I’m sure I can’t see how Casey Ryan ever got the name of being a devil with the ladies.  He certainly behaved like a yap then, if you get my meaning.  He gave the Little Woman a quick, unwinking stare, looked away from her shamedly, reached for his plug of tobacco, took away his hand, swallowed twice, shuffled his feet and then grunted—­I can use no other word for it: 

“Aw, I guess I c’n stand it if you can!”

He made a motion then to rise up and go to his own camp where he would undoubtedly think of many tender, witty things that he would like to have spoken to the Little Woman.  But she was watching him.  She saw him move and stopped him with a question.

“Casey Ryan, tell me the truth about that tunnel.  Do you think it’s ever going to strike the ore body at all?”

Start Casey off on the subject of mining and you have him anchored and interested for an hour, at least.  The Little Woman had brains, you must see that.

“Well, I don’t want to discourage you, ma’am,” Casey said reluctantly, the truth crowding against his teeth.  “But I’d ‘a’ gone in under that iron capping, if I’d been doing it.  The outcropping you followed in from the surface never has been in place, ma’am.  It’s what I’d call a wild stringer.  It pinched out forty foot back of where we’re diggin’ now.  That’s just an iron stain we’re following, and the pocket of high grade don’t mean nothin’.  You went in on the strength of indications—­” He stopped there and chuckled to himself, in a way that I’d come to know as the “indications” of a story,—­which usually followed.

The Little Woman probably guessed.  I suppose she was lonely, too, and the pain of her hurts made her want entertainment.  “What are you laughing at, Casey Ryan?” she demanded.  “If it’s funny, tell me."

Casey blushed, though she couldn’t have seen him in the dusky light of the cabin.  “Aw, it ain’t anything much,” he protested bashfully.  “I just happened to think about a little ol’ Frenchman I knowed once, over in Cripple Creek, ma’am.”  He stopped.

“Well?  Tell me about the little ol’ Frenchman.  It made you laugh, Casey Ryan, and it’s about the first time I’ve seen you do that.  Tell me.”

“Well, it ain’t nothin’ very funny to tell about,” Casey hedged like a bashful boy; which was mighty queer for Casey Ryan, I assure you.  For if there was anything Casey liked better than a funny story, it was some one to listen while he told it.  “You won’t git the kick, mebby.  It’s knowin’ the Frenchman makes it seem kinda funny when I think about it.  He was a good little man and he kept a little hotel and was an awful good cook.  And he wanted a gold mine worse than anybody I ever seen.  He didn’t know a da—­nothin’ at all about minin’ ma’am, but every ol’ soak of a prospector could git a meal off him by tellin’ him about some wildcat bonanza or other.  He’d forgit to charge ’em, he’d be so busy listenin’.