“How hard it is to judge people!” She sighed deeply. To discover that we have been deceived in a friend is always a shock.
“I cannot doubt Johnny’s word,” she assured herself. “And yet—”
She could form no real answer to the questions that came unbidden to her mind.
“I will watch,” she told herself, “watch and wait. ‘Be sure your sin will find you out.’ I read that somewhere and I believe it is true. If there is a thief in our camp he will steal again, perhaps many times. In the end, his sin will find him out.”
With these matters settled in her mind, she whistled sharply to her dogs and sent them spinning away with redoubled speed toward the three rude cabins that were a prospector’s camp and her present home.
Arrived there, she unharnessed her dogs and chained them to their places before their kennels; then she went in to prepare supper.
She was not the only cook in this outfit. They all took a hand. Supper fell to her lot. Since the days were still short everyone worked till dark, searching rocky ridges and river banks for elusive signs of wealth and then walking home over long miles after dark.
She was engaged in the mixing of baking powder biscuits when there came a sound of sudden commotion outside. Flinging open the door, she all but ran into Jim Baley, one of the three young prospectors in her outfit, who was just home from work. Jim, however, was not the cause of the commotion. The sounds of trouble came from the kennels. Dogs were howling and snarling. Mingled with this was a sinister snap-snap of jaws.
“Wolves! Timber wolves!” Jim exclaimed, seizing an axe. “Big as men, they are. Savage brutes. They’ll kill the dogs and eat ’em, like they was rats.”
He was about to leap away to the battle when the girl held him back.