She passed them both, still staring—now with curiosity—at Betty and went on along the street. Betty seized her brother’s arm.
“What a horrid little creature!” she said.
CHAPTER XI—THE STORM ABOUT TO BURST
There was a strangely paradoxical feeling in the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s mind. Nell Blossom was a subject of thought he could not escape. He could not wholly overlook her manners and speech; yet he did not feel that she was blameworthy for either.
What chance had this wild blossom of a girl ever had, out in this wilderness, the daughter of a drunken ne’er-do-well, as he had been told, taught from her childhood to sing for her own living and for her father’s in the saloons of mining camps? Why, almost any other girl would have gone bad—as bad as could be. And he knew Nell Blossom was not bad.
He really wished he might make Joe Hurley his confidant about the girl, but, harking back to that letter of Joe’s in which the latter had spoken so enthusiastically of Nell, the parson felt that his friend was too strongly prejudiced in Nell’s favor to risk his criticizing her in any way.
One question recurred again and again to him: What did that man Tolley, who he knew was the proprietor of the Grub Stake saloon and dance hall, mean by commanding Nell to return to his employment?
Betty saw her brother’s more serious mien, and it must be confessed, wickedly hoped that the situation as it opened before him here at Canyon Pass was beginning to appall him. How could it do otherwise? Let alone the crudeness and lack of conveniences in their dwelling place, the nature of the people with whom they must associate, and the utter forlornness of life here in the mining town, that last incident as they walked back from the Great Hope Mine should impress Ford with the utter impracticability of his trying to begin a pastorate here.
The awful ruffian who had sworn at the girl—horrid as she seemed to be—shocked Betty beyond expression. And what a look that Nell Blossom, she had asked her brother the singer’s name, had given her, Betty Hunt! As unfriendly, as hateful, as though the Eastern girl had done the singer some grievous wrong.
The strange girl had insulted and flouted Ford, too. Betty’s loyalty to her brother was up in arms at that, if the truth were told. She could not but admire after all Ford’s cool assumption of authority with the ruffian and with the cabaret singer as well. Why, Ford did not seem to be afraid of these people at all. Even Joe Hurley could have been no more sure of himself in such a situation than her brother had proved to be.