Ring found the way to Placer City, and Mr. Ring was energetic. He also discovered that there was no adequate job-printing plant in Placer City, and that it offered a rich field for his efforts. Mr. Ring was not one to spare effort.
“That’s one thing that maybe accounts for his sort of taming himself down lately,” observed Fosdike to his friend Circumlocutory Smith. “He sort of works off a lot of surplus steam by making a trip once or twice a week to Placer, and every time he does twelve hours grueling work climbing down one side and up the other, to say nothing of a few miles extra walking drumming up printing jobs after he gets there, it makes him less combative and reformative here at home. Now if business would get good enough over there so he’d move his whole blamed outfit across the gulch and stay there, it’d be mighty big relief to Murdock.”
“I ain’t so sure about that,” the miner objected. “I think he’s doing a heap of good for this camp and⸺”
“Oh, I forgot you was chock-full of admiration for him,” Fosdike interrupted. “Also that he’d been such an all-fired good friend and backer, and so on, of yours.”
“Just because he’s panned me a dozen times ain’t got much to do with it,” Smith insisted. “He’s explained it all to me, and I see his side of it. It’s not me personally he objects to, so much as what I represent. He can’t get it out of his head that I’m a gunman and a danger to the community, instead of being the last man on earth to go looking for trouble.”
Fosdike chuckled, threw up his hands, wagged his head and retired. If the man who had been the terror of some thousand miles of territory before he turned peaceful couldn’t be made to view his past reputation as others viewed it, it wasn’t a friend’s duty to enlighten him. Even Pearl Brown couldn’t be convinced that Smith wasn’t dangerous and had once practically requested him to keep away from the Alamo, after the cold announcement that he was welcome only without his battery.
Pearl Brown again did the unexpected when she met Smith on the street that afternoon, halted him and put out her hand.
“See here,” she said abruptly, when he stared down at her in astonishment, “I try to play a fair game. When I first came here and saw you, I thought—well—I thought you were probably the same as you were when I first knew you by sight, and of you by—by what I heard. I was mistaken. It seems you aren’t the kind of a man you used to be, or that I took you to be.”
His keen eyes, whimsical, curious, appraised her.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I like people who’ve got the stuff to come around and say so when they find out they’ve made a mistake; but⸺ Wonder if you’d mind my asking you what made you change your mind about me?”