"And who give it a black eye?" demanded Yankee Sam wrathfully. "Who done it but knockers like you? I 'spose if Capital was settin' right alongside you'd up and tell 'em you never saw a ledge yet in this camp hold out below a hundred feet?"

Uncle Bill replied tranquilly:

"Would if they ast me."

"You'd rather see us all starve than boost."

"Jest as lief as to lie."

"Well, that's what we're goin' to do if somethin' don't happen this Spring. She'll own this camp. Porcupine Jim turned over 'the Underdog'

yesterday and Lannigan's finished eatin' on 'The Gold-dust Twins'." He moved away disconsolately. "Lord, I wish the stage would get in."

At this juncture Judge George Petty turned in from the street, hitting both sides of the snow tunnel as he came. He fumbled at the door-k.n.o.b in a suspicious manner and then stumbled joyously inside.

"Boys," he announced exuberantly, "I think I heerd the stage."

The group about the red-hot stove regarded him coldly and no one moved.

It was like him, the ingrate, to get drunk alone. When he tried to wedge a chair into the circle they made no effort to give him room.

"You don't believe me!" The Judge's mouth, which had been upturned at the corners like a "dry" new moon, as promptly became a "wet" one and drooped as far the other way.

"Somethin' you been takin' must a quickened your hearin'," said Yankee Sam sourly. "She's an hour and a half yet from bein' due."

"'Twere nothin'," he answered on the defensive, "but a few drops of vaniller and some arnicy left over from that sprain. You oughtn't to feel hard toward me," he quavered, wilting under the unfriendly eyes.

"I'd a pa.s.sed it if there'd been enough to go aroun'."

"An' after all we've done fer ye," said Lannigan, "makin' ye Jestice of the Peace to keep ye off the town."

"Jedge," said Uncle Bill deliberately, "you're gittin' almost no-account enough to be a Forest Ranger. I aims to write to Washington when your term is out and git you in the Service."

The Judge jumped up as though he had been stung.

"Bill, we been friends for twenty year, an' I'll take considerable off you, but I want you to understan' they'r a _limit_. You kin call me a wolf, er a Mormon, er a son-of-a-gun, but, Bill, you can't call me no Forest Ranger! Bill," pleadingly, and his face crumpled in sudden tears, "you didn't mean that, did you? You wouldn't insult an ol', ol' frien'?"

"You got the ear-marks," Uncle Bill replied unmoved. "For a year now you've walked forty feet around that tree that fell across the trail to your cabin rather than stop and chop it out. You sleeps fourteen hours a day and eats the rest. The hardest work you ever do is to draw your money. h.e.l.l's catoots! It's a crime to keep a born Ranger like you off the Department's pay-roll."

"You think I'm drunk now and I'll forgit. Well--I won't." The Judge shook a tremulous but belligerent fist. "I'll remember what you said to me the longest day I live, and you've turned an ol', ol' frien' into an enemy. Whur's that waumbat coat what was hangin' here day 'fore yistiday?"

In offended dignity the Judge took the waumbat coat and retreated to the furthermost end of the office, where he covered himself and went to sleep in the plush barber-chair.

In the silence which followed, Miss Vi doing belated chamberwork upstairs sounded like six on an ore-wagon as she walked up and down the uncarpeted hall.

"Wisht they'd sing somethin'," said Porcupine Jim wistfully.

As though his desire had been communicated by mental telepathy Ma Snow's soprano came faintly from the kitchen--"We all like she-e-e--p-." Miss Rosie's alto was heard above the clatter of the dishes she was placing on the table in the dining-room--"We all like she-e-e--p-." Miss Vi's throaty contralto was wafted down the stairs--"We all like she-e-e-p."

"Have gone" sang the tenor. "Have gone astray--astray"--Mr. Snow's booming ba.s.s came through the stove-pipe hole. The baritone arrived from the stable in time to lend his voice as they all chorded.

"The stage's comin'," the musical hostler announced when the strains died away. The entranced audience dashed abruptly for the door.

A combination of arnica and vanilla seemed indeed to have sharpened the Judge's hearing for the stage was fully an hour earlier than any one had reason to expect.

"Don't see how he can make such good time over them roads loaded down like he is with Mungummery-Ward Catalogues and nails comin' by pa.s.sel post." Yankee Sam turned up his coat collar and shivered.

"Them leaders is turrible good snow-horses; they sabe snow-shoes like a man." Lannigan stretched his neck to catch a glimpse of them through the pines before they made the turn into the Main street.

There was a slightly acid edge to Uncle Bill's tone as he observed:

"I ought to git my Try-bune to-night if the postmistress at Beaver Crick is done with it."

"Git-ep! Eagle! Git-ep, Nig!" They could hear the stage driver urging his horses before they caught sight of the leader's ears turning the corner.

Then Porcupine Jim, who had the physical endowment of being able to elongate his neck like a turtle, cried excitedly before anyone else could see the rear of the stage: "They's somebudy on!"

A pa.s.senger? They looked at each other inquiringly. Who could be coming into Ore City at this time of year? But there he sat--a visible fact--in the back seat--wearing a c.o.o.n-skin cap and snuggled down into a c.o.o.n-skin overcoat looking the embodiment of ready money! A Live One--in winter! They experienced something of the awe which the Children of Israel must have felt when manna fell in the wilderness. Even Uncle Bill tingled with curiosity.

When the steaming stage horses stopped before the snow tunnel, the population of Ore City was waiting like a reception committee, their att.i.tudes of nonchalance belied by their gleaming, intent eyes.

The stranger was dark and hatchet-faced, with sharp, quick-moving eyes.

He nodded curtly in a general way and throwing aside the robes sprang out nimbly.

A pang so sharp and violent that it was nearly audible pa.s.sed through the expectant group. Hope died a sudden death when they saw his legs. It vanished like the effervescence from charged water, likewise their smile. He wore puttees! He was the prospectors' ancient enemy. He was a Yellow Leg! A mining expert--but who was he representing? Without knowing, they suspected "the Guggenheimers"--when in doubt they always suspected the Guggenheimers.

They stood aside to let him pa.s.s, their cold eyes following his legs down the tunnel, waiting in the freezing atmosphere to avoid the appearance of indecent haste, though they burned to make a bee-line for the register.

"Wilbur Dill,--Spokane" was the name he inscribed upon the spotless page with many curlicues, while Ma Snow waited with a graceful word of greeting, bringing with her the fragrant odors of the kitchen.

"Welcome to our mountain home."

As Mr. Dill bowed gallantly over her extended hand he became aware that there was to be fried ham for supper.

He was shown to his room but came down again with considerable celerity, rubbing his knuckles, and breaking the highly charged silence of the office with a caustic comment upon the inconvenience of sleeping in cold storage.

There was a polite murmur of a.s.sent but nothing further, as his hearers knew what he did not--that Pa Snow upstairs was listening. Yankee Sam however tactfully diverted his thoughts to the weather, hoping thus indirectly to draw out his reason for undertaking the hardship of such a trip in winter. But whatever Mr. Dill's business it appeared to be of a nature which would keep, although they sat expectantly till Miss Rosie coyly announced supper.

"Don't you aim to set down, Uncle Bill?" she asked kindly as the rest filed in.

"Thanks, no, I et late and quite hearty, an' I see the Try-bune's come."

"I should think you'd want to eat every chance you got after all you went through out hunting."

"It's that, I reckon, what's took my appet.i.te," the old man answered soberly, as he produced his steel-rimmed spectacles and started to read what the Beaver Creek postmistress had left him of his newspaper.

Inside, Mr. Dill seated himself at the end of the long table which a placard braced against the castor proclaimed as sacred to the "transient." A white tablecloth served as a kind of dead-line over which the most audacious regular dared not reach for special delicacies when Ma Snow hovered in the vicinity.

"Let me he'p yoah plate to some Oregon-grape jell," Ma Snow was urging in her honied North Carolina accent, when, by that mysterious sixth sense which she seemed to possess, or the eye which it was believed she concealed by the arrangement of her back hair, she became suddenly aware of the condition of Mr. Lannigan's hands.

She whirled upon him like a catamount and her weak blue eyes watered in a way they had when she was about to show the hardness of a Lucretia Borgia. Her voice, too, that quivered as though on the verge of tears, had a quality in it which sent shivers up and down the spines of those who were familiar with it.