She laughed, in cheerful carelessness as if his worries meant but little to her.
“You see, I’ve heard so much of mines and mining, although my father seldom talks of them to me, that I know the geological formation and history of this district like a real miner. I played with nothing but miners’ children from the time I was so high, pigtails and pinafores, until I was this high, short skirts and frocks.”
She indicated the progressive stages of her growth with her riding crop, as if seeing herself in those younger years.
“Then my father sent me to an aunt, in New York, with instructions that I was to be taught something, and to be a lady. I believe I used to eat with my knife when I first went to her home.”
She leaned back and laughed until the tears welled into her eyes.
“She was a Spartan lady. She cured me of it by rapping my knuckles with the handle of a silver-plated knife. My, how it hurt! I feel it yet! I wonder that they were not enlarged by her repeated admonitions.”
Dick looked at them as she held them reminiscently before her, and had an almost irresistible desire to seize and crush the long, slender, white fingers in his own. But the end of the meeting had been commonplace, and they had parted again without treading on embarrassing ground.
Dick had heard no more from the owner of the Rattler, save indirectly, nor met him since the strained passage of the bridge; but mess-house gossip, creeping through old Bells, who recognized no superiors, and calmly clumped into the owner’s quarters whenever he felt inclined, said that the neighboring mine was prodigiously prosperous.
“I heard down in Goldpan,” he squeaked one night, “that Wells Fargo takes out five or six bars of bullion for him every mill clean-up. And you can bet none of it ever gets away from that old stiff.”