"I'm not complaining on my own account," returned Smith, laughing;
"Clinch's suits me."
"Well, don't concern yourself on my account, Hal Smith. And you'd better keep out of the dance, too, if there are any strangers there."
"You think a State Trooper may happen in?"
"It's likely. A lot of people come and go. We don't always know them." She opened a sliding wooden shutter and looked into the bar room. After a moment she beckoned him to her side.
"There are strangers there now," she said, "— that thin, dark man who looks like a Kanuk. And those two men shaking dice. I don't know who they are. I never before saw them."
But Smith had seen them at Ghost Lake Inn. One of them was Sard.
Quintana's gang had arrived at Clinch's dump.
A moment later Clinch came through the pantry and kitchen and out onto the rear porch where Smith was washing glasses in a tub filled from an ever-flowing spring.
"I'm a-going to get supper," he said to Eve. "There'll be twenty-three plates." And to Smith: "Hal — you help Eve wait on the table. And if anybody acts up rough you slam him on the jaw — don' argue, don't wait — just slam him good, and I'll come on the hop."
"Who are the strangers, dad?" asked Eve.
"Don't nobody know 'em, girlie. But they ain't State Troopers. They talk like they was foreign. One of 'em's English — the big, bony one with yellow hair and mustache."