Those strangers passing by! She saw a face in the throng but seldom as the street lights flickered upon it. And always she was fearfully expectant of seeing—What? Whom? She shuddered.
CHAPTER VII—THE FIRST TRICK
The high-springed stagecoach lurched drunkenly over the trail that wound through a valley Betty thought gnomes might have hewn out when the world was young. Barren, riven rock, gaunt, stunted trees, painted cliffs hazed by distance, all added to a prospect that fell far short in the Eastern girl’s opinion of being picturesque.
Rather, it was just what her brother had termed this Western country—raw. Betty did not like any rude thing. She shrank instinctively from anything crude and unfinished.
The three—herself, her brother, and Joe Hurley—occupied the seat on the roof of the plunging coach just behind the driver. “Lizard Dan” was an uncouth individual both in speech and appearance. He was bewhiskered, overalled, wore broken boots and an enormous slouched hat, and his hands were so grimy that Betty shuddered at them, although they so skillfully handled the reins over the backs of six frisky driving-mules.
Lizard Dan, Hurley told the Easterners, had gained his nickname when he was a pocket-hunter in a now far-distant day. He had been lost in the desert at one time and swore when he came out that he had existed by eating Crotaphytus Wislizeni roasted over a fire of dry cacti—the succulence of which saurian is much doubted by the Western white man, although it is a small brother of the South American iguana, there considered a delicacy.
However, Dan acquired a nickname and such a fear of the desert thereby that he became the one known specimen of the completely cured desert rat. He never went prospecting again, but instead drove the stage between Crescent City and Canyon Pass.
“The boys expecting us at the Pass to-day, Dan?” Joe Hurley had asked early in the journey.
“Youbetcha!”