The little boy nodded his head solemnly, too much awed by his strange surroundings to speak.
“Well, if that don’t beat anything I ever heard of!” exclaimed Ma’am Hickey. “If I’d been your ma you wouldn’t’ve done it!”
The little girl kept looking into the faces of the men who crowded about them, and said:
“I don’t see my papa anywhere. He said that he would be here when the stage got here with us; but I don’t see him at all.”
“What is your papa’s name, deary?”
“Richard Miller.”
The men looked at each other blankly. Some of them opened and closed their mouths without uttering a sound. Big “Missouri Dan” uttered an exclamation under his breath. Ma’am Hickey held up one finger warningly. Then she stooped and kissed the little girl on the brow, and said gently:
“You come right into the house with me, little folks. I’ll get you a real nice hot supper, an’ then I think you’d best go right to bed after your long ride.”
When the cabin door had closed behind them, Big Dan said to the miners around him:
“Well, if this ain’t what I call a state of affairs! To think of them poor little tots trailin’ ’way out here from back in Ioway only to find their daddy a day in his grave! Cur’us how things turns out!”