the sea had thrown you up. Then everybody wanted to know why you did it, why you, a Californian, attempted such a dangerous thing.”
“There wasn’t anything so desperately dangerous about it,” he said, almost in a tone of sulky protest.
“The men down stairs seemed to think so. They say nobody could have got up here in such a storm.”
“Oh, rubbish! Besides, it wasn’t storming when I left Rocky Bar. It was gray and threatening, but there wasn’t a flake falling. The first snow came down when I was passing the Silver Crescent. It came very fast after that.”