of shade east by the little, red station house upon the parched sand and cinders, Keno’s flanks were heaving like the silent sobbing of a woman with the pace his master’s spurred heels had required of him.
Miss Georgie gave her hair a hasty pat or two, pushed a novel out of sight under a Boise newspaper, and turned toward him with a breezily careless smile when he stepped up to the open door and stopped as if he were not quite certain of his own mind, or of his welcome.
He was secretly thinking of Peppajee’s information that Miss Georgie thought he was “bueno,” and he was wondering if it were true. Not that he wanted it to be true! But he was man enough to look at her with a keener interest than he had felt before. And Miss Georgie, if one might judge by her manner, was woman enough to detect that interest and to draw back her skirts, mentally, ready for instant flight into unapproachableness.
“Howdy, Mr. Imsen?” she greeted him lightly. “In what official capacity am I to receive you, please? Do you want to send a telegram?” The accent upon the pronoun was very faint, but it was there for him to notice if he liked. So much she helped him. She was a bright young woman indeed, that she saw he wanted help.
“I don’t believe I came to see you officially at all,” he said, and his eyes lighted a little as he looked at her. “Peppajee Jim told me to come. He said you’re a ’heap smart squaw, all same mans.’”
“Item: One pound of red-and-white candy for Peppajee Jim next time I see him.” Miss Georgie laughed—but she also sat down so that her face was turned to the window. “Are you in urgent need of a heap smart squaw?” she asked. “I thought”—she caught herself up, and then went recklessly on—“I thought yesterday that you had found one!”
“It’s brains I need just now.” After the words were out, Good Indian wanted to swear at himself for seeming to belittle Evadna. “I mean,” he corrected quickly—“do you know what I mean? I’ll tell you what has happened, and if you don’t know then, and can’t help me, I’ll just have to apologize for coming, and get out.”
“Yes, I think you had better tell me why you need me particularly. I know the chicken’s perfect, and doesn’t lack brains, and you didn’t mean that she does. You’re all stirred up over something. What’s wrong?” Miss Georgie would have spoken in just that tone if she had been a man or if Grant had been a woman.
So Good Indian told her.
“And you imagine that it’s partly your fault, and that it wouldn’t have happened if you had spent more time keeping your weather eye open, and not so much making love?” Miss Georgie could be very blunt, as well as keen. “Well, I don’t see how you could prevent it, or what you could have done—unless you had kicked old Baumberger into the Snake. He’s the god in this machine. I’d swear to that.”
Good Indian had been fiddling with his hat and staring hard at a pile of old ties just outside the window. He raised his head, and regarded her steadily. It was beginning to occur to him that there was a good deal to this Miss Georgie, under that offhand, breezy exterior. He felt himself drawn to her as a person whom he could trust implicitly.
“You’re right as far as I’m concerned,” he owned, with his queer, inscrutable smile. “I think you’re also right about him. What makes you think so, anyway?”
Miss Georgie twirled a ring upon her middle finger for a moment before she looked up at him.
“Do you know anything about mining laws?” she asked, and when he swung his head slightly to one side in a tacit negative, she went on: “You say there are eight jumpers. Concerted action, that. Premeditated. My daddy was a lawyer,” she threw in by way of explanation. “I used to help him in the office a good deal. When he—died, I didn’t know enough to go on and be a lawyer myself, so I took to this.” She waved her hand impatiently toward the telegraph instrument.
“So it’s like this: Eight men can take placer claims—can hold them, you know—for one man. That’s the limit, a hundred and sixty acres. Those eight men aren’t jumping that ranch as eight individuals; they’re in the employ of a principal who is engineering the affair. If I were going to shy a pebble at the head mogul, I’d sure try hard to hit our corpulent friend with the fishy eye. And that,” she added, “is what all these cipher messages for Saunders mean, very likely. Baumberger had to have someone here to spy around for him and perhaps help him choose—or at least get together—those eight men. They must have come in on the night train, for I didn’t see them. I’ll bet they’re tough customers, every mother’s son of them! Fighters down to the ground, aren’t they?”
“I only saw four. They were heeled, and ready for business, all right,” he told her. “Soon as I saw what the game was, and that Baumberger was only playing for time and a free hand, I pulled out. I thought Peppajee might give me something definite to go on. He couldn’t, though.”
“Baumberger’s going to steal that ranch according to law, you see,” Miss Georgie stated with conviction. “They’ve got to pan out a sample of gold to prove there’s pay dirt there, before they can file their claims. And they’ve got to do their filing in Shoshone. I suppose their notices are up O.K. I wonder, now, how they intend to manage that? I believe,” she mused, “they’ll have to go in person—I don’t believe Baumberger can do that all himself legally. I’ve got some of daddy’s law-books over in my trunk, and maybe I can look it up and make sure. But I know they haven’t filed their claims yet. They’ve got to take possession first, and they’ve got to show a sample of ore, or dust, it would be in this case. The best thing to do—” She drew her eyebrows together, and she pinched her under lip between her thumb and forefinger, and she stared abstractedly at Good Indian. “Oh, hurry up, Grant!” she cried unguardedly. “Think—think hard, what’s best to do!”
“The only thing I can think of,” he scowled, “is to kill that—”
“And that won’t do, under the circumstances,” she cut in airily. “There’d still be the eight. I’d like,” she declared viciously, “to put rough-on-rats in his dinner, but I intend to refrain from doing as I’d like, and stick to what’s best.”
Good Indian gave her a glance of grateful understanding. “This thing has hit me hard,” he confided suddenly. “I’ve been holding myself in all day. The Harts are like my own folks. They’re all I’ve had, and she’s been—they’ve all been—” Then the instinct of repression walled in his emotion, and he let the rest go in a long breath which told Miss Georgie all she needed to know. So much of Good Indian would never find expression in speech; all that was best of him would not, one might be tempted to think.
“By the way, is there any pay dirt on that ranch?” Miss Georgie kept herself rigidly to the main subject.
“No, there isn’t. Not,” he added dryly, “unless it has grown gold in the last few years. There are colors, of course. All this country practically can show colors, but pay dirt? No!”
“Look out,” she advised him slowly, “that pay dirt doesn’t grow over night! Sabe?”
Good Indian’s eyes spoke admiration of her shrewdness.
“I must be getting stupid, not to have thought of that,” he said.
“Can’t give me credit for being ’heap smart’?” she bantered. “Can’t even let me believe I thought of something beyond the ken of the average person? Not,” she amended ironically, “that I consider you an average person! Would you mind”—she became suddenly matter of fact—“waiting here while I go and rummage for a book I want? I’m almost sure I have one on mining laws. Daddy had a good deal of that in his business, being in a mining country. We’ve got to know just where we stand, it seems to me, because Baumberger’s going to use the laws himself, and it’s with the law we’ve got to fight him.”
She had to go first and put a stop to the hysterical chattering of the sounder by answering the summons. It proved to be a message for Baumberger, and she wrote it down in a spiteful scribble which left it barely legible.
“Betraying