“Her darter, stranger—not his, I guess. She was a scraggly little black-haired thing, more like a boy.”
Brainard smiled as his young man’s dream of a beautiful heroine, with aristocratic manners and gracious character, crumbled at the miner’s touch.
“She used to ride all over the place on her pony—she was a wild sort. Sometime after her mother died, she disappeared.”
“Where did she go?”
The old man shook his head slowly.
“Nobody could tell. One night, a month or more ago, she just rode off on the trail. I seed her going down there at a run on her pony, and she never came back. P’r’aps she was going to look for Krutzmacht. They caught the pony over by Phantom, but nothing has been heard of her since.”
“Melody—”
“Yes, that was her name, stranger!” the old miner said with a look of surprise. “Melody White! How did you come to know it?”
“I must have guessed it,” Brainard replied with a smile.
“The mine was named after her, or she after the mine; I don’t know which.”