The sudden, sharp blizzard that tore across the country blew itself out by nightfall. In the morning the sun shone brilliantly, a warm wind followed the gale, and the snow and ice melted like a September frost. It had been only a foretaste of winter.
The effect of the incidents of that day remained longer in the hearts of some of the participators in the events than it did upon the earth or the rivers, the rocks and gorges, the frosted herbage, or other physical and material matters about Canyon Pass. To be in mutual peril, to suffer alike the buffetings of the storm, had linked Betty Hunt and Nell Blossom with a chain that could not lightly be severed.
There was, too, a secret knowledge on the Eastern girl’s part that made this chain stronger than Nell imagined. The latter had no suspicion that Dick Beckworth—Dick the Devil—was a link in the chain that bound her to the parson’s sister. There was as well another thing that made the cabaret singer an object of Betty’s deeper interest. The latter had seen in her brother’s face something which had vastly surprised her and something which—had it been revealed to her before this time—would have horrified Betty as well as startled her.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was plainly and frankly more concerned in Nell Blossom than he had any right to be—unless he proposed to declare himself the singer’s suitor. It was a somewhat shocking thought for Betty—no two ways about it. She had scarcely ever considered her brother in the light of a marrying man, and never here at Canyon Pass! For it to have been suggested that Hunt would find an object of sentimental interest in this Western mining camp would have completely confounded Betty at an earlier date.
And Nell Blossom? A singer in a rough amusement place that Betty would consider herself smirched if she entered? Yet—and Betty was surprised to consider it—she was much less amazed by her brother’s seeming choice than she presumed she would be. Besides, there was a reason why Betty Hunt felt that she might not criticise her brother’s course in this affair.
When Nell Blossom had recovered from the exposure sufficiently to go home to Mother Tubbs, and that was not until late in the day following the storm, Betty had gained from her brother all he knew and much that he surmised regarding Nell’s association with the gambler who had returned to the Grub Stake at so dramatic a moment.
For his part, Hunt had not the first suspicion that Betty held any personal interest in the man, Dick Beckworth. But he knew that his sister suspected his love for Nell Blossom.
Hunt braced himself for an argument, and a serious one. Betty veered from Nell herself in a most surprising manner and seemed to feel interest only in Dick the Devil.
“He is scarcely a person in whom you would find any interest did you meet him, Betty,” declared the parson. “Believe me, as Joe says, the fellow is one of those fungi attached to society that would much better be lopped off than allowed to develop and spread their vile spawn about.”
“Oh!” gasped Betty. “You mean it would have been better had you and—and Mr. Hurley found the man’s remains where you found his horse? Oh, Ford!”