father offered him
wages and a ten per cent. bonus. He went to work. A few months later
they got into good ore. That paid fairly well, even if it was
irregular. It looked like the bad luck was over at last. Then--"

Mother Howard hesitated at the brink of the very nubbin of it all, to
Robert Fairchild. A long moment followed, in which he repressed a
desire to seize her and wrest it from her, and at last--

"It was about dusk one night," she went on. "Harry came in and took me
with him into this very room. He kissed me and told me that he must go
away. He asked me if I would go with him--without knowing why. And,
Son, I trusted him, I would have done anything for him--but I was n't
as old then as I am now. I refused--and to this day, I don't know why.
It--it was just woman, I guess. Then he asked me if I would help him.
I said I would.

"He did n't tell me much; except that he had been uptown spreading the
word that the ore had pinched out and that the hanging rock had caved
in and that he and 'Sissie' and your father were through, that they
were beaten and were going away that night. But--and Harry waited a
long time before he told me this--'Sissie' was not going with them.

"'I'm putting a lot in your hands,' he told me, 'but you 've got to
help us. "Sissie" won't be there--and I can't tell you why. The town
must think that he is. Your voice is just like "Sissie's." You 've
got to help us out of town.'

"And I promised. Late that night, the three of us drove up the main
street, your father on one side of the seat. Harry on the other, and
me, dressed in some of Sissie's clothes, half hidden between them. I
was singing; that was Sissie's habit,--to get roaring drunk and blow
off steam by yodelling song after song as he rolled along. Our voices
were about the same; nobody dreamed that I was any one else but the
Swede--my head was tipped forward, so they couldn't see my features.
And we went our way with the miners standing on the curb waving to us,
and not one of them knowing that the person who sat between your father
and Harry was any one except Larsen. We drove outside town and
stopped. Then we said good-by, and I put on an old dress that I had
brought with me and sneaked back home. Nobody knew the difference."

"But Larsen--?"

"You know as much as I do, Son."

"But did n't they tell you?"

"They told me nothing and I asked 'em nothing. They were my friends
and they needed help. I