“Bless you, Miss Dale,” chuckled Garry Knapp. “That dear old codger has been knocking about in rough country all his days. He’s always been a miner. Prospected pretty well all over our West. He’s made, and then bunted away, big fortunes sometimes.
“He always has a stake laid down somewhere. Never gets real poor, and never went hungry in his life—unless he chanced to run out of grub on some prospecting tour, or his gun was broken and he couldn’t shoot a jackrabbit for a stew.
“Oh, Uncle Terrence isn’t at all the sort of hampered prospector you read about in the books. He doesn’t go mooning around, expecting to ‘strike it rich’ and running the risk of leaving his bones in the desert.
“No, Uncle Terry is likely to make another fortune before he dies——”
“Oh! Then maybe you will be rich!” cried Tavia, breaking in.
“No.” Garry shook his head with a quizzical smile on his lips and in his eyes. “No. He vowed I should never see the color of his money. First, he said, he’d leave it to found a home for indignant rattlesnakes. And he’d surely have plenty of inmates, for rattlers seem always to be indignant,” he added with a chuckle.
Dorothy wanted awfully to ask him why he had quarreled with his uncle—or vice versa; but that would have been too personal upon first meeting. She liked the young man more and more; and in spite of Tavia’s loss they parted at the end of the hour in great good spirits.
“I’m going to be just as busy as I can be this afternoon,” Garry Knapp announced, as they went out. “But I shall get back to the hotel to supper. I wasn’t in last night when you ladies were down. May I eat at your table?” and his eyes squinted up again in that droll way Dorothy had come to look for.
“How do you know we ate in the hotel last evening?” demanded Tavia, promptly.
“Asked the head waiter,” replied Garry Knapp, unabashed.