“Are you going ashore to the show to-night?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Vane lazily. “It’s a long while since I’ve struck another entertainment of any kind, and that yellow-haired mite’s dancing is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen.”
“You’ve been twice already,” Carroll pointed out. “The girl with the blue eyes sings her first song rather well.”
“I think so,” Vane agreed with a significant absence of embarrassment. “In this case a good deal depends upon the singing—the interpretation, don’t they call it? The thing’s on the border, and I’ve struck places where they’d have made it gross; but the girl only brought out the mischief. Strikes me she didn’t see there was anything else in it.”
“That’s curious, considering the crowd she goes about with,” Carroll suggested. “Aren’t you cultivating a critical faculty?”
Vane disregarded the ironical question. “She’s Irish; that accounts for a good deal.” He paused and looked thoughtful. “If I knew how to do it, I’d like to give the child who dances five dollars. It must be a tough life, and her mother—the woman at the piano—looks ill. I wonder why they came to a place like this?”
“Struck a cold streak at Nanaimo, the storekeeper told me,” Carroll replied. “Anyway, since we’re to start at sun-up, I’m staying here.” Then he smiled. “Has it struck you that your attendance in the front seats is liable to misconception?”
His companion rose without answering and dropped into the canoe. Thrusting her off, he drove the craft towards the wharf with vigorous strokes, and Carroll shook his head whimsically as he watched him.
“Anybody except myself would conclude that he was waking up at last,” he said.
A minute or two later, Vane swung himself up on to the wharf and strode into the wooden settlement. There were one or two hydraulic mines and a pulp mill in the vicinity, and though the place was by no means populous, a company of third-rate entertainers had arrived some days earlier. On reaching the rude wooden building in which they had given their performance and finding it closed, he accosted a lounger.