“There’s one thing about you, pardner, I don’t quite sabe,” drawled Bill to his employer as they sat in front of their cabin one night, after discussing the assays which Dick made his especial work. “You ain’t as talkative as you used to be. Somethin’s on your mind. It’s more’n two weeks now since I had time to think about anything but the green lead, and I’m beginnin’ to notice. Where the devil do you go every mornin’ between nine and eleven?”
Dick turned toward him impulsively, and then made no reply, other than to laugh softly. Then slowly he felt a wave of embarrassment.
“Not that it’s any of my business, bein’ as you’re you and I’m me; but we were pardners for some years before things changed and made you the boss and me the hired hand. And it 152 may be I’m undue curious. Who’s that girl you go up on the pipe line to meet every mornin’?”
His question was so abrupt that, for an instant, the younger man had a hot, childish anger; but he controlled himself, and wondered why he should have been annoyed by the frank interrogation.
“Miss Presby, the lumberman’s daughter,” he said crisply. “But what interests me most is how you knew?”
The elder miner slapped his leg gleefully, as if pleased with a joke, and said: “Well, I went up there five or six days ago, tryin’ to find you, because I’d lost the combination to the safe, and wanted to look over them old drawings. I sneaked back, because I was a little jealous to see you sittin’ on the pipe talkin’ right friendly to such a good-looker. Three evenin’s later while you were workin’ on them mill samples, I thought I’d like to see the whole of the line. I took a walk. There’s been a real good horse trail worked into the ground up there, ain’t there? And it’s a new trail, too. Seems as if somebody must have been riding up and down that way every day for just about two weeks. And it’s serious, too, because you don’t say nothin’ to a man you was pardners 153 with for more’n seven years. Hey, Dick! What ails you, anyway?”
The younger man was on his feet with one of his fists drawn back, in an attitude of extreme temper.
“Suppose after this you mind your own business?”
For a full half minute the elder man sat there in the dusk, and then said slowly: “All right, boy––I mean, Mister Townsend––I will hereafter.”
In the gloom his figure seemed suddenly bent forward more than usual, and his voice had a note of terrible hurt. It was as if all the ties of seven years of vicissitude had been arbitrarily cast off by his old partner; that they had become master and man. His words conveyed an indescribable sorrow, and loss.