“I got wind of a story Dick Beckworth’s been telling—about your being already married. It’s so, isn’t it?”
Betty, her face working pitifully, nodded.
“All right. We won’t say no more about it. He’s a low dog for telling about it. I don’t want to know no more—not even who the feller is who married you. But you can bank on me, Betty, every time! I’m your friend.”
“I know you are, Joe,” she whispered, and the look she gave him paid Joe Hurley for a good deal.
But he was by no means satisfied to consider that Betty Hunt’s marriage closed the door of paradise in his face. He was just as determined to get her as ever he had been. He had learned the great thing that he had desired to know. Betty loved him. He had seen it in her look! He could wait, and be patient, and let things take their course. She could be wedded to another man as hard and fast as all the laws could make it. But Joe Hurley felt a glory in his soul that expanded from the heaven-born belief that time would change all that!
They started down into the town, the girls shod with rubber boots that Joe supplied. The people of Canyon Pass were running about like muddy ants seeking their flooded hills. Mother Tubbs and Sam were high and dry in the loft of the stamp mill. The old woman had made Sam lug up there her one good feather-bed—and it was dry. But as she said, she expected to find all her other possessions “as wet as a frog’s hind leg.”
Bill Judson lounged in the doorway of the Three Star and hailed them with some cheerfulness.
“There’s one sure thing, Parson Hunt,” he said. “What I got in cans ain’t water-soaked—much. And the cat and six kittens ain’t drowned. I expect I can keep shop with what I got left for a while. But Smithy’s lost all his clo’es that’s fit to wear, dad burn it! I can’t have him waitin’ on lady customers in a gunny-sack and a pair of ridin’ boots.”
A little group surrounded Sheriff Blaney on the street as the quartette strolled along. Joe was interested.
“Find him, Blaney?” he asked the officer.