“No,” said Hetty, “and I have none with me now. But if a responsible man came to the bluff to-morrow night at eight o’clock, my maid could slip down with the wallet—you must not come. It would be too dangerous. My father, and one or two of the rest, are very bitter against you.”
“Well,” said Grant, smiling gravely, “a responsible man will be there. There are folks who will bless you, Hetty.”
“You must never tell them, or anybody,” the girl insisted.
Grant said nothing further, and led his team past; but Hetty noticed the shadow in his bronzed face and the wistfulness in his eyes. Then, she shook the reins, and as the horses plodded up the slope Miss Schuyler fancied that she sighed.
In the meanwhile Grant got into his sleigh, and Breckenridge, who had been vanquished by Miss Schuyler in an exchange of badinage, found him somewhat silent during the journey to Fremont ranch. He retired to rest soon after they reached it, and set out again before daylight the next morning, and it was late at night when he came back very weary, with his garments stiff with frost. The great bare room where Breckenridge awaited him was filled with a fusty heat, and as he came in, partly dazed by the change of temperature, Grant did not see the other man who sat amidst the tobacco-smoke beside the glowing stove. He sank into a hide chair limply, and when Breckenridge glanced at him inquiringly, with numbed fingers dragged a wallet out of his pocket.
“Yes,” he said, “I got the dollars. I don’t know that it was quite the square thing, but with Harper’s wife and the Dutchman’s children ’most starving in the hollow, I felt I had to take them.”
Breckenridge made a little warning gesture, and the man behind the stove, reaching forward, picked up a packet that had dropped unnoticed by the rest when Grant took out the wallet.
“You seem kind of played out, Larry, and I guess you didn’t know you dropped the thing,” he said.
Grant blinked at him; for a man who has driven for many hours in the cold of the Northwest is apt to suffer from unpleasant and somewhat bewildering sensations when his numbed brain and body first throw off the effect of the frost.
“No,” he said unevenly. “Let me alone a minute. I didn’t see you.”