“The hussy!” I heard plainly. But Julian Jones and I were pretty well used to it by this time.
“I don’t mind saying that I was getting some interested myself—oh, not in the way Sarah never lets up letting me know she thinks. That two-pound nugget was what had me going. If Vahna’d put me wise to where it came from, I could say good-bye to railroading and hit the high places for Nebraska and Sarah.
“And then the beans were spilled . . . by accident. Come a letter from Wisconsin. My Aunt Eliza ’d died and up and left me her big farm. I let out a whoop when I read it; but I could have canned my joy, for I was jobbed out of it by the courts and lawyers afterward—not a cent to me, and I’m still paying ’m in instalments.
“But I didn’t know, then; and I prepared to pull back to God’s country. Paloma got sore, and Vahna got the weeps. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ That was her song. But I gave notice on my job, and wrote a letter to Sarah here—didn’t I, Sarah?
“That night, sitting by the fire like at a funeral, Vahna really loosened up for the first time.
“‘Don’t go,’ she says to me, with old Paloma nodding agreement with her. ‘I’ll show you where my brother got the nugget, if you don’t go.’ ‘Too late,’ said I. And I told her why.
“And told her about me waiting for you back in Nebraska,” Mrs. Jones observed in cold, passionless tones.
“Now, Sarah, why should I hurt a poor Indian girl’s feelings? Of course I didn’t.
“Well, she and Paloma talked Indian some more, and then Vahna says: ‘If you stay, I’ll show you the biggest nugget that is the father of all other nuggets.’ ‘How big?’ I asked. ‘As big as me?’ She laughed. ‘Bigger than you,’ she says, ‘much, much bigger.’ ‘They don’t grow that way,’ I said. But she said she’d seen it and Paloma backed her up. Why, to listen to them you’d have thought there was millions in that one nugget. Paloma ’d never seen it herself, but she’d heard about it. A secret of the tribe which she couldn’t share, being only half Indian herself.”
Julian Jones paused and heaved a sigh.