“You did not tell my brother the half of it!” she cried, flaring at the mining man. “You hid the worst. You only said things in your letters that you knew would attract him here.”
Joe Hurley started back a step. If a kitten he had stooped to pet had suddenly turned and gouged him with its claws he could have been no more startled.
But Betty Hunt proved herself no kitten. She was usually a very self-contained and quite unexcited young woman. It was only for a minute that she allowed her anger to flame out.
“Now, that’s enough about that,” she pursued, still with a frown. “The thing is done. We are here. I do not believe that Ford will ever be happy in Canyon Pass; and I know I shall not.”
“Better not speak so positively, Bet,” said Hunt coolly. A brother seldom is much impressed by his sister’s little ruffles of temper. “You may have to change your opinion. My belief is that none of us can find happiness in a new environment. We must take the happiness with us to any new abode.”
Hurley was much subdued during their walk through the town. His knowledge of girls like Betty was very slight. He had never had a sister and he could not remember his mother.
Even girls like Nell Blossom had not been frequent events in the mining man’s life. His two years spent in the East had been almost as barren of feminine society as his years in the West.
Now, it must be confessed, Betty Hunt had “got him going,” to quote his own thought in the matter. Not that Hurley was of a fickle temperament. But he was not a man to eat his heart out in an utterly impossible cause.
Nell had shown him plainly that she had no use for him save as an acquaintance. He could not even count himself her friend now, for since her return from Hoskins she had seemed more remote from the men of Canyon Pass than ever before.
So, Joe Hurley had already put Nell out of his mind in that way before Betty Hunt had appeared on the scene. And, it seemed, he was fated to be attracted by a distant star. The minister’s sister was distinctly of another world—and a world far, far above that of Canyon Pass, Hurley told himself.