Don’t think that a squaw who wants to live like a white princess will forget to go hunting a gold mine whose richness she had seen,—­in a lard bucket, perhaps.  Lucy Lily did not abandon her bait.  She used it again, and a renegade white man snapped at it, worse luck.  So they went hunting through the Tippipahs for the mine of Injun Jim.  What excuses the squaw made for not being able to lead the man directly to the spot, I can’t say, of course; but I suppose she invented plenty.

She did one clever thing, at least.  In their wanderings she led the way into the old camp of Injun Jim.  There had been no storm to dim the tracks Casey had made, and Lucy Lily, Indian that she was, knew that these were the tracks of Casey Ryan and guessed what was his errand there.  So she and her white man trailed him across the valley to Two Peak.

They came first to the camp, and there the Little Woman met them, and by some canny intuition knew who they were and what they wanted,—­thanks to Casey’s garrulous mood when he told her of Lucy Lily.  They said that they were hunting horses, and presently went on over the ridge; not following Casey’s plain trail to the tunnel, but riding off at an angle so that they could come into the trail once they were hidden from the house.

Casey, as it happened, was not at the tunnel at all, but over at the gold mine, doing the location work.  Doing it in the side hill a good two hundred feet away from the gold streak, too, I will add.

The Little Woman watched until the squaw and her man were out of sight, and then she took a small canteen and filled it, got her rifle, pocketed her automatic revolver, and tied Babe’s sunbonnet firmly under Babe’s double chin.  She could not take the mule, because Casey had ridden him, so she walked, and carried Babe most of the way on her back.  She kept to the gulches until she was too far away to be seen in the sage, even when a squaw was squinting sharp-eyed after her.

She came, in the course of two hours or so, to the lip of the canyon, and who-whooed to Casey, mucking out after a shot he had put down in the location hole.  Casey looked up, waved his hand and then came running.  No whim would send the Little Woman on a four-mile walk with a heavy child like Babe to carry, and Casey was as white as he’ll ever get when he met her halfway to the bottom of the canyon.

“Take Babe and let’s get back to the claim,” she panted.  “I came to tell you that squaw is on your trail with a white man in tow, and it’ll be a case of claim-jumping if they can see their way tolerably clear.  He’s a mate for the two you helped me haul out of camp, and I think, Casey Ryan, the squaw would kill you in a minute if she gets the chance.”

Casey did rather a funny thing, considering how scared he was usually of the Little Woman.  “You pack that kid all the way over here?” he grunted, and picked up the Little Woman and carried her, and left Babe to walk.  Of course he helped Babe, holding her hand over the roughest spots, but it was the Little Woman whom he carried the rest of the way.  And Babe, if you please, was quite calm about it and never once became “sad” so that she must sit down and cry.