With a smile on his bronzed face, Gordon stood looking at him. Gordon was dressed in soil-stained garments of old blue duck, with a patch cut from a cotton flour-bag on one of them. Laura Waynefleet stood a little nearer, and there was also a welcome in her eyes. Nasmyth noticed how curiously at home she seemed amidst that tremendous colonnade of towering trunks. He shook hands with her, but it was Gordon who spoke first.
“You have come back to us. We have been expecting 220 you,” he said. “After all, store clothes and three well-laid meals a day are apt to pall on one.”
Nasmyth turned to Laura. “I should like to point out that this is the man who urged me to go,” he said. “One can’t count on him.”
“Oh, yes,” admitted Gordon, “I certainly did urge you, but I guess I knew what the result would be. It was the surest way of quieting you. Anyway, you don’t seem sorry to be back again?”
Nasmyth glanced at Laura.
“No,” he said; “in some respects I’m very glad.”
He became suddenly self-conscious as he saw Gordon’s significant smile. It suggested that he had, perhaps, made too great an admission, and he wondered for the first time, with a certain uneasiness, whether Gordon had mentioned Miss Hamilton to Laura, and, if that was the case, what Miss Waynefleet thought about the subject.
Laura talked to him in her old friendly fashion as they walked on towards the settlement, until Gordon broke in.
“I’ve called the boys together, as you suggested, and fixed up the meeting for to-night,” he said. “They’ll be ready to give you a hearing, after supper, in the hotel.”
Laura left them on the outskirts of the settlement, and Gordon, stopping a moment, looked hard at Nasmyth.