! As if
I was dead broke!--a mere tramp. As if--"

"In course! in course!" said Bill soothingly, yet turning his head aside
to bestow a deceitful smile upon the trees that whirled beside them.
"And ye told her ye didn't want her money?"

"Yes, Bill--but it--it--it was AFTER she had done this!"

"Surely! I'll take the lines now, Jeff."

He took them. Jeff relapsed into gloomy silence. The starlight of that
dewless Sierran night was bright and cold and passionless. There was no
moon to lead the fancy astray with its faint mysteries and suggestions;
nothing but a clear, grayish-blue twilight, with sharply silhouetted
shadows, pointed here and there with bright large-spaced constant stars.
The deep breath of the pine-woods, the faint, cool resinous spices of
bay and laurel, at last brought surcease to his wounded spirit. The
blessed weariness of exhausted youth stole tenderly on him. His head
nodded, dropped. Yuba Bill, with a grim smile, drew him to his side,
enveloped him in his blanket, and felt his head at last sink upon his
own broad shoulder.

A few minutes later the coach drew up at the "Summit House." Yuba Bill
did not dismount, an unusual and disturbing circumstance that brought
the bar-keeper to the veranda.

"What's up, old man?"

"I am."

"Sworn off your reg'lar pizen?"

"My physician," said Bill gravely, "hez ordered me dry champagne every
three hours."

Nevertheless, the bar-keeper lingered.

"Who's that you're dry-nussin' up there?"

I regret that I may not give Yuba Bill's literal reply. It suggested a
form of inquiry at once distant, indirect, outrageous, and impossible.

The bar-keeper flashed a lantern upon Jeff's curls and his drooping
eyelashes and mustaches.

"It's that son o' Briggs o' Tuolumne--pooty boy, ain't he?"

Bill disdained a reply.

"Played himself out down there, I reckon. Left his rifle here in pawn."

"Young man," said Bill gravely.

"Old man."

"Ef you're looking for a safe investment ez will pay ye better than
forty-rod whiskey at two bits a glass, jist you hang onter that ar
rifle. It may make your fortin yet, or save ye from a drunkard's grave."
With this ungracious pleasantry he hurried his dilatory passengers
back into the coach, cracked his whip, and was again upon the road. The
lights of the "Summit House" presently dropped here and there into the
wasting shadows of the trees. Another stretch through the close-set
ranks of pines, another dash through the