on and
history of this district like a real miner. I played with nothing but
miners' children from the time I was so high, pigtails and pinafores,
until I was this high, short skirts and frocks."

She indicated the progressive stages of her growth with her riding
crop, as if seeing herself in those younger years.

"Then my father sent me to an aunt, in New York, with instructions
that I was to be taught something, and to be a lady. I believe I used
to eat with my knife when I first went to her home."

She leaned back and laughed until the tears welled into her eyes.

"She was a Spartan lady. She cured me of it by rapping my knuckles
with the handle of a silver-plated knife. My, how it hurt! I feel
it yet! I wonder that they were not enlarged by her repeated
admonitions."

Dick looked at them as she held them reminiscently before her, and
had an almost irresistible desire to seize and crush the long,
slender, white fingers in his own. But the end of the meeting had
been commonplace, and they had parted again without treading on
embarrassing ground.

Dick had heard no more from the owner of the Rattler, save indirectly,
nor met him since the strained passage of the bridge; but mess-house
gossip, creeping through old Bells, who recognized no superiors, and
calmly clumped into the owner's quarters whenever he felt inclined,
said that the neighboring mine was prodigiously prosperous.

"I heard down in Goldpan," he squeaked one night, "that Wells Fargo
takes out five or six bars of bullion for him every mill clean-up. And
you can bet none of it ever gets away from that old stiff."

"But how does this news leak out?" Dick asked, wondering at such a
tale, when millmen and miners were distinguished for keeping inviolate
the secrets of the property on which they worked.

"Wells Fargo," the engineer answered. "None of the boys would say
anything. He pays top wages and hires good men. Got to hand that to
him. He brags there ain't no man so high-priced that he can't make
money off'n him--Bully Presby does. And they ain't no better miner
than him on earth. He can smell pay ore a mile underground--Bully
Presby can."

The old man suddenly looked at the superintendent, and said: "Say,
Bill. You been down to the camp a few times, ain't you?"

"Yes, we've been down there several times. Why?"

"Well, I suppose you know they's a lot of talk goin' around that the
Cross is workin' in good pay now?"

"Oh, I've heard it; but do