“Hello, Mark,” Jim had said, a trifle startled by King’s sudden appearance.  “Here you come again, like a Injun out’n the woods.”

Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench.  King paused, saying: 

“Hello, Jim.  Has Ben showed up yet?”

“No, he ain’t showed, Mark.  Expectin’ him?”

“Yes.  Who’s in the house, then?”

“Why, some of ’em come on ahead.  Ben’s girl, for one, and that city guy, Gratton, for another.  She didn’t say anything about Ben comin’; she did say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon.”

Gloria and Gratton here?  King frowned.  He had had ample time during the long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to say to Gloria Gaynor.  And now she was here—­with Gratton.  He turned into Jim’s quarters.  He had no desire—­or at least so he told himself very emphatically—­to see either one of them.

“I’ve hit the trail hard to-day, Jim,” he said as Jim followed him and King closed the door.  “And I’m dead tired and as hungry as a bear.  What shape’s the cupboard in?”

“Fine,” returned Spalding hospitably.  “You know me, Mark.”

So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone, Mark King sat at Spalding’s table, not a hundred yards away, and made a silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim’s crude baking, and a dubious, warmed-over stew.  Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim’s bunk and the two smoked their pipes.  With nothing in particular to be said, virtually nothing was said.

“Needn’t tell anybody I’m here, Jim.”  King was knocking the ashes out of his pipe.  “I haven’t any business with the folks in there.  But keep your eye peeled for Ben, will you?  The minute he comes I want to see him.”

“Maybe,” suggested Spalding, “his girl brought word?”

“No.  Ben is in Coloma.  Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would have come up from the city, you know.  That means they would have come through Placerville or Truckee.”

“Guess so,” agreed Spalding.  “That’s right.  I’ll set outside where I can watch for Ben.  Goin’ to take a snooze?”

“Yes.”

And after lying ten minutes staring up at the ceiling above him King went to sleep.

“Must of been goin’ some to-day,” meditated the man who was once more on his bench outside the door.  “King looks tuckered.”

He sat through the thickening shadows watching the stars come trooping into the darkening sky, hearkening to the night breeze among the trees, and the thin singing noises of insects.  An hour or so later he heard horses.  “That would be Ben, now,” was his first thought.  His second was that it might be some one else, and that there was no sense waking a tired man for nothing.  So he went down toward the house.  He saw two men dismount and tie their horses; he saw the door open and Gratton come out.  The horsemen went up to the porch.  Neither was Ben Gaynor.  One, as he passed in through the light-filled doorway, was a little grey man whom Jim had never seen before; the other man, it happened, he knew.  Rather well by sight and reputation, a good-for-nothin’ scalawag, as Jim catalogued him, name of Steve Jarrold.  The door closed after them and Jim went back to his bench.