Gregory Compton’s indifference to women had been more pretended than real, although an occasional wild night on The Flat had interested him far more than picnics and dances where the girls used no better grammar than the “sporting women” and were far less amusing. He went to this picnic to please his old school friend, Mark Blake, and because Nine Mile Cañon had looked very green and alluring after the June rains when he had ridden through it alone the day before. The moment he stood before Ida Hook, staring into the baffling limpid eyes, about which heavy black lashes rose and fell and met and tangled and shot apart in a series of bedevilling manœuvres, he believed himself to be possessed by that intimate soul-seeking desire that nothing but marriage can satisfy. He kept persistently at her side, his man’s instinct prompting the little attentions women value less than they demand. He also took more trouble to interest her verbally than was normal in one whom nature had prompted to silence, and he never would learn the rudiments of small talk; but his brain was humming in time with his eager awakened pulses, and Ida was too excited and exultant to take note of his words. “It was probably about mines, anyway,” she confided to her friends, Ruby and Pearl Miller. “Nobody talks about anything else long in this old camp.” Gregory’s infatuation was by no means reduced by the fact that no less than six young men contended for the favour of Miss Hook. She was the accredited beauty of Butte, for even the ladies of the West Side had noticed and discussed her and hoped that their husbands and brothers had not. It was true that her large oval blue-grey eyes, set like Calliope’s, were as shallow as her voice; but the lids were so broad and white, and the lashes so silky and oblique, that the critical faculty of man was drugged, if dimly prescient. Her cheeks were a trifle too full, her nose of a type unsung in marble; but what of that when her skin was as white as milk, the colour in cheek and lips of a clear transparent coral, that rarest and most seductive of nature’s reds, her little teeth enamelled like porcelain? And had she not every captivating trick, from active eyelash to the sudden toss of her small head on its long round throat, even to the dilating nostril which made her nose for the moment look patrician and thin! Her figure, too, with its boyish hips, thin flexible waist, and full low bust, which she carried with a fine upright swing, was made the most of in a collarless blouse, closely fitting skirt, and narrow dark belt. Miss Hook, although her expression was often wide-eyed and innocent, was quite cynically aware of her power over the passions of men. More than one man of high salary or recent fortune had tried to “annex” her, as she airily put it; her self-satisfaction and the ever-present sophistications of a mining town saving her from anything so gratuitous as outraged maidenhood.