“I wish June would care for Rion Gracey. But if you’d hear her talk!”—with hopeless recollection of June’s sentimental transports. “It sounds as if she didn’t know there was a man in the world but that miserable Barclay. She’s just bewitched. What’s the matter with women that they’re always falling in love with the wrong man?”
There was another pause.
“I’ll do my best,” said the Colonel at length, “to keep Rion from coming down and trying his luck. He mustn’t see her now. She’d refuse him in such a way that he’d never dare to come near her again. And you, Rosie, try and cheer her up and keep her from thinking of Barclay.”
On Monday morning the Colonel left for San Francisco, and a few days later was again en route for Virginia City.
The rest of the summer slowly passed, idle and eventless. June brightened a little with the passage of the weeks, but was far from her old self. Now and then she saw Barclay at the station, in the house of friends, or met him in the village. At first he merely bowed and passed on. But before the summer was over he had spoken to her; in the beginning with the short and colorless politeness of early acquaintanceship, but later with something of his natural bonhomie.
Once at an afternoon garden fête she suddenly came out on a balcony and found him there alone. For a moment they stood dumb, eye full on eye, then began speaking of indifferent things, their hearts beating hard, their faces pale. It was the first conversation of any length they had had since the meeting in the wood. They parted, feeling for the moment poignantly disturbed and yet eased of the ache of separation. From that on they spoke at greater length, talking with an assumption of naturalness, till finally their fragmentary intercourse assumed a tone of simple friendliness, from which all sentiment was banished. This surface calm was all that each saw of the other’s heart, but each knew what the calm concealed.
In October the Allens returned to town. The Colonel had managed to keep Rion Gracey from going to San Francisco “to try his luck” until this late date. It would have been impossible had not Fate been with him. In the growing excitement of the reawakened mining town Rion was continuously occupied, and he was a man to whom work was a paramount duty.
But in October he slipped his leash for a week and ran down to San Francisco. In four days he returned, as quiet as ever, and inclined to be harder with his men. The Colonel knew what had happened, and Black Dan guessed. Outside these two, no one understood why Rion Gracey had become a more silent and less lenient man after a four days’ visit to the coast.
CHAPTER VII
BUSINESS AND SENTIMENT
The winter of ’71-’72 was a feverish one for San Francisco. The rising excitement in Virginia ran like a tidal wave over the mountains to the city by the sea and there broke in a seething whirl. There was no stock market in the Nevada camp. Pine Street was the scene of the operations of capitalist and speculator—the arena where bull and bear met.