It was Joe Hurley who saw Betty appear on the porch of the hotel.
Perhaps his gaze had been fixed in that direction for that very purpose.
It was a vision to draw the eyes of any man hungry for a picture of a
well-dressed and modest young woman. Betty Hunt was like nothing that
had ever before stepped out upon the Main Street of Canyon Pass.
"Come on, Willie," urged Hurley, seizing the minister's sleeve. "You've
jarred Judson clean to bedrock. Spare him any more for now. Come on.
Your sister is waiting for us to take her to the Great Hope."
Betty was not gaily appareled. Her frock was black and white, and so was
her hat. She still remembered Aunt Prudence's death--and that she was a
parson's sister! But it was the way the frock was made, and how it and
the hat became her that marked Betty as an object of approval, to the
male Passonians at least.
"Such a beautiful day, Mr. Hurley," Betty ventured. "One might think it
a respectable country town if only one could forget last night."
She stared at Hurley with accusation. He dropped his head sheepishly.
Somehow Betty Hunt put the matter as though it were his fault!
"We're going to change all that in time," said Hunt cheerfully. "These
people are not so bad, Betty----"
"That they couldn't be worse? Yes, I know," retorted his sister.
"Why, Betty!" murmured Hunt, "isn't that a bit uncharitable?"
"I have no thought for charity in a place like this," declared the girl.
"Such dirt, vileness and disorder I never dreamed of! These people are
not even human! I cannot excuse them. No branch of the human family
could possibly be ignorant enough for us to excuse what I have already
seen about me in Canyon Pass."
"Great saltpeter!" murmured Hurley.
"You did not tell my brother the half of it!" she cried, flaring at the
mining man. "You hid the worst. You only said things in your letters
that you knew would attract him here."
Joe Hurley started back a step. If a kitten he had stooped to pet had
suddenly turned and gouged him with its claws he could have been no more
startled.
But Betty Hunt proved herself no kitten. She was usually a very
self-contained and quite unexcited young woman. It was only for a minute
that she allowed her anger to flame out.
"Now, that's enough about that," she pursued, still with a frown. "The
thing is done. We are here. I do not believe that Ford will ever be
happy in Canyon Pass; and I know I shall not."
"Better not speak so positively, Bet," said Hunt coolly. A brother
seldom is much impressed by his sister's little ruffles of temper. "You
may have to change your opinion. My belief is that none of us can find
happiness in a new environment. We must take the happiness with us to
any new abode."
Hurley was much subdued during their walk through the town. His
knowledge of girls like Betty was very slight. He had never had a sister
and he could not remember his mother.
Even girls like Nell Blossom had not been frequent events in the mining
man's life. His two years spent in the East had been almost as barren of
feminine society as his years in the West.
Now, it must be confessed, Betty Hunt had "got him going," to quote his
own thought in the matter. Not that Hurley was of a fickle temperament.
But he was not a man to eat his heart out in an utterly impossible
cause.
Nell had shown him plainly that she had no use for him save as an
acquaintance. He could not even count himself her friend now, for since
her return from Hoskins she had seemed more remote from the men of
Canyon Pass than ever before.
So, Joe Hurley had already put Nell out of his mind in that way before
Betty Hunt had appeared on the scene. And, it seemed, he was fated to be
attracted by a distant star. The minister's sister was distinctly of
another world--and a world far, far above that of Canyon Pass, Hurley
told himself.
It was not Betty's finnicky ways, as her brother bluntly called them,
that held the girl from the East so dear in Joe's eyes. It was in spite
of her disapproval of Canyon Pass and all that lay therein. The mining
man was deeply interested in the development of the camp. He had done
much in a business way to improve conditions here. He hoped to do more.
He had quite realized that the place needed something besides modern
business methods to raise it out of the slough in which it wallowed as a
community. This realization, shared with such people as Bill Judson and
old Mother Tubbs, had led Hurley to interest the Reverend Willett Ford
Hunt in Canyon Pass. He foresaw the camp in time as well governed a
place as Crescent City.
Betty's scorn and vituperation regarding the shortcomings of the Pass
actually pained Hurley. Was it so bad as she seemed to think it was?
This girl from the East was very positive in her dislike for the place
and its people.
Then he looked over her head at the quietly smiling face of Hunt. He did
not seem to share his sister's opinion that the Pass was beyond
redemption. There was, after all, a quality of sanity and stability
about Hunt that bolstered Hurley's hope.
"That boy is all right," thought Hurley finally. "He sees things with a
clear eye. And our crudeness doesn't scare him. His sister----Well! what
could you expect of a pretty, fluffy little thing like her? This place
is bound to look rotten to her at the first. But at that, she may change
her opinion."
In fact, Joe Hurley had determination enough to believe that he was just
the chap who could change these opinions of Betty Hunt! His non-success
with Nell Blossom had not convinced him that he would never be able to
attract other girls.
Right at the start Joe had been enamored of the fragile beauty of the
parson's sister. Hers was not the robust, if petite, prettiness of Nell
Blossom. It was a beauty of spirit and character that looked out of
Betty's gray eyes. Her very calmness and primness intrigued the mining
man.
Opposite is attracted by opposite. Because he was so open and hearty
himself, Hurley admired the daintiness and delicacy of Betty. Her
primness, even her shrinking from the things to which he was so used in
and about Canyon Pass, pleased the young man in a way.
Here was just the sort of girl he desired to establish in his home--a
real home--when he got one. Joe Hurley did not propose to live in a
bachelor shack in the purlieus of Canyon Pass all his life--by no means!
He was getting on. The Great Hope was panning out well. It had every
promise of being a big thing in time. He was going to be rich. Betty
Hunt would grace the head of the table of a millionaire--wear the clothes
a prince might buy for his wife--hold the respect and admiration that the
highest lady in the land might claim.
"I've got to have that girl," thought Hurley. "And I'm going after her!"
They climbed the steep road of rolled rock to the highland overlooking
the town and giving them a view to the first turn of the canyon bed of
Runaway River. When the squalid sight of Canyon Pass could be shut out
of the mind, even Betty admitted that the dimming light in the canyon
lent a fairylike charm to all its ruggedness. It was a slot made by
giants in the hills without doubt. She expressed a desire to see more of
it.
"I'll get you a good cayuse," said Hurley eagerly. "Got any riding duds
with you?"
"I have my habit in one of my trunks."
The Westerner looked at her doubtfully. "Don't know about long skirts
flapping around the legs of these Western critters----"
"Habits are not made with skirts nowadays, Mr. Hurley," Betty
interrupted coldly. "Fashion--even in the Fenway--demands that the
feminine riding suit shall be mannish."
"Oh! If you ride astraddle," replied Hurley, without realizing that his
phrase shocked her, "we can find you a horse that will fill the bill.
I've got one that I ride myself, and I can pick up one for Willie."
"Most agreeable to me, I'm sure," agreed the parson. "I can ride after a
fashion. Bet got her training at boarding school. If Aunt Prudence knew
all her niece got at that institution the dear old lady would have been
shocked."
Betty did not smile. There were things that had happened to her at
boarding school that Ford knew nothing about. His words aroused in her
mind the carking memory of the secret that had changed Betty Hunt's life
completely--the secret that had killed all the sparkle and winsome
lightness in the girl's nature. She became silent and after that only
listened to the talk of the two young men.
Not that she was not interested as they went on and Hurley pointed out
the several claims being worked with the most modern methods of the
Oreode Company, and the Nufall Syndicate, and by himself and his
associates at the Great Hope. This mining business was all new to the
girl, and she had an inquiring mind. She did not shrink at all, when
Hurley suggested a descent into the shaft and produced slickers and
rubber boots and tarpaulins to put on over their clothes.
The man in charge let them down in the bucket, and a gasoline torch
showed them all that there was to see under the surface. Hurley
explained with pride how he had found and developed the first paying
lead in the Great Hope, but that the name of the mine foreshadowed a
much richer vein that he was confident was soon to be opened. Science
and that "sixth sense" of the miner assured him that the big thing was
coming.
"We're always looking toward El Dorado, we miners," he said with a
laugh. "It's hope that keeps us up."
"'El Dorado'--the hoped-for land," repeated Betty softly. And then,
standing there in the flickering radiance of the torch, she repeated,
while the men were silent, that concluding paragraph of Robert Louis
Stevenson's essay:
"'O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, traveling ye know
not whither! Soon, soon it seems to you, you must come forth on some
conspicuous hilltop and, but a little way further, against the
setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your
own blessedness, for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to
arrive, and the true success is to labor.'"
"Amen," Hunt commented seriously.
"You said it," agreed the mining man with that bluff emphasis that did
not shock Betty so much now as it might at the beginning. "That's what
keeps me going. Stevenson knew what he was writing about. But, we would
have considered him a weakling out here, I am afraid. We are inclined to
judge everything here in terms of muscle and brawn."
"But it has been your brains, Joe, not your brawn, that has carried you
so far in this work," Hunt declared warmly.
Hurley sighed as they went back to the shaft. "Let me tell you I have
had to use considerable brawn, Willie, in handling these roughnecks that
work for me."
He laughed again. Joe Hurley could not be sober for long. And his temper
exploded when he had to shout at the top of his lungs to attract the
attention of the watchmen when they wanted to get up to the surface.
"This feller isn't worth the powder to blow him from here to Jericho,"
grumbled Hurley. "I always miss old Steve Siebert when he slopes for the
desert, as he's bound to do every spring. That old desert rat is always
here over Sunday to see that everything is all right, when he's on the
job. But he just has to go off prospecting once in so often."
He told them more about Siebert and Andy McCann as they went away from
the claim. Betty listened as before with quiet interest, but she made no
comment. Hurley was not at all sure that she had enjoyed, or even
approved of their visit to the mine when she and Hunt parted from him at
his own shack, although she thanked him politely.
The walk did not end for Hunt and his sister without a more adventurous
incident. The sun had disappeared and the dusk had begun to thicken in
corners and by-streets as they approached the hotel. There, at the mouth
of a narrow lane, two figures stood, a man and a girl, and their voices
were sharp and angry.
"That's what I'm telling you," the man's voice drawled, a note in it
that at once raised in Hunt that feeling that any decent man experiences
who hears one of his own sex so address a woman. "You got to come to it,
and you might as well come now as later. I got you on the hip--that I
have. Understand?"
"I understand nothing of the kind, Tolley. You're a bluffer and a beast!
And if you don't let me alone----"
"Don't fool yourself," interrupted the man. "I won't let you alone till
you come back to the Grub Stake. But I won't talk to you about it again.
I'll talk to others."
Then the girl told him angrily to do his worst. Betty attempted to pass
on swiftly; but the young man hesitated.
"Do for goodness' sake come along, Ford!" whispered his sister, looking
back at him.
Back in Ditson Corners--or in almost any other Eastern town--the Reverend
Willett Ford Hunt would scarcely have shown his interest in such a scene
on the street, save perhaps to speak to a constable or policeman about
it.
But there was something here he could not ignore. Nor was it entirely
because he recognized the angry voice of the girl, although he had not
as yet seen her face in the dusk.
"You'll do what I tell you," muttered the bully with an oath, as Hunt
stepped nearer. "If you don't come back to the Grub Stake to sing
to-morrow night, I'll let the whole o' Canyon Pass know----"
It was just then that Hunt's hand dropped upon Boss Tolley's shoulder.
Nor did it drop lightly. The parson twisted the big man around by one
muscular exertion and looked into his flushed face.
"Don't you think you've said enough to the young lady?" Hunt asked
quietly. "You have evidently forgotten yourself."
"What--why, you fool tenderfoot!"
"Suppose you go, Miss Blossom," suggested Hunt with unruffled voice.
"Let me speak to this man."
But the minister had quite mistaken Nell Blossom's temper. She turned on
him like a shot.
"What are you butting in for, I'd like to know? I can take care of
myself--always have and always expect to." Then she laughed harshly,
turning to Tolley again. "Better beat it, Tolley, or the parson will do
something to you besides grabbing your hat."
The dance-hall keeper, swearing still, jerked away from Hunt's grasp. He
did not seek to continue the quarrel, however. He abruptly turned up the
alley and disappeared.
"For goodness' sake, Ford!" ejaculated Miss Betty.
Nell Blossom, thus attracted to the other girl, stepped nearer and
stared at her. Her own face was unsmiling. If it had not been so really
pretty one might have said it was a black look that she gave Betty. But
it was an impish look, too.
"There are some things you'd better learn if you are going to stay in
this camp, parson," said the singer. "The principal thing is to mind
your own business. If I ever need your help in any little thing, I'll
call on you."
She passed them both, still staring--now with curiosity--at Betty and went
on along the street. Betty seized her brother's arm.
"What a horrid little creature!" she said.