Betty had dimpled sympathetically.
"You have an awfully mean disposition, Allen," she chided him.
Meggy and Dan Higgins were working furiously at their mine, but after a few days Betty was quick to see that they were not progressing as well as some of the others. After all Meggy, though unusually strong and robust for her age, was only a girl and her father was an old man who had just about worn out his energies in a fruitless search for fortune.
Betty had besought her father to send help to these good friends of hers, and Mr. Nelson had immediately complied.
There had been some trouble with Dan at first—with Meggy too, for that matter.
"We can't take nothin' thet we can't pay fer, sir," the old fellow assured Mr. Nelson positively. But the latter reminded him that he and Meggy had saved his daughter's life, as well as those of the other girls, and that this put him, Mr. Nelson, deeply in the others' debt. In view of this the old fellow finally surrendered. In his heart he was deeply, fervently thankful for the help of the young, able-bodied man whom Mr. Nelson provided and for whose services he paid.
"But ef I strike thet thar gold vein, sir," Dan assured Mr. Nelson earnestly, "I'm goin' to make it up to you, sir, every cent of it."
"All right, we can talk about that later," Mr. Nelson said, and laughed and walked on to view his own operations, feeling that he had done a very good day's work.
One morning, as the girls mounted their horses and turned their heads in the direction of the gold diggings, they heard what seemed to be wild cheering and shouting in the distance and with one impulse they urged their horses to a gallop.
"Somebody's found something!" shouted Mollie, as the cheering and shouting became more distinct. "Oh, girls, I wonder who it is."