vil joy made it impossible for him to find further
words. He broke off, and, a moment later, went on coldly: "All right,
I'll do as you say. Gee, but it makes me sick. Eh? No. I won't tell
other folk. Nor Eve--but--but you're goin' to give me that gold, an'
I'll be rich. Say, I'll be able to buy buggies, an' hosses, an'
ranches, an' things? I'll be able to have plenty folks workin' for me?
Gee! I'll make 'em work. I'll make 'em sick to death when I get that
gold."

Peter rose abruptly to return to work. The boy's diseased mind
nauseated him. His heart revolted with each fresh revelation of the
terrible degeneracy that possessed the lad.

CHAPTER XVIII

A WOMAN'S INSTINCT

The women of Barnriff were as keenly alive to the prevailing
excitements as the men. Perhaps they were affected differently, but
this was only natural. The village, with its doings, its gossip, was
their life. The grinding monotony of household drudgery left them
little margin for expansion. Their horizon possessed the narrowest
limits in consequence. Nor could it be otherwise. Most of them lived
in a state of straining two ends across an impossible gulf, and the
process reduced them to a condition of pessimism which blinded them to
matters beyond their narrow focus.

But just now the cloud had lifted for a moment and a flutter of
excitement gave them an added interest in things, and relieved them
from the burden of their usual topics. When they met now matters of
housekeeping and babies, and their men-folk, were thrust aside for the
fresher interests. And thus Pretty Wilkes, blustering out of Abe
Horsley's emporium in a heat of indignation, found little sympathy for
her grievance from Mrs. Rust and Jane Restless.

"Say, I'll give Carrie a word or two when I see her," she cried,
viciously flourishing a roll of print in the faces of her friends. "If
Abe isn't a money grubbing skinflint I just don't know nothin'. Look
at that stuff. Do I know print? Do I know pea-shucks! He's been tryin'
to sell me faded goods that never were anything else but faded, at
twice the price they ever were, when they couldn't have been worth
half of it if the color hadn't faded that never did, because there
wasn't no decent color to fade. I'll----"

But the two women's attention was wandering. They were gazing across
at Eve's house where Annie Gay was just disappearing through the
doorway. Pretty saw her, too, and, in a moment, her anger merged into
the gener