fingers out, brushed the miner's singed hair
back from his brow, and said: "I've forgotten your name, but--I want
to say--you're a man!"

CHAPTER VI

MY LADY OF THE HORSE

"It serves you right for bein' so anxious to help one of them
dance-hall women; not but what I'd probably 'a' done it myself," was
the croaking, querulous consolation offered by Bells Park as he sat
beside the plainly suffering and heavily bandaged Bill that night, or
rather in the early hours of the morning, in the cabin on the Cross.
"They ain't no good except for young fools to gallop around with over
a floor."

He poured some more olive oil over the bandages, and relented enough
to add: "All but The Lily, and she don't dance with none of 'em. She's
all right, she is. Mighty peart looker, too. None purtier than Dorothy
Presby, though."

Dick, looking up from where he sat with his tired chin resting on his
tired hands and elbows, thought of the gruff Bully Presby with some
interest.

"Oh, so the old Rattler owner has a daughter, eh?"

"I don't mean old skinflint Presby!" sharply corrected the engineer.
"He ain't the only Presby in this whole United States, is he? He don't
own the whole world and the name, even if he thinks he does. This
Presby I'm talkin' about ain't no kin of his. He's too white. He owns
all them sawmills on the other side of the Cross peak, about four
miles from here. Got a railroad of his own. Worth about a billion, I
reckon."

Dick's momentary interest subsided, but he heard the old man babbling
on:

"I worked for him once, when Dorothy was a little bit of a kid. Him
and me fought, but he's a white man. She's been away to some of those
fool colleges for women back East, they say, for the last four or five
years. It don't do women no good to know too much. My wife couldn't
read or write, and she was the best woman that ever lived, bar none."

He looked around as if delivering a challenge, and, finding that no
one was paying any attention to him, subsided, fidgeted for a minute,
and then said he guessed he'd "turn in so's the water wouldn't gain on
the pumps in the mornin'."

On the insistent demand of his partner, Dick also retired shortly, and
the cabin on the hillside was dark save for the dim light that glowed
in the sufferer's room.

They began to straggle in, the men wanted, before the partners had
finished their breakfast on the following morning. Some of them were
real miners, and others were non