er time to do her packing and
consider the grave step she was taking for better or worse, like every
true, serious-minded woman ought to.

"Angus now said he couldn't afford to fritter away any more time in the
cattle business, having a wife to support in the style she had been
accustomed to, so he would go to work at his trade. He picked out
Wallace, just over in Idaho, as a young and growing town where he could
do well. He rented a nice four-room cottage there, with an icebox out on
the back porch and a hammock in the front yard, and begun to paper and
paint and grain and kalsomine and made good money from the start.
Ellabelle was a crackajack housekeeper and had plenty of time to lie out
in the hammock and read 'Lucile' of afternoons.

"By and by Angus had some money saved up, and what should he do with
bits of it now and then but grubstake old Snowstorm Hickey, who'd been
scratching mountainsides all his life and never found a thing and likely
never would--a grouchy old hardshell with white hair and whiskers
whirling about his head in such quantities that a body just naturally
called him Snowstorm without thinking. It made him highly indignant,
but he never would get the things cut. Well, and what does this old
snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the canon
past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous!
They didn't know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got assays and
they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and
drifted in a tunnel, and the assays got better, and people with money
was pretty soon taking notice.

"One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a
capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the
workings for three days. Snowstorm was awful dejected. He had hated the
capitalist right off. 'He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes
like one of these fly city dames,' says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old
scoundrel, 'and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two
thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more.
What do you think of that for nerve?'

"'Is that all?' says Angus, working away at his job in the new
International Hotel at Wallace. Graining a door in the dining-room he
was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little
curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was
at first before it was painted at