"How's he like it?" asked Mormon.
Sam grinned at him.
"You bald-headed ol' badger, you, he acted plumb like yore wives must have, when I salutes him on the snoot. Licks my nose first an' then curls up his tongue an' licks off his own. Wipes out all trace of the oskylation pronto an' thorough. Most unappreciative animile I ever see."
"I'll tell you straight out that none of my wives ever acted thataway," started Mormon, and the laugh swung at his expense.
"I didn't mind the operation so much," Sam confided to them, "when I figger out that I was just handin' it on fo' Molly, an' that she owes me one, whether she decides to salute you two galoots or not."
Molly's letters were prime events at the Three Star. She wrote every week telling of life at the Keiths'. Miranda made up the quartet to read them. Molly wrote:
It is full of excitement, this life at the Keiths', and they are just lovely to me. There is a lot of company always at the house and every one seems to be enjoying himself, but somehow it strikes me as not quite real. I want to be back where nobody pretends.
I go automobiling a good deal, with Mrs. Keith and once in a while with Donald, but I'd give anything, sometimes, for a good gallop through the redtop and sage and rabbit-brush on my pony. I can go riding here, but it is in the Park and you should see the saddle! Imagine a real saddle with the cantle taken away, the horn gone, the pommel trimmed down to almost nothing, no skirts to it, just pared to the core. And the poor horse bob-tailed and roach-maned, taught to go along with its knees high, like a trained horse in a circus. High-school gaited, they call it.
There was more talk of dinners and dances, of receptions and theaters, with mention of Donald Keith here and there, chat of new clothes, kind words for the elder Keiths. "Don't think I've changed," she said. "I'm the same Molly underneath even if I have been revamped and decorated."
The famous White Gold prospectuses and advertisements duly followed the news stories. Three Star saw no copies of the last, nor, it seemed, did Molly. Neither did prospectuses or advertisements come their way, for that matter. Casey Town boomed with some bona-fide strikes that sent Keith's stocks soaring high. The porphyry dyke at the Molly Mine began to yield rich results almost from the first and dividends were paid in such quantities as to stagger the Three Star outfit who saw themselves in a fair way to become rich. All over the barren hills, where the first futile shafts had been driven and abandoned, buildings sprang up like mushrooms, housing machinery, sending up plumes of white smoke that tokened the underground energies. The Keith properties were being developed with much show of outlay, prices jumping at every report from the Molly Mine or other successful developments. None of the investors in these Keith undertakings knew that he owned forty-nine per cent of the shares of the Molly and of none other, save for the space between issuing them and selling them.