“It’s the natural ambition of creation,” she declared in confidence to the dried peach-pie she was slipping from the oven. “Of course, being as I’m a widow myself, I can’t just make that statement to men folks promiscuous like. But it’s true, and every man ought to know it’s true, and why Dan Overton—”
She paused in the midst of her soliloquy, and dropped into the nearest chair, while a light of comprehension illuminated her broad face.
“To think it never came in my mind before,” she ejaculated. “That’s it! Poor boy! he’s had a girl somewhere and she’s died, I suppose, or married some other fellow; and that’s why he’s a bachelor at nearly thirty, I guess,” she added, thoughtfully. “She must have died, 85 and that’s why he never looks as gay or goes on larks with the other boys. He just goes on a lone trail mostly, Dan does. Even his own stepfather don’t seem to have much knowledge about him. Well, well! I always did feel that he had some sort of trouble lookin’ out of them dark eyes of his, and his words to-day makes it plain to me all at once. Well, well!”
The pensive expression of her face, as it rested on her fat hand, was evidence that Lorena Jane Huzzard had, after all, found a romance in real life suited to her fancy, and the unconscious hero was Dan Overton. Poor Dan!
The grieving hero to whom her thoughts went out was at that moment walking in a most prosaic, lazy fashion down the main thoroughfare of the settlement. The road led down to the Ferry from seemingly nowhere in particular, for from the Ferry on both sides of the river the road dwindled into mere trails that slipped away into the wildernesses—trails traveled by few of the white race until a few short years ago, and then only by the most daring of hunters, or the most persevering of the gold-seekers.
In the paths where gold is found the dwellings of man soon follow, and the quickly erected shanties and more pretentious buildings of Sinna Ferry had grown there as evidence that the precious metals in that region were no longer visionary things of the enthusiasts, but veritable facts. The men who came to it along the water, or over the inland trails, were all in some way connected with the opening up of the new mining fields.
Overton himself had drifted up there as an independent prospector, two years before. Then, when works were got under way all along that river and lake region, 86 when a reliable man was needed by the transfer company to get specie to their men for pay-days, it was Overton to whom was given the responsibility.
Various responsible duties he had little by little shouldered, until, as Lyster said, he seemed a necessity to a large area, yet he had not quite abandoned the dreams with which he had entered those cool Northern lands. Some day, when the country was more settled and transportation easier, it was his intention to slip again up into the mountains, along some little streams he knew, and work out there in quietness his theories as to where the gold was to be found.
Meantime, he was contented enough with his lot. No vaulting ambition touched him. He was merely a ranger of the Kootenai country, and was as welcome in the scattered lodges of the Indians as he was in the camps of the miners. He even wore clothes of Indian make, perhaps for the novelty of them, or perhaps because the buckskin was better suited than cloth to the wild trails over which he rode. And if, at times, he drifted into talk of existence beyond the frontier, and gave one an idea that he had drunk of worldly life deep enough to be tired of it, those times were rare; even Lyster had but once known him to make reference to it—that one evening after their ride along the falls of the Kootenai.
But however tired he might at some time have grown of the life of cities, he was not at all too blasé to accommodate himself to Sinna Ferry. If poor Mrs. Huzzard had seen the very hearty drink of whisky with which he refreshed himself after his talk with her, she would not have been so apt to think of him with such pensive sympathy. 87