In the morning the preacher rolled up his sleeves and assisted Jim in preparing breakfast in the cabin on the hill, where he and Doc, in addition to Keno and the miner, had spent the night. Doc had departed at an early hour to take his morning meal at home. Keno was out in the brush securing additional fuel, the supply of which was low.
"Jim," said Stowe, in the easy way so quickly adopted in the mines, "how does the camp happen to have this one little child? There seem to be no families, and that I can understand, for Bullionville is much the same; but where did you get the pretty little boy?"
"I found him out in the brush, way over to Coyote Valley," Jim replied. "He was painted up to look like a little Piute, and the Injuns must have lost him when they went through the valley hunting rabbits."
"Found him—out in the brush?" repeated the preacher. "Was he all alone?"
"Not quite. He had several dead rabbits for company," Jim drawled in reply, and he told all that was known, and all that the camp had conjectured, concerning the finding of the grave little chap, and his brief and none too happy sojourn in Borealis.
The preacher listened with sympathetic attention.
"Poor little fellow," he said, at the end. "It someway makes me think of a thing that occurred near Bullionville. I was called to Giant-Powder Gulch to give a man a decent burial. He had been on a three-days' spree, and then had lain all night in the wet where the horse-trough overflowed, and he died of quick pneumonia. Well, a man there told me the fellow was a stranger to the Gulch. He said the dissolute creature had appeared, on the first occasion, with a very small child, a little boy, who he said had belonged to his sister, who was dead. My informant said that just as soon as the fellow could learn the location of a near-by Indian camp he had carried the little boy away. The man who told me of it never heard of the child again, and, in fact, had not been aware of the drunkard's return to the Gulch, till he heard the man had died, in the rear of a highly notorious saloon. I wonder if it's possible this quiet little chap is the same little boy."
"It don't seem possible a livin' man—a white man—could have done a thing like that," said Jim.
"No—it doesn't," Stowe agreed.
"And yet, it must have been in some such way little Skeezucks came to be among the Injuns," Jim reflected, aloud. Then in a moment he added; "I'm glad you told me, parson. I know now the low-down brute that sent him off with the Piute hunters can't never come to Borealis and take him away."