“Well, old sobersides!” said Joe.
“Same old Joe, aren’t you?” rejoined the minister.
“Come on. We’ll get your bags into a taxi and go up to the hotel,” Hurley said briskly. “I got rooms for you. We can’t go on to the Pass till eight o’clock to-morrow morning.”
“Is there but one train a day, Mr. Hurley?” Betty asked as he helped her into the cab.
“To Canyon Pass? Ain’t ever been one yet,” and he chuckled. “We go over with Lizard Dan and the mail. Some day, when the roads are fixed up, we may get motor service. Until then, a six-mule stagecoach has to serve.”
“Oh!”
Hunt’s eyes twinkled. “Break it to her gently, Joe,” he advised. “Bet is prepared to be very much shocked, I know. This frontier life is going to be an eye-opener for her.”
“‘Frontier life!’” snorted Hurley. “Why, we’re plumb civilized. Bill Judson has laid in a stock of near-silk hosiery and shirts with pleated bosoms. Wait till you see some of the boys in holiday rig. Knock your eye out, when it comes to style.”
Betty smiled. She did not mind being laughed at. Besides, the modern appearance of Crescent City had somewhat relieved her apprehension. Even the hotel was not bad. Their rooms were cheerful and clean, so she could excuse the brand-new, shiny oak furniture and the garish brass beds.
She did not dislike Joe Hurley – not really. It was only his influence over Ford that she observed with a somewhat jealous eye. Although the mining man seldom addressed her brother seriously, she realized that he was fond of Ford. The latter was much the stronger character of the two – she was sure of that. He would never be overborne in any essential thing by the lighter-minded Hurley. But Ford admired the latter so much that Betty felt her brother was likely to give heed to Hurley’s advice in most matters connected with this new and strange environment to which they had come.
“Bet is scared of the West and of you Westerners,” Hunt said lightly. “I don’t know but what she expected you to have sprouted horns since she saw you before, Joe.”
“Shucks!” chuckled the other. “We’re mostly born with ’em out here, Miss Betty. But they de-horn us before they let us run loose out o’ the branding pens. And remember, I spent two years in the effete East.”
“It never touched you,” and Hunt laughed. “You’re just as wild and woolly as ever.”
The girl noted that Hurley was thoughtful of their every comfort. He showed them the best of the town that day; but in the evening they rested at the hotel and talked. The two men conversed while they smoked in Hunt’s room, with the door opened into Betty’s. She heard the murmur of their voices as she sat by her darkened window and looked out into the electrically lighted main street of Crescent City.
She was not at all thrilled by the novelty of the situation. She was only troubled.
Those strangers passing by! She saw a face in the throng but seldom as the street lights flickered upon it. And always she was fearfully expectant of seeing – What? Whom? She shuddered.
CHAPTER VII – THE FIRST TRICK
The high-springed stagecoach lurched drunkenly over the trail that wound through a valley Betty thought gnomes might have hewn out when the world was young. Barren, riven rock, gaunt, stunted trees, painted cliffs hazed by distance, all added to a prospect that fell far short in the Eastern girl’s opinion of being picturesque.
Rather, it was just what her brother had termed this Western country – raw. Betty did not like any rude thing. She shrank instinctively from anything crude and unfinished.
The three – herself, her brother, and Joe Hurley – occupied the seat on the roof of the plunging coach just behind the driver. “Lizard Dan” was an uncouth individual both in speech and appearance. He was bewhiskered, overalled, wore broken boots and an enormous slouched hat, and his hands were so grimy that Betty shuddered at them, although they so skillfully handled the reins over the backs of six frisky driving-mules.
Lizard Dan, Hurley told the Easterners, had gained his nickname when he was a pocket-hunter in a now far-distant day. He had been lost in the desert at one time and swore when he came out that he had existed by eating Crotaphytus Wislizeni roasted over a fire of dry cacti – the succulence of which saurian is much doubted by the Western white man, although it is a small brother of the South American iguana, there considered a delicacy.
However, Dan acquired a nickname and such a fear of the desert thereby that he became the one known specimen of the completely cured desert rat. He never went prospecting again, but instead drove the stage between Crescent City and Canyon Pass.
“The boys expecting us at the Pass to-day, Dan?” Joe Hurley had asked early in the journey.
“Youbetcha!”
“Got your gun loaded?”
Dan kicked the heavy double-barreled shotgun at his feet and replied again:
“Youbetcha!”
“Do – do wild animals infest the road?” Betty had asked stammeringly.
“Not much,” said Hurley. “But Dan carries a heap of registered mail in which wild men, rather than wild animals, might be interested.”
“Youbetcha!” agreed Dan.
Hurley glanced sideways at Betty’s face, caught its expression, and exploded into laughter.
“You’ve come to ‘Youbetcha Land,’ Miss Betty,” he said, when he could speak again.
“He is a character,” chuckled Hunt on her other side.
The suggestion of highwaymen stuck in the girl’s mind. She looked from Lizard Dan’s weapon to the ivory butt of the heavy revolver pouched at Joe Hurley’s waist. These weapons could not be worn exactly for show – an exhibition of the vanity of rather uncouth minds. It fretted her though without frightening her, this phase of Western life. It was not the possibility of gun-fights and brawls and the offices of Judge Lynch that made Betty Hunt shrink from contact with this country and its people.
The stagecoach mounted out of the valley – which might, Hunt said, have been fittingly described by Ezekiel – and followed a winding trail through the minor range of hills that divided Crescent City and its purlieus from the Canyon Pass country. The coach pitched and rocked as though it was a sea-going hack.
In time they crossed the small divide and came down the watershed into the valley of the East Fork.
Borne to their ears on the breeze at last, through the sound of the rumbling coach-wheels and the rattling trace-chains, was another noise. A throbbing rhythm of sound with the dull swish of intermittent streams of water.
“The hydraulic pumps at the Eureka Washings,” explained Hurley. “We’ll be in sight of them – and of Canyon Pass – before very long.”
The stagecoach lurched around a corner, and the raw, red bench of the riverbank came into view. Steam pumps were noisily at work and men were busy at the sluices into which the gold-bearing earth and gravel were washed down from the high bank.
Three great, brass-nozzled hydraulic “guns” were at work – each machine straddled by a man in oil-skins and hip boots, who manipulated the heavy stream of water that ate into the bank and crumbled it in sections.
At the moment of their sighting the hydraulic washings across the river, there was raised a wild, concerted shout from a point ahead. Out of a hidden cove galloped a cavalcade of a dozen or more mounted men, who swept up the road to meet the coach.
For an instant Betty thought of the shotgun at Dan’s feet and of highwaymen. These coming riders waved guns and yelled like wild Indians. But