CHAPTER VII
THE WOMAN UNAFRAID
They were to have another opportunity to puzzle over the character of The Lily before a week passed, when, wishing to make out a new bill of supplies, they went down to the camp. The night was fragrant with the spring of the mountains, summer elsewhere––down in the levels where other occupations than mining held rule. The camp had the same dead level of squalor in appearance, the same twisting, wriggling, reckless life in its streets.
“Fine new lot of stuff in,” the trader said, pushing his goods in a brisk way. “Never been a finer lot of stuff brought into any camp than I’ve got here now. Canned tomatoes, canned corn, canned beans, canned meat, canned tripe, canned salmon. That’s a pretty big layout, eh? And I reckon there never was no better dried prunes and dried apricots ever thrown across a mule’s back than I got. Why, they taste as if you 115 was eatin’ ’em right off the bushes! And Mexican beans! Hey, look at these! Talk about beans and sowbelly, how would these do?”
He plunged his grimy hand into a sack, and lifted a handful of beans aloft to let them sift through his fingers, clattering, on those below. The partners agreed that he had everything in the world that any one could crave in the way of delicacies, and gave him their orders; then, that hour’s task completed, sauntered out into the street.
Dick started toward the trail leading homeward, but Bill checked him, with a slow: “Hold on a minute.”
The younger man turned back, and waited for him to speak.
“I’d kind of like to go down to the High Light for a while,” the big man said awkwardly. “We ought to go round there and see Mrs. Meredith, and patronize her as far as a few soda pops, and such go, hadn’t we? Seein’ as how she’s been right good to us.”
Dick, nothing loath to a visit to The Lily, assented, although the High Light, with its camp garishness, was an old and familiar sight to any one who had passed seven years in outlying mining regions.