“He thinks he does. Kalispel will have to kill him. And that—”

  “Enough. Say you will leave — this place.”

  “Oh, if I only dared!”

  “Say you will! Or I’ll carry you out of here this minute.”

  “Yes. I — I will come.”

  “Say you will marry me!”

  “If — nothing — else will do.”

  “Nug — Ruth, darlin’, you leave here right now. Pack your things. I’ll help. You can have my tent. It’s quite comfortable — board floor an’ all. You can keep house for me while I dig gold for you. I’ll sleep at my neighbor’s. An’ then the very first parson who comes will marry us.... I’ll make my fortune here. Then we’ll go far away. My parents are dead. I have no one to look out for.... You’ll be my wife!” Kalispel stepped out and softly closed the door.

  “By heaven! there’s one good mark for Kalispel!” he whispered.

  On the street he searched for Blair. Eventually Kalispel located him in the most disreputable gambling-hell in the gold camp. He was already under the influence of drink and the elation of winning. Blair was a poor gambler for many reasons, but his chief fault was to lose his head when fortune smiled. Kalispel surveyed the room and then approached the table to lean over and whisper in Blair’s ear.

  “Come home soon as you start losin’. Hell to pay!”

  “Huh?... Oh yes — all right — all right,” returned Blair, slowly comprehending.

  Kalispel went out. “Wouldn’t do for me to stay down town tonight,” he soliloquized as he made his way through the noisy throng. He was like a man that could see in the dark, and on all sides at once. The atmosphere of the gold town seemed charged with fatality for him. It was, for all these gold-grubbers and parasites. Mirth, song, and guitar, the discordant squeak of fiddles, the gay, soft murmuring inside and the coarse roar outside — these belied the truth that only a step away from this life loomed defeat, ruin, death.

  Kalispel felt this, and deeply his relation to it. He had drawn the Blairs into the vortex of this maelstrom, and he doubted that he could avert a tragic end. As for Sydney, he was in a state of desperation. She had seemed at first so self-contained, so strong and fine and balanced. But who could understand a woman? Sydney might do anything.

  As Kalispel left town the moon came out above the bold black dome of Thunder Mountain. Its hue was orange and it had a weird, threatening aspect. The whole dark mass of the slope lay in shadow, looming as always, menacing as always, waiting. And on the moment a low hollow rumble pealed from subterranean depths.

  “Thunder an’ grumble, old man,” muttered Kalispel, grimly. “You’re not foolin’ me. You’ll never bury me an’ my gold.”

  When he ascended the steps of the Blair porch Sydney was not in sight. Lighting a cigarette, he paced to and fro, heavily, so she would hear his footfalls. The door was open and a faint light shone in the far room. But she did not come out. He was about to call when he heard quick steps on the ground. He turned to see Sydney appear in the moonlight, coming from the trail. His pulses leaped again. Slowly she ascended to the porch, leaned against the post, panting. He approached her.

  “Somebody chase you?” he queried, sharply. “Don’t you know enough yet to stay away from that gold camp after dark?”

  She did not answer. Kalispel stepped closer, to peer into her face. The moon shone at her back, so that all he could descry in the shadow were two dark eyes that electrified him.

  “Where you been?” he demanded.

  “I followed you,” she replied, as swiftly, and the low, rich voice shook.

  “Where?”

  “Downtown. Never lost sight of you for a moment.”

  “Wal, I’ll be dog-goned!... Flatterin’, Sydney — but I don’t savvy.”

  “You may call it flattering if you like.”

  “Where’d you follow me?”

  “To Borden’s dance-hall.”

  “An’ then what?”

  “I followed you in.”

  “My Gawd!... Sydney, what possessed you? — That joint! To go in it!”

  “I was possessed, yes, of several things — the only one of which need concern you is that I had a determination to know.”

  “Ah-huh. I’m some flabbergasted.... Wal?”

  “I went through to the dining-room,” she continued, hurriedly. “Those girls! — I asked where Kalispel Emerson had gone. They looked queer. But one of them laughed and said: ‘He’s gone back to Nugget’s room. Down the hall — last on the right!’”

  “Then — what?” gasped Kalispel.

  “I ran out. On the way up the street I thought I’d make a good job of it. I went into all the — the gambling-places and asked for my father. But he had not been seen in any one of them tonight. Oh, I am so — so frightened.”

  “Wal, you needn’t be — about him, anyway. I found him in Flannigan’s. He was all right. He’d won a lot. I told him to quit soon as he began to lose. Told him there was hell to pay — which wasn’t no lie. He’ll be home pronto.”

  She murmured something in relief. Then silence fell. Kalispel threw away his cigarette, in a slow, uncertain gesture which betrayed the conflict of his thoughts. The yellow moon, the black slope, the pale squares of tents, the faint roar of the stream, and the fainter hum of life in the town — all seemed unreal to Kalispel, like the objects remembered from a dream.

  But as he attended once more to the girl he found she was real — so real and intense that his consciousness fixed sternly on one obvious fact — her conviction of his utter shamelessness.

  That did not greatly shock Kalispel, because he knew his innocence and could prove it, but what staggered him was her motive in wanting to determine this supposed guilt of his.

  “Miss Blair, your trailin’ me ‘pears a powerful strange proceedin’,” he drawled, stifling his agitation and playing for time. She would commit herself.

  “Yes, it was — for me — more than you could dream. But this West is strange — this raw camp — these gold-mad men — all are strange. And I have been upset by them.”

  “Wal, what’d you do it for?”

  “I’d never tell you, but for the fact that I must clear myself of something brazen.... When I met you on the street with that — that — with the girl called Nugget I was so distressed and shamed that I realized I had not utterly lost faith in you — that in my heart I still cared.... Even your prompting her to speak familiarly to Rand Leavitt — even after he said she was your sweétheart — even then I still fought for you. Oh, it was hard to kill. I had to be sure, so tonight I followed you.”

  Into Kalispel’s slow and mounting ecstasy there burnt, at the mention of Leavitt, a passion that held all softer emotions in check.

  “So Leavitt told you Nugget was my sweetheart?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “An’ that confirmed your suspicions?”

  “It told me what a fool I was. Still I had to find out for myself.”

  “An’ you believed I put Nugget up to speakin’ intimate to Leavitt?”

  “That was how he explained it — and I believed.”

  “Wal, for once you were right,” replied Kalispel, coldly. “I did put her up to it.”

  “How contemptible of you!” she exclaimed, hotly. “He is a gentleman. He is insulted.”

  “Ah-huh. An’ you are perfectly shore Leavitt is too much a gentleman — too far above us poor miners — to have any interest in a girl like Nugget?”

  “Yes, I am. More than that — he is too fine and clean to come to me, if he had been with her — as you have done.”

  “An’ whatever decent feelin’ you ever had for me is dead an’ gone?”

  “Yes, thank God. You are a strange mixture of chivalry and baseness. You don’t know what honor means. You have no morals. You saved me from a ruffian. You make love to me and pull me out of the river when I was drowning. Then you kill an innocent man and become a drunken sot. Lastly you become transformed, apparently. At least your appearance underwent some great change. No more ragged garb or unkempt locks! You win my father. You win the miners to your side. You take up the hardest job of all, to pack meat down to these madmen who would starve before they’d give up gold.... And then all the time, no doubt, you were going to — to the room of this Nugget. And worst of all you come to me with her kisses on your lips...”

  In her denunciation Kalispel grasped the undercurrent — the betrayal of her jealousy.

  “Sydney, how do you know that Nugget is not as good as the very gold she’s named for?”

  Sydney gasped-”Do you imagine I am mad, too?” she cried, incredulously.

  “Couldn’t a man — couldn’t I go into Nugget’s bedroom without having you think something wrong?”

  “No!” she replied, violently.

  “Suppose I told you she needed a brother an’ I’d tried to be one? That she’d run off from home when only a kid, an’ drifted into this dance-hall business to earn a livin’? That some one had to save her from ruin — from dyin’ of drink an’ violence — from men like these brutal miners — an’ Borden — an’ Leqvitt?”

  She laughed in mocking astonishment.

  “I’d think you a monumental liar.”

  “Wal, the funny thing is — I could prove it.”

  “Kalispel, you lack a great deal, and one thing is brains. Can’t you see how — how cheap it is to intimate that Leavitt — Oh, I wouldn’t repeat it!”

  “Shore I can see what I lack,” he rejoined, in the might of gathering wrath. “One thing is common sense. Another was to keep on levin’ a girl who failed in the big things — faith, love. But whatever I had for you, Sydney Blair, is as dead as whatever you had for me. An’ cold as ashes!”

  Her passion spent, she backed away from him to the porch rail. He loomed over her, peering down into the white face.

  “All the same, I can prove my innocence,” he went on. “I can prove it two ways.”

  “How can you?” she whispered, as if she could not hold back the words.

  “Wal, I reckon this way suits — me — best,” he replied, hoarsely, and seized her in powerful, relentless arms.

  Sydney struggled violently, but in a moment she was in such a vice-like clasp that she was unable to move. He bent to kiss her, but she twisted her face this way and that, so that his lips swept her cheeks, her closed eyes, her hair.

  “How — dare you?” she cried, in fierce anger and dawning fright. “Let me go!... You shall suffer — for this....” Kalispel reached her lips with his, ending her outcries, her struggles. Suddenly she sank limp on his breast. And he kissed her with all the despairing passion of his innocence, with the agony of renunciation, with mad hunger for what he knew was lost to him.

  When he released his hold she sank upon the bench, drooping and spent.

  “There!” he said, huskily, “I reckon — that’s my proof. I couldn’t be — villain enough to do that — if I was the — what you called me.... An’ I’ll never forgive you, Sydney Blair.”

  Kalispel wrestled himself erect, and at that juncture Blair came staggering and panting up the steps.

  “Wal, old-timer, I see you’re drunk again,” remarked Kalispel, stepping forward doubtfully.

  “That you — Emerson?... No, I’m not drunk... Where’s Syd — ?”

  “Here, Dad,” cried the girl, rising with her hands on the rail. “Oh, you look so white!”

  “Blair, where’d the blood come from?” queried Kalispel, sharply, as he put his finger to a dark splotch running down Blair’s face.

  “I won all — their gold,” panted Blair, heavily. “Stacks of it!... And I was hurrying home with it all — got beyond the camp — heard steps behind — men — three men — they hit me — ran off with the gold.”

  “Ah-huh. Wal, this crack won’t kill you, but maybe it’ll be a lesson. Sydney, better wash an’ tie it up.”

  “Dad, I knew it would happen,” faltered Sydney.

  “Wal, I reckon some gun-play is just what I need,” said Kalispel, and strode off the porch.

  “Come back!” called the girl, poignantly.

  Kalispel did not even turn his head, though her voice was like a dragging weight.

  “Oh, don’t go!... Kalispel!”

  He walked on, his formidable self again, out into the weird moonlight.

  Chapter Nine

  September came with its frosty mornings and purple-hazed afternoons. Kalispel spent less time hunting game on the heights, though meat brought almost as high a price as gold. It had been inevitable that Jake would retrograde. After he lost hope of finding Sam’s body or some clue of his having left the valley, Jake seemed on the verge of ruining all their chances. Kalispel, finally in desperation, confided in him, and that worked a great change in the despondent miner. He became amenable, and willingly set his hand to the task of accumulating firewood for the winter, no small need when the snow began to fly.

  Events had multiplied. Kalispel did not watch for Sydney on her porch any more, and when by accident he happened to see her, he suffered a wrenching pang. Blair had been laid up with his injury, which had induced fever; and Kalispel thought that was a good thing. He sent Jake with meat and firewood to the cabin, and also had his brother do what tasks and errands Sydney would permit.

  Miners with mediocre claims were working like beavers to clean up as much as possible and get out before winter locked the valley.

  This had been added incentive to the small clique of bandits who were operating in the diggings. Kalispel had been unable to discover Blair’s assailants, and had come to the conclusion that they were under the dominance of a clever and resourceful leader. While Kalispel was not hunting, he haunted the town by day and night, a somber, watchful man who had become marked by the populace.

  One morning Kalispel had a call from a miner who brought a request for an interview from Masters, the new sheriff. Kalispel regarded that as something to expect and told the messenger he would see the sheriff.

  A little later Masters approached leisurely. Kalispel had never encountered the man at close range. He was tall and lean, in his shirt sleeves, without any star on his vest, and walked with a limp. He wore a huge black sombrero, that at a distance hid the upper part of his sallow face, and he packed one gun prominently where it ought to be. Kalispel’s sharp eyes made sure he had another inside his vest.

  “Howdy, youngster,” he drawled, with the accent of a Texan. “Shore am obliged to you for seein’ me.”

  “Howdy, yourself,” replied Kalispel as he met the other’s deep gray eyes. One glance at them and this man’s lined, quiet face told Kalispel that he did not have to do with another Lowrie. “You sort of surprised me. A sheriff usually don’t ask to call.”

  “Wal, I reckon he ought to, if he happens to want to see a youngster like you.”

  “Ah-huh. That sounds friendly, Masters.”

  “I’d like to be friendly with everybody heahaboots. I didn’t want the job, Kalispel. But since thet rock busted my laig I can’t do hard work. I got a man workin’ my claim on shares. An’ I let the miners elect me. There was some opposition from the big mugs, but thet didn’t keep me from bein’ elected.”

  “Good thing for Thunder City, I’d say,” rejoined Kalispel, thoughtfully. He liked the man. “Who were the big mugs?”

  “Wal, who’d you say? You’ve been heah longer than me.”

  “Masters, I’m a pretty blunt-spoken fellow. Borden an’ Leavitt, with their backin’, run this camp. An’ if they didn’t want you elected I don’t see how’n hell you ever got in.”

  “Lowrie was their man, as you know, an’ after you drove him out of town they moved to set up Haskell. Do you know him?”

  Kalispel grunted an unfavorable affirmative.

  “Wal, my friends canvassed the diggin’s an’ got the jump on the opposition. So I was nominated at the meetin’, an’ elected, as you must have heahed if you were there.”

  “No, sorry to say I missed that. I’d kind of enjoyed it.”

  “Youngster, why’d you drive Lowrie out of camp?” queried the Texan, deliberately.

  “What do you want to know for, Sheriff?”

  “Wal, I don’t want thet against you.”

  Thus importuned, Kalispel told him in full the details of his entire association with Lowrie.

  “An’ you’d killed him if he’d hung on heah?”

  “I shore would. That job of his, tryin’ to arrest my friend, Dick Sloan, for no reason on earth except that Sloan dragged the girl Nugget out of Borden’s dive — that soured me for good an’ all on Lowrie.”

  “What’d you have to do with Sloan’s takin’ up the girl?”

  “I had a lot to do with it. They love each other. She’s a good kid. An’ Sloan means to marry her.”

  “Wal, thet puts a different light on the matter. I’m glad you told me.... Youngster, I don’t mind tellin’ you I like you. I’m from Texas, an’ thet oughta explain. You’re in bad heah with most of the miners an’ thought wal of by the rest. I’m one of the rest. You an’ me ought to pull together.”

  “My Gawd! — Me pullin’ with a sheriff. About as funny as death!”

  “There are sheriffs an’ sheriffs. I don’t need to tell you thet Lowrie was a four-flush. He couldn’t have lasted a day in Texas. Wal, outside of my likin’ you, there are some good reasons why I’d hate to clash with you.”

  “Masters, I can name one myself,” replied Kalispel, heartily. “I just don’t want to clash with you.... Suppose you name some of your reasons.”

  “Wal, youngster, I’ll tell you one, an’ if you stand for it we’ll shake on it. Then I’ll tell you the others.”

  “Shoot, Texas, dog-gone it, I kind of like you!” exclaimed Kalispel, frankly.

  “I’ve seen twice the frontier life you have, an’ most of it spent with a harder shootin’ outfit than you ever met up with. When I was your age I rode for McNelly an’ his Texas Rangers. Later I trained with gun-fighters like King Fisher, Wess Hardin’, an’ others of thet Texas ilk.... Wal, the point of all this gabbin’ aboot myself, which I ain’t much given to, is thet if you an’ me clashed heah, I’d pretty shore beat you to a gun.”