He paused and looked at Essex, with his beady, dark eyes glistening with a sense of the importance of his communication. His hand sought the glass and he drained it. Then he leaned forward to deliver the climax of his story:—
“Bought her from Shackleton for a pair of horses.”
“Bought her for a pair of horses! How could he?”
“I’m not sayin’ how he could; I’m sayin’ what he did.”
“What did he do it for?”
“The Lord knows. He was that kind of a fool. We had her in the cabin sick for days, with me and him waitin’ on her hand and foot, and the cussed baby yellin’ like a coyote. She wasn’t good for anything. Just ust ter lie round sick and peaked and sorter pine. But Moreau got a crazy liking for her, and he was sot on the baby same’s if it was his own. I caught on pretty soon to the way the cat was goin’ to jump. I lit out and left ’em.”
“Why did you leave if the claim was good?”
“It weren’t no good when no one worked it, and there weren’t more’n enough in it for Moreau alone, with a woman and a baby on his hands. He said first off he was only goin’ to get her cured up and send her to the Eldorado Hotel to be a waitress, but I seen fast enough what was goin’ to happen. And it did happen. They was snowed in up there all winter. In the spring he took her into Hangtown and married her—said he was marryin’ a widow woman whose husband died on the plains. I heard that afterwards from some er the boys, but it weren’t my business to give ’em away. So I shut my mouth and ain’t opened it till now. But Moreau’s dead, and the woman’s dead, and now Shackleton’s dead. There ain’t no one what knows but me and Shackleton’s widow.”
“And what makes you think this is the same child? The baby you saw may have died and this may be a child born a year or two later.”
“It ain’t. It’s the same. There weren’t never any other children. I kep’ my eye on ’em. Moreau was mining round among the camps and afterward was in Sacramento for a spell, and I was round in them places off and on myself. I saw him, but I dodged him ’cause I knew he didn’t want to run up against me, knowin’ as how I was onter what he’d done. He was safe for me. But I seen the girl often; seen her grow up. And I knew her in a minute the day I saw you walkin’ with her on Sutter Street, and I thinks to myself, ‘You’re with the biggest heiress in San Francisco if you and she only knew it.’ And that’s what she is, if there was somethin’ else but my word to prove it.”