Rosie turned back slowly and sat down heavily at the kitchen table, her occupation gone. Jim didn’t need a grubstaker now. She sat there a long time, while memories of other miners who had got rich swarmed in her brain like little devils that fell over each other in their eagerness to stab her: Senator Sherrill, and Tom Potts, the hotel man, and Hooker Bates, who took his flier in Wall Street; and Mike Watson, who divorced his wife for Dora Schoonmaker, and a dozen others. They made their money and then were gathered in by women like the Schoonmakers. She had seen so many of them. They always left the women they had picked up when they were poor. Especially dance hall women. Even when they were their wives. And she and Jim had never been married. * * * * * But Rosie Briggs wasn’t a quitter. Little in her life had gone by default. When the terms of the sale of the mine had been arranged and everybody in Conifer County knew that Jim was going to be a rich man, she capped his plans with hers and squared about to meet what was coming. She went over her clothes and spruced up as much as she could to match her new station. And very carefully she laid down a program of buying to be carried out as soon as the money came in. Among her things she found a picture that she had clipped from a fashion magazine twelve years ago--a colored picture of an electric-blue plush dress of a style that she had admired. She felt a twinge of sadness as she wondered how many other things that she had wanted and gone without would look as queer as that now. The dress she had worn when Jim took her out of the dance hall--the red dress with the spangles on it--looked queerer, but that night while Jim was in the village on an errand after supper she put it on and sat waiting for him by the fire, determined to play such cards as she had. When he came in he stopped at the door of the little sitting room with a whistle of surprize. “I ain’t seen that for ten years. Didn’t know you had it.” “It isn’t much--” she said, smoothing the skirt. She had lengthened and renovated it as best she could. It was the only piece of finery she owned. “It’s all right. Lord, how purty I uster think it was!” The windows were open to the night. The weather had turned suddenly warm that day, as if the old earth had decided to start life all over again with the Briggses. There was a moon, and the new tender leaves of the aspens about the cabin made patterns on it that twinkled. You could almost feel the soft wooly anemones thrusting up their oval spear points outside. The feel of it all had got into Rosie’s heart and driven out some of her fears. She even had her old banjo in her lap. She wanted to prove to him that she meant to help him to be happy. She touched the strings and began to sing.