“That’s a mighty queer story how Jack got that girl sweet on him just by borrowin’ a prospectin’ pan of her,” said Faulkner, between the whiffs of his pipe under the trees.  “You and me might have borrowed a hundred prospectin’ pans and never got even a drink thrown in.  Then to think of that old preachin’ coon-hunter hevin’ to give in and pass his strike over to his daughter’s feller, jest because he had scruples about gold diggin’ himself.  He’d hev booted you and me outer his ranch first.”

“Lord, ye ain’t takin’ no stock in that hogwash,” responded the other.  “Why, everybody knows old man Jallinger pretended to be sick o’ miners and minin’ camps, and couldn’t bear to hev ’em near him, only jest because he himself was all the while secretly prospectin’ the whole lode and didn’t want no interlopers.  It was only when Fleming nippled in by gettin’ hold o’ the girl that Jallinger knew the secret was out, and that’s the way he bought him off.  Why, Jack wasn’t no miner—­never was—­ye could see that.  He never struck anything.  The only treasure he found in the woods was Tinka Jallinger!”

A BELLE OF CANADA CITY

Cissy was tying her hat under her round chin before a small glass at her window.  The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level—­the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape.  The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere.  There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of “stores,” ending abruptly against a tangled bluff; there was the ruthless clearing in the sedate pines where the hideous spire of the new church imitated the soaring of the solemn shafts it had displaced with almost irreligious mockery.  Yet this foreground was Cissy’s world—­her life, her sole girlish experience.  She did not, however, bother her pretty head with the view just then, but moved her cheek up and down before the glass, the better to examine by the merciless glare of the sunlight a few freckles that starred the hollows of her temples.  Like others of her sex, she was a poor critic of what was her real beauty, and quarreled with that peculiar texture of her healthy skin which made her face as eloquent in her sun-kissed cheek as in her bright eyes and expression.  Nevertheless, she was somewhat consoled by the ravishing effect of the bowknot she had just tied, and turned away not wholly dissatisfied.  Indeed, as the acknowledged belle of Canada City and the daughter of its principal banker, small wonder that a certain frank vanity and childlike imperiousness were among her faults—­and her attractions.