"If he'd been my brother I should, just as you have, girl."
"That's it, Bulldog, you're doing all this, standing there holding up a mob of angry men, because he's my brother."
"You called the turn, Jeanette."
"And all I can do, all I can say is, thank you. Is that all?"
"That's all, girl. It's more than enough."
He put a strong hand on her arm, almost shook her, saying with an earnestness that the playful tone hardly masked:
"When you've got a true friend let him do all the friending—then you'll hold him; the minute you try to rearrange his life you start backing the losing card. Now, good-bye, girl; I've got work to do. I'll bring in that wolf of the trail; I've got him marked down in a cave—I'll get him. You tell that pin-headed brother of yours to stand pat. And if Kootenay starts any deviltry go straight to Graham. Good-bye."
Cool fingers touched the girl on the forehead; then she stood alone watching the figure slipping down the gloomed passage of the drift, lighted candle in hand.
Carney led his buckskin from the mine tunnel, climbed the hillside to a back trail, and mounting, rode silently at a walk till the yellow blobs of light that was Bucking Horse lay behind him. Then at a little hunch of his heels the horse broke into a shuffling trot.
It was near midnight when he camped; both he and the buckskin had eaten robustly back at the Gold Nugget Hotel, and Carney, making the horse lie down by tapping him gently on the shins with his quirt, rolled himself in his blanket and slept close beside the buckskin—they were like two men in a huge bed.