partnership with him had closed?  Why had they declined to go with him?  Why had this money—­of which he had thought so little, and for which he had cared so little—­changed them toward him?  It had not changed him—­he was the same!  He remembered how they had often talked and laughed over a prospective “strike” in mining and speculated what they would do together with the money!  And now that “luck” had occurred to one of them, individually, the effect was only to alienate them!  He could not make it out.  He was hurt, wounded—­yet oddly enough he was conscious now of a certain power within him to hurt and wound in retribution.  He was rich:  he would let them see he could do without them.  He was quite free now to think only of himself and Kitty.

For it must be recorded that with all this young gentleman’s simplicity and unselfishness, with all his loyal attitude to his partners, his first thought at the moment he grasped the fact of his wealth was of a young lady.  It was Kitty Carter, the daughter of the hotelkeeper at Boomville, who owned the claim that the partners had mutually coveted.  That a pretty girl’s face should flash upon him with his conviction that he was now a rich man meant perhaps no disloyalty to his partners, whom he would still have helped.  But it occurred to him now, in his half-hurt, half-vengeful state, that they had often joked him about Kitty, and perhaps further confidence with them was debarred.  And it was only due to his dignity that he should now see Kitty at once.

This was easy enough, for in the naive simplicity of Boomville and the economic arrangements of her father, she occasionally waited upon the hotel table.  Half the town was always actively in love with her; the other half had been, and was silent, cynical, but hopeless in defeat.  For Kitty was one of those singularly pretty girls occasionally met with in Southwestern frontier civilization whose distinct and original refinement of face and figure were so remarkable and original as to cast a doubt on the sagacity and prescience of one parent and the morality of the other, yet no doubt with equal injustice.  But the fact remained that she was slight, graceful, and self-contained, and moved beside her stumpy, commonplace father, and her faded, commonplace mother in the dining-room of the Boomville Hotel like some distinguished alien.  The three partners, by virtue, perhaps, of their college education and refined manners, had been exceptionally noticed by Kitty.  And for some occult reason—­the more serious, perhaps, because it had no obvious or logical presumption to the world generally—­Barker was particularly favored.

He quickened his pace, and as the flagstaff of the Boomville Hotel rose before him in the little hollow, he seriously debated whether he had not better go to the bank first, deposit his shares, and get a small advance on them to buy a new necktie or a “boiled shirt” in which to present himself to Miss Kitty; but, remembering that he had partly given his word to Demorest that he would keep his shares intact for the present, he abandoned this project, probably from the fact that his projected confidence with Kitty was already a violation of Demorest’s injunctions of secrecy, and his conscience was sufficiently burdened with that breach of faith.