Zephyr noted with approval.

"Rising barometer, with freshening winds, growing brisk, clearing weather."

Madame looked up at Zephyr's almost inaudible words.

"How?" she ventured, timidly.

"That's a fair question," Zephyr remarked, composedly. "The fact is, I get used to talking to myself and answering a fool according to his folly. It's hard sledding to keep up. You see, a fellow that gets into his store clothes only once a year or so don't know where to hang his thumbs."

Madame looked somewhat puzzled, began a stammering reply, then, dropping her useless efforts, came to her point at once.

"It's about elise."

Zephyr answered as directly as Madame had spoken.

"Is elise in trouble?"

"Yes. I don't know what to do." Madame paused and looked expectantly at Zephyr.

"Pierre wants her to marry that Morrison?"

Madame gave a sigh of relief. There was no surprise in her face.

"Pierre says she shall not go to school and learn to despise him and me.

He says she will learn to be ashamed of us before her grand friends. Do you think she will ever be ashamed of me?" There was a yearning look in the uncomplaining eyes.

Zephyr looked meditatively at the fire, pursed his lips, and, deliberately thrusting his hand into the bosom of his shirt, drew forth his harmonica. He softly blew forth a few bars of a plaintive melody, then, taking the instrument from his lips, began to speak, without raising his eyes.

"If my memory serves me right, I used to know a little girl on a big ranch who had a large following of beasts and birds that had got into various kinds of trouble, owing to their limitations as such. I also remember that that same little girl on several appropriate occasions banged h.e.l.l--if you will excuse a bad word for the sake of good emphasis--out of two-legged beasts for abusing their superior kind. Who would fly at the devil to protect a broken-winged gosling. Who would coax rainbows out of alkali water and sweet-scented flowers out of hot sand. My more recent memory seems to put it up to me that this same little girl, with more years on her head and a growing heart under her ribs, has sat up many nights with sick infants, and fought death from said infants to the great joy of their owners. From which I infer, if by any chance said little girl should be lifted up into heaven and seated at the right hand of G.o.d, much trouble would descend upon the Holy Family if Madame should want to be near her little elise, and any of the said Holies should try to stand her off."

Madame did not fully understand, but what did it matter? Zephyr was on her side. Of that she was satisfied. She vaguely gleaned from his words that, in his opinion, elise would always love her and would never desert her. She hugged this comforting thought close to her cramped soul.

"But," she began, hesitatingly, "Pierre said that she should not go to school, that she should marry right away."

"Pierre is a very hard sh.e.l.l with a very small kernel," remarked Zephyr.

"Which means that Pierre is going to do what he thinks is well for elise. elise has got a pretty big hold on Pierre."

"But he promised her father that he would give back elise to her friends, and now he says he won't."

"Have you told elise that Pierre is not her father?"

"No; I dare not."

"That's all right. Let me try to think out loud a little. The father and mother of elise ran away to marry. That is why her friends know nothing of her. Her mother died before elise was six months old, and her father before she was a yearling. Pierre promised to get elise back to her father's family. It wasn't just easy at that time to break through the mountains and Injuns to Denver. You and Pierre waited for better times.

When better times came you both had grown very fond of elise. A year or so would make no difference to those who did not know. Now elise is sixteen. Pierre realizes that he must make a choice between now and never. He's got a very soft spot in his heart for elise. It's the only one he ever had, or ever will have. elise isn't his. That doesn't make very much difference. Pierre has never had any especial training in giving up things he wants, simply because they don't belong to him. You haven't helped train him otherwise." Zephyr glanced at Madame. Madame's cheeks suddenly glowed, then as suddenly paled. A faint thought of what might have been years ago came and went. Zephyr resumed: "As long as elise is unmarried, there is danger of his being compelled to give her up. Well," Zephyr's lips grew hard, "you can set your mind at rest.

elise isn't going to marry Morrison, and when the proper time comes, which will be soon, Pierre is going to give her up."

Madame had yet one more episode upon which she needed light. She told Zephyr of Pierre's threatened attack, and of elise's holding him off at the point of her revolver. She felt, but was not sure, that elise by her open defiance had only sealed her fate.

Zephyr smiled appreciatively.

"She's got her father's grit and Pierre's example. Her sense is rattling round in her head, as her nonsense is outside of it. She'll do all right without help, if it comes to that; but it won't."

Madame rose, as if to depart. Zephyr waved her to her seat.

"Not yet. You rest here for a while. It's a hard climb up here and a hard climb down. I'll shake things up a little on my prospect. I'll be back by dinner-time."

He picked up a hammer and drills and went still farther up the mountain.

Having reached the Inferno, he began his work. Perhaps he had no thought of Jael or Sisera; but he smote his drill with a determined emphasis that indicated ill things for Pierre. Jael pinned the sleeping head of Sisera to the earth. Sleeping or waking, resisting or acquiescent, Pierre's head was in serious danger, if it threatened elise.

Zephyr loaded the hole and lighted the fuse, then started for the camp.

A loud explosion startled Madame from the most peaceful repose she had enjoyed for many a day.

After dinner Zephyr saw Madame safely down the worst of the trail.

"Pierre is not all bad," he remarked, at parting. "You just _restez tranquille_ and don't worry. It's a pretty thick fog that the sun can't break through, and, furthermore, a fog being only limited, as it were, and the sun tolerably persistent, it's pretty apt to get on top at most unexpected seasons."

Madame completed the remainder of her journey with very different emotions from those with which she had begun it. She entered the back door of the Blue Goose. Pierre was not in the room, as she had half expected, half feared. She looked around anxiously, then dropped into a chair. The pendulum changed its swing. She was under the old influences again. Zephyr and the mountain-top were far away. A thousand questions struggled in her mind. Why had she not thought of them before? It was no use. Again she was groping for help. She recalled a few of Zephyr's words.

"elise isn't going to marry Morrison, and Pierre's going to give her up."

They did not thrill her with hope. She could not make them do so by oft repeating. Confused recollections crowded these few words of hope. She could not revivify them. She could only cling to them with blind, uncomprehending trust, as the praying mother clings to the leaden crucifix.

CHAPTER IX

_The Meeting at the Blue Goose_

An algebraic formula is very fascinating, but at the same time it is very dangerous. The oft-times repeated a.s.sumption that _x_ plus _y_ equals _a_ leads ultimately to the fixed belief that a is an attainable result, whatever values may be a.s.signed to the other factors. If we a.s.sign concrete dollars to the abstract _x_ and _y_, _a_ theoretically becomes concrete dollars as well. But immediately we do this, another factor known as the personal equation calls for cards, and from then on insists upon sitting in the game. Simple algebra no longer suffices; calculus, differential as well as integral, enters into our problem, and if we can succeed in fencing out quaternions, to say nothing of the _nth_ dimension, we may consider ourselves fortunate.

Pierre was untrained in algebra, to say nothing of higher mathematics; but it is a legal maxim that ignorance of the law excuses no one, and this dictum is equally applicable to natural and to human statutes.

Pierre a.s.sumed very naturally that five dollars plus five dollars equals ten dollars, and dollars were what he was after. He went even further.

Without stating the fact, he felt instinctively that, if he could tip the one-legged plus to the more stable two-legged sign of multiplication, the result would be twenty-five dollars instead of ten.

He knew that dollars added to, or multiplied by, dollars made wealth; but he failed to comprehend that wealth was a variable term with no definite, a.s.signable value. In other words, he never knew, nor ever would know, when he had enough.

Pierre had started in life with the questionable ambition of becoming rich. As foreman on a ranch at five dollars a day and found, he was reasonably contented with simple addition. On the sudden death of his employer he was left in full charge, with no one to call him to account, and addition became more frequent and with larger sums. His horizon widened, the Rainbow mine was opened, and the little town of Pandora sprang into existence. Three hundred workmen, with unlimited thirst and a pa.s.sion for gaming, suggested multiplication, and Pierre moved from the ranch to the Blue Goose. Had he fixed upon a definition of wealth and adhered to it, a few years at the Blue Goose would have left him satisfied. As it was, his ideas grew faster than his legitimate opportunities. The miners were no more content with their wages than he with his gains, and so it happened that an underground retort was added to the above-ground bar and roulette. The bar and roulette had the sanction of law; the retort was existing in spite of it. The bar and roulette took care of themselves, and incidentally of Pierre; but with the retort, the case was different. Pierre had to look out for himself as well as the furnace. As proprietor of a saloon, his garnered dollars brought with them the protection of the nine points of the law--possession; the tenth was never in evidence.

As a vender of gold bullion, with its possession, the nine points made against rather than for him. As for the tenth, at its best it only offered an opportunity for explanation which the law affords the most obviously guilty.

Morrison allowed several days to pa.s.s after his interview with Luna before acquainting Pierre with the failure to land their plunder. The disclosure might have been delayed even longer had not Pierre made some indirect inquiries. Pierre had taken the disclosure in a very different manner from what Morrison had expected. Morrison, as has been set forth, was a very slick bird, but he was not remarkable for his sagacity. His cunning had influenced him to repel, with an a.s.sumption of ignorance, Luna's broad hints of guilty complicity; but his sagacity failed utterly to comprehend Pierre's more cunning silence. Pierre was actively acquainted with Morrison's weak points, and while he ceased not to flatter them he never neglected to gather rewards for his labour. If the fabled crow had had the wit to swallow his cheese before he began to sing he would at least have had a full stomach to console himself for being duped. This is somewhat prognostical; but even so, it is not safe to jump too far. It sometimes happens that the fox and the crow become so mutually engrossed as to forget the possibility of a man and a gun.

Late this particular evening Luna entered the Blue Goose, and having paid tribute at the bar, was guided by the knowing winks and nods of Morrison into Pierre's private club-room, where Morrison himself soon followed.

Morrison opened the game at once.