"Five years, Ma'am," he returned promptly. "For a boom town that didn't grow as was expected, nor yet peter out entirely, Topaz is holding her own and business ain't so bad; besides, the air is good for the missus. That's why we come in the first place."
The girl had paused at the window, gazing up the western slope.
"That is the Yellow Streak?"
"Yes'm, that's the mine. Folks thought at first that she was going to pan out another bonanza, I guess, but now she's just about profitable enough to make it worth while to keep her going. Great town, this must have been when she was first opened up."
The girl scarcely heard. She was thinking of the weary, consumptive young time-keeper who had struggled up that gray slope with daily weakening tread and of the girl who, with her baby in her arms, watched him perhaps from the door of one of those dilapidated, weather-worn shacks upon which she herself now gazed. With blurred eyes, the erstwhile Willa Murdaugh turned to her informant.
"Have there been many changes since you came?" she asked.
"Well, no," he considered. "Once in a while some hustler from the Coast lands here and runs up a concrete store, but usually he don't stay long; there ain't enough doing. The population's always shifting; there's been a whole new outfit up at the mine since we come, but everything seems to go on just the same, so you couldn't rightly call it much of a change. The moving-picture houses are about all that's marked any difference in things here, I guess."
"I wonder if there is anyone left in the town who was here fifteen years ago." Willa spoke with ill-concealed eagerness. "Who is the oldest inhabitant you know of?"
The proprietor looked his surprise.
"Well," he began at last, "there's Bill Ryder; he come in with the first rush, they tell me, and he still runs the Red Dog Cafe. Then there's Pete Haines, a half-witted old cuss—begging your pardon, Ma'am!—that's got enough dust cached somewhere to keep himself drunk perpetual; and the Widow Atkinson, and Big Olaf, and—and Klondike Kate."