,' she said abruptly. 'If one of them were Jim
Courtot--would you want him to die?'

At the mention of Courtot's name she made out a quick hardening of his
mouth; she even saw, or fancied, an angry gathering of his brows.
To-night's work was largely the work of Jim Courtot, and because of it
Dry Gulch, which might have poured great heaps of gold at Helen's feet,
was being wrangled over by a hundred men. He thought of that and he
thought of other things, of how Courtot had fired on him from the dark
long ago, of how Courtot was hunting him after Courtot's own tenacious
fashion.

'Why do you ask that?' he demanded sharply.

She did not reply. Instead she turned from him and looked at the
stars. And then she withdrew her eyes and turned them toward the light
gleaming palely through the walls of canvas. But at last she lifted
her face again to Howard.

'I'll go in now. And maybe I am tired after all. It has been a day,
hasn't it? And please know that I felt that you did the right thing
to-night, and that I don't know another man who would have been man
enough to do it. Good night.'

'Good night,' he said, and watched her as she went into the house.

Chapter XIX

Sanchia Persistent

Thus, upon the barren flanks of Dry Gulch, a town was born. Mothered
by the stubborn desert that appears sterile and is not, it was a
sprawling, ungainly, ill-begotten thing. In the night it came; in the
dawn it grew; during the first day it assumed lustiness and an
insolence that was its birthright. And, like any welcome child, there
was a name awaiting it. Men laughed as the unceremonious christening
was performed. A half-drunken vagabond from no one knew where had
staked out his claim and drained his bottle. 'Here's lookin' at
Sanchia's Town!' he cried out, and smashed his bottle against a rock.

It appeared that every one had heard the tale of Longstreet's discovery
and of Sanchia Murray's manoeuvre. They made high fun of Longstreet
and declared that Sanchia was a cool one. The mere fact that she was a
woman enlisted their sympathies in an affair wherein they had no
interest. They were doomed to second choice and deemed it as well for
Sanchia to have had first as any one. When a narrow-headed individual
remarked that he had heard that the widow was getting nothing out of
it, but that Courtot and his crowd had cheated her, they hooted and
jeered at him until he withdrew wondering at their insane attitude. I