"Now, you git," he ordered them sternly. "There's four of us camped just
acrost the ridge from this lady's place, and we'll sure keep plenty of
eyes out. If you got any ideas about taking the back trail, you better
think agin, both of yuh. You'd never git within shootin' distance of this
lady's camp. I'm Casey Ryan that's speakin' to yuh. You ask anybody about
me. Git!"

Sourly they shouldered their bed-rolls and went limping down the trail,
and when their forms were only blurs beyond the shine of the headlights,
the little woman churned Jawn around somehow in the sand and drove back
quite as recklessly as she had come. Casey, bouncing alone in the rear
seat, did a great deal of thinking, but I don't believe he spoke once.

"Casey Ryan, I have never had much reason for feeling gratitude toward a
man, but I am truly grateful to you. You are a man and a gentleman." The
little woman had driven close to the stone cabin and had turned and rested
her arm along the back of the front seat, half supporting the sleeping
child while she looked full at Casey. She had left the engine running,
probably for sake of the headlights, and her eyes shone dark and bright in
the crisp starlight.

"'Tain't worth mentionin'," Casey protested awkwardly, and got out.

"I've been wondering if I could get a couple of you men to do the work on
my claims," she went on. "I'm paying four dollars and board, and it would
be a great nuisance to make the long trip to town and find a couple of men
I would dare trust. In fact, it's going to be pretty hard for me to trust
any one, after this experience. If you men can take the time from your own
business--"

"I don't know about the rest," Casey hedged uncomfortably. "They was
figurin' on doing something else. But I guess I could finish up the work
for yuh, all right. How deep is your shaft?"

"It's a tunnel," she corrected. "My husband started four years ago to
drift in to the contact. He'd gone fifty feet when he died. I don't know
that I'll strike the body of ore when I do reach the contact, but it's the
only hope. I'm working the four claims as a group, and the tunnel is now
eighty feet. Those two brigands have wasted a month for me, or it would be
a hundred. One man can manage, though of course it's slower and harder. I
have powder enough, unless they stole it from me. They did about five feet
all told, and tore down part of my wall, I discovered to-day, chasing a
stringer of fairly rich ore, think