“Well, mebbe you might, but it don’t seem to me that you’re seein’ much of it to-night.”
He heard her smothered laugh, shot his glance back to see her face, and laughed himself, turning to his horses, and then turning back to her.
“You’re a lively girl, ain’t you?” he said.
“I don’t feel very lively just at this minute. I’m a cold girl, the coldest in California, I think.”
That made him laugh, too, but he turned back to his horses, saying with quick consideration:
“I guess you are. Come boys,” to the horses, “we’ve got to get a move on. We can’t let this young lady catch cold.”
The horses quickened their pace and there was no more talk. An hour later the first broken lights of Antelope sparkled along the road. The old mining camp, in a hollow between two buttresses of the Sierra, lay shuttered and dreaming under the starlight. A lamp-lit window, here and there, showed the course of its straggling main street, and where the hotel stood, welcoming rays winked between the boughs of leafless trees.
As the thud of the approaching hoof-beats woke the echoes a sudden violent barking of dogs broke out. Antelope was evidently not as sound asleep as it looked. At the hotel, especially, there was life and movement. The bar disgorged a throng of men, and Perley, the proprietor, had to push his way through them to welcome his midnight guests. Antelope, though remote, was in telegraphic communication with the world, and the operator at Rocky Bar had wired Perley to be ready for the distinguished arrivals,—news that in a half-hour was known throughout the town and had brought most of the unattached male population into the hotel.
Jake McVeigh was pulling the luggage from under the seats and Cannon was interchanging the first greetings with his landlord, when the girl, who had gone to the balcony railing and was looking out into the darkness, cried:
“Why, papa, snow!”