The Countess nodded.  “Right!  They deserve it.  You know we don’t have any stealing on the ‘inside.’  Now, then, I’ll say good-by.”  She paid Pierce and extended her hand to him.  “Thank you for helping me across.  I’ll be in Dyea by dark.”

“I hope we’ll meet again,” he said, with a slight flush.

The woman favored him with one of her generous, friendly smiles.  “I hope so, too.  You’re a nice boy.  I like you.”  Then she stepped into the building and was gone.

“A nice boy!” Phillips was pained.  A boy!  And he the sturdiest packer on the pass, with perhaps one exception!  That was hardly just to him.  If they did meet again—­and he vowed they would—­he’d show her he was more than a boy.  He experienced a keen desire to appear well in her eyes, to appear mature and forceful.  He asked himself what kind of man Count Courteau could be; he wondered if he, Pierce Phillips, could fall in love with such a woman as this, an older woman, a woman who had been married.  It would be queer to marry a countess, he reflected.

As he walked toward his temporary home he beheld quite a gathering of citizens, and paused long enough to note that they were being harangued by the confidence-man who had first initiated him into the subtleties of the three-shell game.  Mr. Broad had climbed upon a raised tent platform and was presenting an earnest argument against capital punishment.  Two strangers upon the fringe of the crowd were talking, and Pierce heard one of them say: 

“Of course he wants the law to take its course, inasmuch as there isn’t any law.  He’s one of the gang.”

“The surest way to flush a covey of crooks is to whistle for old Judge Lynch,” the other man agreed.  “Listen to him!”

“Have they caught the cache-robbers?” Phillips made bold to inquire.

“No, and they won’t catch them, with fellows like that on the committee.  The crooks hang together and we don’t.  If I had my way that’s just what they’d do—­hang together.  I’d start in by bending a limb over that rascal.”

Phillips had attended several of these indignation meetings and, remembering that all of them bad proved purposeless, he went on toward the McCaskey brothers’ tent.  He and the McCaskeys were not the closest of friends, in spite of the fact that they had done him a favor—­a favor, by the way. for which he had paid many times over—­nevertheless, they were his most intimate acquaintances and he felt an urgent desire to tell them about his unusual experience.  His desire to talk about the Countess Courteau was irresistible.

But when he entered the tent his greeting fell flat, for Joe, the elder McCaskey, addressed him sharply, almost accusingly: 

“Say, it’s about time you showed up!”

“What’s the matter?” Pierce saw that the other brother was stretched out in his blankets and that his head was bandaged.  “Hello!” he cried.  “What ails Jim?  Is he sick?”