“You did n’t swallow all that rot about the diamond, did you?” he asked, crossly.

Flip ran a little ahead, as if to avoid a reply.

“You don’t mean to say that’s the sort of hog wash the old man serves out to you regularly?” continued Lance, becoming more slangy in his ill temper.

“I don’t know that it’s any consarn o’ yours what I think,” replied Flip, hopping from boulder to boulder, as they crossed the bed of a dry watercourse.

“And I suppose you’ve piloted round and dry-nussed every tramp and dead-beat you’ve met since you came here,” continued Lance, with unmistakable ill humor.  “How many have you helped over this road?”

“It’s a year since there was a Chinaman chased by some Irishmen from the Crossing into the brush about yer, and he was too afeered to come out, and nigh most starved to death in thar.  I had to drag him out and start him on the mountain, for you couldn’t get him back to the road.  He was the last one but you.”

“Do you reckon it’s the right thing for a girl like you to run about with trash of this kind, and mix herself up with all sorts of roughs and bad company?” said Lance.

Flip stopped short.  “Look! if you’re goin’ to talk like Dad, I’ll go back.”

The ridiculousness of such a resemblance struck him more keenly than a consciousness of his own ingratitude.  He hastened to assure Flip that he was joking.  When he had made his peace they fell into talk again, Lance becoming unselfish enough to inquire into one or two facts concerning her life which did not immediately affect him.  Her mother had died on the plains when she was a baby, and her brother had run away from home at twelve.  She fully expected to see him again, and thought he might sometime stray into their canon.  “That is why, then, you take so much stock in tramps,” said Lance.

You expect to recognize him?”

“Well,” replied Flip, gravely, “there is suthing in that, and there’s suthing in this:  some o’ these chaps might run across brother and do him a good turn for the sake of me.”

“Like me, for instance?” suggested Lance.

“Like you.  You’d do him a good turn, wouldn’t you?”

“You bet!” said Lance, with a sudden emotion that quite startled him; “only don’t you go to throwing yourself round promiscuously.”  He was half conscious of an irritating sense of jealousy, as he asked if any of her proteges had ever returned.

“No,” said Flip, “no one ever did.  It shows,” she added with sublime simplicity, “I had done ’em good, and they could get on alone.  Don’t it?”

“It does,” responded Lance grimly.  “Have you any other friends that come?”

“Only the Postmaster at the Crossing.”

“The Postmaster?”

“Yes:  he’s reckonin’ to marry me next year, if I’m big enough.”

“And what do you reckon?” asked Lance earnestly.