Bankruptcy -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Alaska -- Fiction; Oakland (Calif.) -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
"Got it" he cried suddenly. "Hegan, congratulate me. It's as simple
as rolling off a log. All I've got to do is hit him on the nose, and
hit him hard."
Then he explained to the startled Hegan, and became a good listener
again, though he could not refrain now and again from making audible
chuckles of satisfaction and delight. That was the scheme. Bob always
whirled to the right. Very well. He would double the quirt in his
hand and, the instant of the whirl, that doubled quirt would rap Bob on
the nose. The horse didn't live, after it had once learned the lesson,
that would whirl in the face of the doubled quirt.
More keenly than ever, during that week in the office did Daylight
realize that he had no social, nor even human contacts with Dede. The
situation was such that he could not ask her the simple question
whether or not she was going riding next Sunday. It was a hardship of a
new sort, this being the employer of a pretty girl. He looked at her
often, when the routine work of the day was going on, the question he
could not ask her tickling at the founts of speech--Was she going
riding next Sunday? And as he looked, he wondered how old she was, and
what love passages she had had, must have had, with those college
whippersnappers with whom, according to Morrison, she herded and
danced. His mind was very full of her, those six days between the
Sundays, and one thing he came to know thoroughly well; he wanted her.
And so much did he want her that his old timidity of the apron-string
was put to rout. He, who had run away from women most of his life, had
now grown so courageous as to pursue. Some Sunday, sooner or later, he
would meet her outside the office, somewhere in the hills, and then, if
they did not get acquainted, it would be because she did not care to
get acquainted.
Thus he found another card in the hand the mad god had dealt him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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