He stood up and stretched his arms.
“What do you say we go down and hear what the trader has to say? If he’s square he’ll make good. If he ain’t––we’ll make him!”
Taking it for granted that the younger man would accompany him, he was already slipping off his working shirt and peering around the corners of the room for his clean boots. Dick hesitated and had to be urged. He wondered then if it were not possible that something beside the errand to the trader’s caused Bill’s eagerness; but wisely kept the idea to himself.
The camp was in the dusk when they entered it, the soft dusk that falls over early summer 131 evenings in the hills, when everything in nature seems drowsily awaiting the night. They thought there was an unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness. Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening spaces with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be subdued. At the trader’s there was not the usual small gathering of loungers, squatted sociably around on cracker boxes and packing cases, and the man with the twang was alone.
“Say, there’s something wrong with that stuff you sent us,” Bill began, and the trader answered with a soft, absent-minded, “So?”
Bill repeated the words of the cook; but the storekeeper continued to stare out of the door as if but half of what was said proved interesting.
“I’ll send up and bring it back to-morrow,” he replied when the miner had concluded his complaint. “The fact is it’s a job lot I bought in Portland, and I didn’t look at it. Came in yesterday. I ain’t––I ain’t exactly feelin’ right. I suppose you heard about it?”
The partners looked at him questioningly, but he did not shift his eyes from the door through which he still appeared to be staring away into the 132 distance, and it was easy to conjecture, from the expression of his eyes, that he was seeing a tragedy.
“I’m sort of busted up,” he went on, without looking at them. “You see I had a brother over there. A shift boss, he was. Him and me was more than brothers. We was friends. It don’t seem right that Hiram was down there, in the dark, when the big cave came––came just as if the whole mountain wanted to smash them men under it. It don’t seem right! I can’t quite get it all yet. I’m goin’ over there on the stage in the mornin’. He’s left a widder and a couple of little shavers. I’m goin’ to bring ’em here.”
“We don’t quite understand you,” Dick said, hesitatingly, and with sympathy in his voice. “We haven’t heard about it––whatever it is. I’m sorry if–––”