And Fifty Mile talked. It talked to all who came in from the white wastes of the country around. It talked in its tents. It talked while trifling with Black Pete’s games of no-chance. It talked around Raftery’s bar. It talked so loudly that men heard it up at Dumont’s Camp. From Fifty Mile and Dumont’s the talk spread up and down the trails, and even out to solitary cabins and dugouts where there were no trails. Wherever men were to be found in that desolate region the talk of Fifty Mile soon made its way. And the talk was mainly of the young squaw, of the old crippled-up squaw-man, and that she was of a beauty to set men’s heads a-whirling and make them murder each other for her possession. Men meeting each other on the trails asked three questions in order: “Where you traveling? How’s your tobacco? Heard about the beaut’ of a little squaw down to Fifty Mile?” Men travelling in the direction of the settlements bent their steps toward Fifty Mile, even though it lay far out of their course. Men travelling in the opposite direction passed the news to all whom they bespoke. Of those who came to the settlement, many strolled casually up the gully where the squaw-man had his camp. And all of them strolled down again with nothing to brag about but a drink of hooch and a mouthful of talk with the squaw-man. “I don’t quite follow that gent’s curves,” summed up Jack Raftery, speaking for the gang. “He gets enough hooch here to keep any human gent laid out twenty-six hours out of the twenty-four, but somehow whenever you come moseying up to his camp he’s on his pins, ready to give you a drink and a lot of locoed talk. Yessir, he sure is locoed until he needs a guardian, but for one I don’t go to do no rushing of his lady-folks, not while he’s able to stand on his pins and keep his eyes moving. Gents, there’s been one awful stiff man in his day, and his condition goes to show what booze’ll do to the best of ’em, and ought to be a warning to us all. Line up, men; ’bout third drink time for me.” “There is sometheeng about heem,” agreed Black Pete, “I don’t know what ‘tees, but there is sometheeng that whispairs to me, ‘Look out!’” While Fifty Mile thus debated his character, Reivers lay in his tepee, carefully playing the shameful part he had assumed. He knew that by now the news of his arrival, or rather the arrival of Neopa and Tillie, had been bruited far and wide around the settlements. Soon the news must come to the ears of the man for whose benefit the scheme had been arranged. Shanty Moir, being what he was, would become interested when he heard the descriptions of Neopa, and, also because he was what he was, he would waste no time, falter at no risks, stop at nothing when his interest had been aroused. Reivers had only to wait. Moir would come. The only danger was that Hattie and her uncle might come before him.