In the midst of it, the woman fished an ancient leather-bound volume, all scarred and marred, from the bottom of a dilapidated chest, and thereafter it lay on the table between them.  Though it remained unopened, she constantly referred to it by look and gesture, and each time she did so a greedy light blazed in Bishop’s eyes.  At the end, when she could say no more and had repeated herself from two to half a dozen times, he pulled out his sack.  Mrs. Whipple set up the gold scales and placed the weights, which he counterbalanced with a hundred dollars’ worth of dust.  Then he departed up the hill to the tent, hugging the purchase closely, and broke in on Corliss, who sat in the blankets mending moccasins.

“I’ll fix ’m yet,” Del remarked casually, at the same time patting the book and throwing it down on the bed.

Corliss looked up inquiringly and opened it.  The paper was yellow with age and rotten from the weather-wear of trail, while the text was printed in Russian.  “I didn’t know you were a Russian scholar, Del,” he quizzed.  “But I can’t read a line of it.”

“Neither can I, more’s the pity; nor does Whipple’s woman savve the lingo.  I got it from her.  But her old man—­he was full Russian, you know—­he used to read it aloud to her.  But she knows what she knows and what her old man knew, and so do I.”

“And what do the three of you know?”

“Oh, that’s tellin’,” Bishop answered, coyly.  “But you wait and watch my smoke, and when you see it risin’, you’ll know, too.”

Matt McCarthy came in over the ice Christmas week, summed up the situation so far as Frona and St. Vincent were concerned, and did not like it.  Dave Harney furnished him with full information, to which he added that obtained from Lucile, with whom he was on good terms.  Perhaps it was because he received the full benefit of the sum of their prejudice; but no matter how, he at any rate answered roll-call with those who looked upon the correspondent with disfavor.  It was impossible for them to tell why they did not approve of the man, but somehow St. Vincent was never much of a success with men.  This, in turn, might have been due to the fact that he shone so resplendently with women as to cast his fellows in eclipse; for otherwise, in his intercourse with men, he was all that a man could wish.  There was nothing domineering or over-riding about him, while he manifested a good fellowship at least equal to their own.

Yet, having withheld his judgment after listening to Lucile and Harney, Matt McCarthy speedily reached a verdict upon spending an hour with St. Vincent at Jacob Welse’s,—­and this in face of the fact that what Lucile had said had been invalidated by Matt’s learning of her intimacy with the man in question.  Strong of friendship, quick of heart and hand, Matt did not let the grass grow under his feet. “’Tis I’ll be takin’ a social fling meself, as befits a mimber iv the noble Eldorado Dynasty,” he explained, and went up the hill to a whist party in Dave Harney’s cabin.  To himself he added, “An’ belike, if Satan takes his eye off his own, I’ll put it to that young cub iv his.”