As she came through the door, her head up, her lips a little hard, Broderick was the first to see her and was upon his feet in a flash, as graceful as a cavalier, as debonair in his big boots and soft white silk shirt as though he had been a courtly gentleman dressed for the ball, his eyes frankly filled with the appreciation of her dainty beauty.  Pollard, remembering, rose too, and last of all Cole Dalton, his shrewd eyes intense and keen upon her.  Winifred’s gaze passed by Broderick as though she had not seen him and travelled to her uncle while she waited for the introductions.

Dalton, who was first to be presented, put out a big, hard, square hand, capturing and releasing Winifred’s suddenly as though it were a part of the day’s work to be done and over with.  He had stepped forward and now stepped back to his chair, his keen, watchful eyes never leaving her face.

Then Broderick took the hand which she did not like to refuse to her uncle’s friend and guest and yet which she disliked giving him, saw the little flush which his gaze drove into her cheeks, and with a hint of laughter in his eyes bowed over it gallantly, murmuring his happiness in knowing her.  And it was Broderick who stepped quickly to her chair, drawing it out for her to be seated.  She found herself wondering where this man had learned to do these little things which are no part of the training of the far out cattle men.

During the first half of the meal there was no reference to the happening at Harte’s Camp.  Broderick, with a mood contagiously care free and sparkling, did the greater part of the talking, and though he elicited from the girl rare words beyond a brief “yes” or “no,” he seemed content.  And he interested her.  He talked well, with little slurs of grammar that seemed rather due to the man’s carelessness of nature than to ignorance, his vocabularly not without picturesque force.  It seemed natural that he should do the talking, that he should address himself largely to her, and that Pollard and Cole Dalton should listen and watch him.

Within ten minutes she gleaned that Broderick was a miner, that he had a claim of some sort in the mountains back of Hill’s Corners, to the eastward, that a couple of years ago he had made his “pile” in the Yukon country and that he had lost it in unwise speculation, that he knew more than the names of the streets of the chief cities of both coasts, that he had strong hopes of making a strike where he was and of selling out at a good figure to a mining concern with which he was already corresponding.  And yet this light miscellany of information was so brightly sprinkled into the flow of talk upon a score of other matters that it did not seem that the man was ever talking of himself.

Finally Pollard, catching a sharp look from Sheriff Dalton, got up and stepped into the kitchen where Mrs. Riddell was.  The woman went out into the yard and Pollard came back.  Before he had taken his chair again Dalton said abruptly, turning upon the girl: