r. I dassen't! If I did I'd probably lose my temper
and wallop him. If somebody don't go, the men here'll be makin' a
mistake, blamin' it on me, and I can't exactly see how they could keep
from hangin' me, if they want to do justice."

He had stood in the doorway of the office to voice his complaint, and
now, without further words walked away toward his own particular
section of the little camp village.

"So that's the way that trader down there filled the order, is it?"
Dick said, frowning at his companion.

The latter merely grunted and then offered a solution.

"Probably," he said, "that stuff was sent up here without bein'
opened, just as he got it. If that's so it ain't his fault. About half
the rows in life come from takin' things for granted. The other half
because we know too well how things did happen."

He stood up and stretched his arms.

"What do you say we go down and hear what the trader has to say? If
he's square he'll make good. If he ain't--we'll make him!"

Taking it for granted that the younger man would accompany him, he was
already slipping off his working shirt and peering around the corners
of the room for his clean boots. Dick hesitated and had to be urged.
He wondered then if it were not possible that something beside the
errand to the trader's caused Bill's eagerness; but wisely kept the
idea to himself.

The camp was in the dusk when they entered it, the soft dusk that
falls over early summer evenings in the hills, when everything in
nature seems drowsily awaiting the night. They thought there was an
unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the
corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness.
Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening spaces
with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be
subdued. At the trader's there was not the usual small gathering of
loungers, squatted sociably around on cracker boxes and packing cases,
and the man with the twang was alone.

"Say, there's something wrong with that stuff you sent us," Bill
began, and the trader answered with a soft, absent-minded, "So?"

Bill repeated the words of the cook; but the storekeeper continued to
stare out of the door as if but half of what was said proved
interesting.

"I'll send up and bring it back to-morrow," he replied when the miner
had concluded his complaint. "The fact is it's a job lot I bought in
Portland, and I didn't look at it.