ow many people, directly and indirectly, had
his cause at heart that Christmas week. Two men strove in particular,
one for him and one for the sake of Frona. Pete Whipple, an old-timer
in the land, possessed an Eldorado claim directly beneath French Hill,
also a woman of the country for a wife,--a swarthy _breed_, not over
pretty, whose Indian mother had mated with a Russian fur-trader some
thirty years before at Kutlik on the Great Delta. Bishop went down one
Sunday morning to yarn away an hour or so with Whipple, but found the
wife alone in the cabin. She talked a bastard English gibberish which
was an anguish to hear, so the pocket-miner resolved to smoke a pipe
and depart without rudeness. But he got her tongue wagging, and to
such an extent that he stopped and smoked many pipes, and whenever she
lagged, urged her on again. He grunted and chuckled and swore in
undertones while he listened, punctuating her narrative regularly with
_hells_! which adequately expressed the many shades of interest he felt.

In the midst of it, the woman fished an ancient leather-bound volume,
all scarred and marred, from the bottom of a dilapidated chest, and
thereafter it lay on the table between them. Though it remained
unopened, she constantly referred to it by look and gesture, and each
time she did so a greedy light blazed in Bishop's eyes. At the end,
when she could say no more and had repeated herself from two to half a
dozen times, he pulled out his sack. Mrs. Whipple set up the gold
scales and placed the weights, which he counterbalanced with a hundred
dollars' worth of dust. Then he departed up the hill to the tent,
hugging the purchase closely, and broke in on Corliss, who sat in the
blankets mending moccasins.

"I'll fix 'm yet," Del remarked casually, at the same time patting the
book and throwing it down on the bed.

Corliss looked up inquiringly and opened it. The paper was yellow with
age and rotten from the weather-wear of trail, while the text was
printed in Russian. "I didn't know you were a Russian scholar, Del,"
he quizzed. "But I can't read a line of it."

"Neither can I, more's the pity; nor does Whipple's woman savve the
lingo. I got it from her. But her old man--he was full Russian, you
know--he used to read it aloud to her. But she knows what she knows
and what her old man knew, and so do I."

"And what do the three of you know?"

"Oh, that's tellin'," Bishop answered, coyly. "But you wait