Captain Sefton, a thin, hawk-eyed man with a coppery Vandyke beard, shrugged his shoulders distastefully but passed her, drawing near Dave Drennen. The girl turned toward the second of her companions, a younger man by half a dozen years, who brought the stamp of the cities in his fashionable clothes, the relentless marks of a city's dissipation about his small mouth and light eyes and, in air and features, a suggestion of the French.
"Marc," she said, drawing at her gauntlets, her back upon Sefton and Drennen, "if you can arrange for a room for me I shall go to it immediately."
Marc obeyed her as Captain Sefton had done, turning to Marquette with an inquiry. Drennen's eyes were only for a fleeting moment upon Sefton whose quick fingers were busy at the wound. Then they returned to the table at which he had diced. Frank Marquette, seeing the look, poured the gold all into the canvas bag and brought it to him.
The eyes of one man alone did not waver once while the girl was in the room, black eyes as tender as a woman's, eloquent now with admiration, their glance like a caress. Ramon Garcia spoke softly, under his breath. Ernestine Dumont looked down at him curiously. She had nor understood the words for they were Spanish. They had meant,
"Now am I resigned to my exile!"
CHAPTER VI
THE PROMISE OF A RAINBOW
For a week Dave Drennen lay upon the bunk in the one room dugout which had been home for him during the winter. Stubborn and sullen and silent at first, snarling his anger as sufficient strength came back into him, he refused the aid which the Settlement, now keenly solicitous, offered. He knew why the men who had not spoken to him two weeks ago sought to befriend him now. He knew that the swift change of attitude was due to nothing in the world but to a fear that he might die without disclosing his golden secret.
"And I am of half a mind to die," he told the last man to trouble him; "just to shame Kootanie George, to hang Ernestine Dumont and to drive a hundred gold seekers mad."