“Wait a minute! Yes—there she is!—Hello! By God, boys, there’s two of them!”
“Two!”
“Go on, you’re stringing us!”
“The other must be a breed.”
“No, sir, she’s got a white woman’s hat on, a stylish hat. And now I can see her white face!”
“John, for the lova Mike let me look!”
But the trader held him off obdurately. “I believe she’s young. She’s a little woman beside the other. I believe she’s good-looking! All the men are crowding around her.”
Stonor’s heart set up an unaccountable beating. “Ah, it’ll be the wife of one of the surveyors,” he said, with the instinct of guarding against a disappointment.
“No, sir! If her husband was aboard the other men wouldn’t be crowding around like that.”
“No single woman under forty would dare venture up here. She’d be mobbed.”