She laughed and ran away.
“What have you got for me now?” the Inger called after her.
“This!” she said, and threw a kiss somewhere in the air.
There followed days of anxiety when the men at the mine doubted, and the appraisers hung fire, and pretended to less than they knew. In the midst of it, the Inger had ridden away to the desert and camped for three days, and had returned to find them cursing him out and making an estimate of millions. Riding in after dark to send the message to his father, still grub-staking to the north, the Inger for the second time had seen Lory Moor. She was in the crowd which he was breasting, outside a motion picture house. She was in tawdry pink, with a flame of rose in her hat, and she was with Bunchy. His hands were upon her and he was saying something in her ear from one corner of his mouth. She was not listening, the Inger thought as he passed her. She did not see him, and for this he felt vaguely thankful—as if he had come on her in some shame. A day or two after this Jem had told him that she was to marry Bunchy.
To marry Bunchy, the Inger thought as he lounged in the street outside the Inn on her wedding night, was the worst that could come to her. He drifted into a saloon across the way, one of the meaner places, and on this night of plenty almost unfrequented. He sat down at a table in range with the doors of the Inn, and drank reflectively. That day that he had had her, what if he had galloped away with her to the foothills, to the camp, to the other side of somewhere? He sat thinking of her, wondering why he had not dared it, playing at what might have been.
On the table lay a San Francisco newspaper, three days old. As he drank he glanced at the headlines. “War May Last Another Year,” he read. “Reserves of Three Nations to be Called Out Within the Month.”
The thought had come to him before, since the money came. To-night he turned to it in a kind of relief: Why not go there? There was fighting worth a man’s hand. Drunken Indians, an outlaw or two, a horse thief strung up in a wink and all over—these were all that he knew of warfare. Was he to die with no more understanding than this of how a man might live and die? The thing was happening now—the adventure of the great guns and the many deaths. Yet he, a man like other men, sat here idle. He closed his eyes and lay with those men in the trenches, or leapt up to kill again and again at fifty yards, saw the men roll in torture, saw them red and grovelling in red.... A lust of the thing came on him. He wanted it, as he wanted no other thing that his mind had ever played with. He forgot Jem Moor’s daughter in that imaginary desert. He swallowed and tasted and opened his eyes as on a forgotten world. He pounded the table for more liquor.
“Why don’t you go to the war, you scared, snivelling Pale-liver?” he demanded of the shuffling bartender.
The small man’s little red-rimmed and red-shot eyes lighted, and his lips drew back over black teeth.
“If I was a young dog like you, I’d be there stickin’ in the lead, you bet,” he said. “What you ’fraid of?”