“His horses?”
“Yep. Hain’t you heerd? One-thumb Jake is manager of the plug department. Nigh on fifty two-year-olds ’ll be sold this fall at two hundred dollars an’ more a throw. I suspicioned Derry was goin’ crazy when he bought up so many mares; but I allow he has the bulge on me now. An’ Jake! Dang me if he didn’t show up at a dance t’other evenin’ with a silver fringe on his chaps!”
Willard turned reluctantly into the darkened room, and, by some mischance, when his eyes had recovered from the external glare, the first object they dwelt on was a framed pencil sketch of the Dolores homestead as he had last seen it—a dreary, ramshackle place, arid and poverty-stricken. In the corner was written, “Nancy,” and a date.
“The ways of fortune are mysterious,” he said, making shift to utter the words calmly. “I endured ten long years of financial loss in the house which my daughter has shown there. She used to know Mr. Power, and gave the drawing to him, I suppose.”
“Derry thinks a heap of that picter,” commented MacGonigal.
“I wonder why?”
“He never tole me.”
Willard laughed disagreeably. He had not forgotten Mac’s peculiarities, one of which used to be blank ignorance concerning any subject on which he did not wish to be drawn.
“By the way,” he said, “why did you give the new mine such a queer name—El Preço—I guess you know it means, ‘The Price’? Why was it called that?”
“It was jest a notion of Derry’s.”