up and rock
her again in the old homemade chair with crooked juniper branches hewn for
rockers.

With Babe in his arms he told her, too, about his coming out to hunt the
Injun Jim mine. He must have felt pretty well acquainted, by then, because
he regaled her with a painstaking, Caseyish description of Lucy Lily and
her educated wardrobe, and--because she was a murderous kind of squaw and
entitled to no particular chivalry--even repeated her manner of proposing
to a white man, and her avowed reason and all. That was going pretty far,
I think, for one evening, but we must keep in mind the fact that Casey and
the Little Woman had met almost a month before this, and that Casey had
merely thrown wide open the little door to his real self.

At any rate it was after ten o'clock by Casey's Ingersoll when he tucked
Babe into her little bed, brought a jelly glass of cold water for the
Little Woman to drink in the night, and started for the door.

There he stopped for a minute, debated with his shyness and turned back.

"You mebby moved that steel at the wrong time," he said abruptly, "I guess
you musta, the way it happened. But I was so scared I'd hit yuh, my teeth
was playin' the dance to _La Paloma_. I was in a cold sweat. I never did
hit a man with a double-jack in my life, and I guess I've put down ten
miles uh holes, ma'am, if you placed 'em end to end. I always made it my
brag I never scraped a knuckle at that game. But--them little hands of
yours on the drill--I was shakin' all over for fear I might--hurt yuh. I--
I never hated anything so bad in my life--I'd ruther kill a dozen men than
hurt you--"

"Man alive," the Little Woman exclaimed softly from her dusky corner,
"you'd never have hurt me in the world, if I'd had the nerve to trust
you." And she added softly, "I'll trust you, from now on, Casey Ryan.
Always."

I think Casey was an awful fool to walk out and never let her know that he
heard that "Always."

CHAPTER XXI

"Casey Ryan," the Little Woman began with her usual abruptness one
evening, when she was able to walk as far as the mine and back without
feeling; the effect of the exercise, but was still nursing a bandaged
right hand; "Casey Ryan, tell me again just what old Injun Jim looked
like."

Casey laughed and shifted Babe to a more secure perch on his shoulder, and
drew his head to one side in an effort to slacken Babe's terrific pull on
his hair. "Him? Mean an' ornery as the meanest thin