oot in each hand, back of the
heel. A tear splashed down on one of them and she shook the salt water
from her eyes impatiently as if she had faced tragedy before and knew it
must be looked at calmly.

The two men adjusted the boulders they had set for fulcrums and shoved
down on the stout pieces of ash, their muscles bunching, the veins
standing out corded on their arms. Grit ran from one to the other with
eager little whines, sensing what was being attempted, eager to help.
The wagon-bed creaked, lifted a little.

"Now," grunted Sandy, "snake him out."

The girl tugged, stepping backward, her pliant strength equal to the
dead drag of the body. Sandy, straining down, saw a white beard appear,
stained with blood, an aged seamed face, hollow at cheek and temple,
sparse of hair, the flesh putty-colored despite its tan. Grit leaped in
and licked the quiet features as Sam and Sandy eased down the wagon.

"Whisky, Sam."

The girl sat cross-legged, her father's head in her lap, one hand
smoothing his forehead while the other felt under his vest and shirt,
above his heart.

"He ain't gone yit," she announced.

The old miner's teeth were tight clenched, but there were gaps in them
through which the whisky Sandy administered trickled.

"Daddy! Daddy!"

It might have been the tender agony of the cry to which Patrick Casey's
dulling brain responded, sending the message of his will along the
nerves to transmit a final summons. His body twitched, he choked,
swallowed, opened gray eyes, filmy with death, brightening with
intelligence as he saw his daughter bending over him, the face of Sandy
above her shoulder. The gray eyes interrogated Sandy's long and
earnestly until the light began to fade out of them and the wrinkled
lids shuttered down.

Another swallow of the raw spirits and they opened flutteringly again.
The lips moved soundlessly. Then, while one hand groped waveringly
upward to rest upon his daughter's head, Sandy, bending low, caught
three syllables, repeated over and over, desperately, mere ghosts of
words, taxing cruelly the last breath of the wheezing lungs beneath the
battered ribs, the final spurt of the spirit.

"_Molly--mines!_"

"I'll look out for that, pardner," said Sandy.

The eyelids fluttered, the old hands fell away, the jaw relaxed,
serenity came to the lined face, and no little dignity. For the first
time the girl gave way, lying prone, sobbing out her grief while the two
cowmen looked asi