But she was intimate with none of them and was now too worried to seek the society of mere acquaintances. She ate her solitary meals in oppressive silence, feeling the Chinaman’s eyes fixed upon her in ironic disbelief of the story she had told him to account for Dominick’s absence. Eat as slowly as she would, her dinner could not be made to occupy more than twenty minutes, and after that there was the long evening, the interminable evening, to be passed. She was a great reader of newspapers, and when she returned from her afternoon shopping she brought a bundle of evening papers home in her hand. She would read these slowly, at first the important items, then go over them for matters of less moment, and finally scan the advertisements. But even with this occupation the evenings were of a vast, oppressive emptiness, and her worries crowded in upon her, when, the papers lying round her feet in a sea of billowing, half-folded sheets, she sat motionless, the stillness of the empty flat and the deserted street lying round her like an expression of her own blank depression.
At the end of the week she felt that she must find out something, and went to the bank. It was her intention to cash a small check and over this transaction see if the paying teller would vouchsafe any information about Dominick. She pushed the check through the opening and, as the man counted out the money, said glibly,
“Do you hear anything of my wandering husband?”
The teller pushed the little pile of silver and gold through the window toward her and leaning forward, said, with the air of one who intends to have a leisurely moment of talk,
“No, we haven’t. Isn’t it our place to come to you for that? We were wondering where he’d gone at such a season.”
Berny’s delicately-gloved fingers made sudden haste to gather up the coins.
“Oh, he’s just loafing about,” she said as easily as was consistent with the disappointment and alarm that gripped her. “He’s just wandering round from place to place. He was getting insomnia and wanted a change of scene.”
She snapped the clasp of her purse before the man could ask her further questions, nodded her good-bys, and turned from the window. Her face changed as she emerged on the wide, stone steps that led to the street. It was pinched and pale, two lines drawn between the eyebrows. She descended the steps slowly, the flood of magnificent sunshine having no warming influence upon the chill that had seized upon her. Many of the passing throng of men looked at her—a pretty woman in her modishly-made dress of tan-colored cloth and her close-fitting brown turban with a bunch of white paradise feathers at one side. Under her dotted veil her carefully made-up complexion looked naturally clear and rosy, and her eyes, accentuated by a dark line beneath them, were in attractive contrast to her reddened hair. But she was not thinking of herself or the admiration she evoked, a subject which was generally of overpowering interest. Matters of more poignant moment had crowded all else from her mind.
The next week began and advanced and still no news from Dominick. He had been gone fourteen days, when one evening in her perusal of the paper she saw his name. Her trembling hands pressed the sheet down on the table, and her eyes devoured the printed lines. It was one of the many short despatches that had come from the foot-hill mining towns on the recent storms in the Sierra. It was headed Rocky Bar and contained a description of the situation at Antelope and the snow-bound colony there. Its chief item of information was that Bill Cannon and his daughter were among the prisoners in Perley’s Hotel. A mention was made, only a line or two, of Dominick’s walk from Rocky Bar, but it was treated lightly and gave no idea of the real seriousness of that almost fatal excursion.
Berny read the two short paragraphs many times, and her spirits went up like the needle of a thermometer when the quicksilver is grasped in a warm hand. Her relief was intense, easeful and relaxing, as the sudden cessation of a pain. Not only was Dominick at last found, but he was found in a place as far removed from his own family and its influences as he was from her. And best of all he was shut up, incarcerated, with Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King. What might not come of it? Berny was not glad of the quarrel, but it seemed a wonderful piece of luck that that unpleasant episode should have sent him into the very arms of the man that she had always wanted him to cultivate and who was the best person in the world for him to impress favorably. If Bill Cannon, who had been a friend of his father’s, took a fancy to Dominick, there was no knowing what might happen. In a sudden reaction of relief and hope Berny saw them almost adopted children of the Bonanza King, flouting the Ryans in the pride of their new-found honors.