“Injun Jim, that was—­couldn’t be anybody else!” Casey knocked his pipe against the front of the little cookstove, emptying the half-burned tobacco into the hearth.  The Little Woman probably wondered why he seemed so unexcited, but she did not know all of Casey’s traits.  He put away his pipe and almost immediately reached for his plug of tobacco, taking a chew without remembering where he was.  “If you feel able to ride,” he said, “I’ll ketch up the mule in the morning, and we’ll go over there.”

“So your heart is really set on finding it, after all.  I’ve been wondering about that.  You haven’t seemed to be thinking much about it, lately.”

“A feller can prospect,” Casey declared, “when he can’t do nothin’ else.”  And he added rather convincingly, “Good jobs is scarce, out this way.  I’d be a fool to pass up this one, when I’d have the hull winter left fer prospectin’.”

“And what about those partners of yours?”

“Oh, them?” Casey hesitated, tempted perhaps to tell the truth.  “Oh, they’ve quit on me.  They quit right away after I went to work.  We—­we had a kinda fuss, and they’ve went back to town.”  He stopped and added with a sigh of relief, “We can just as well count them out, fr’m now on—­an’ fergit about ’em.”

“Oh,” said the Little Woman, and smiled to herself.  “Well, if you are anxious about that patch of brush in the canyon, we’ll go and see what’s behind it.  To-morrow is Sunday, anyway.”

“I’d a made up the time, if it wasn’t,” Casey assured her with dignity.  “I’ve been waitin’ a good many years for a look at that Injun Jim gold.”

“And it’s just possible that I have been almost within reach of it for the past four years and didn’t know it!  Well, I always have believed that Fate weaves our destinies for us; and a curious pattern is the weaving, sometimes!  I’ll go with you, Casey Ryan, and I hope, for your sake, that Indian Jim’s mine is behind that clump of bushes.  And I hope,” she added, with a little laugh whose meaning was not clear to Casey, “I hope you get a million dollars out of it!  I should like to point to Casey Ryan, the mining millionaire and say, ’That plutocratic gentleman over there once knocked me down with a hammer, and washed my dishes for two weeks, and really, my dears, you should taste his sour-dough biscuits!’”

Casey went away to his camp and lay awake a long time, not thinking about the Injun Jim mine, if you please, but wondering what he had done to make the Little Woman give him hell about his biscuits.  Good Lord!  Did she still blame him for hitting her with that double-jack?—­when he knew and she knew that she had made him do it!—­and if she didn’t like his sour-dough biscuits, why in thunder had she kept telling him she did?

He tucked the incident away in the back of his mind, meaning to watch her and find out just what she did mean, anyway.  Her opinion of him had become vital to Casey; more vital than the Injun Jim mine, even.