“Well, that’s true. He was. I seen him when he was. Jake Shackleton crossed the Sierra with two wives. One--the first one--was the lady who died here a month ago, and passed as Mrs. Moreau. The other’s the widow. But she was the second wife. She didn’t have no children then. But the first wife had one, a girl baby, born on the plains in Utah. It weren’t three weeks old when I seen it.” “Where did you see it?” “In the Sierra back of Hangtown. Me and Dan Moreau was workin’ a stream bed there. And one day two emigrants, a man and a woman, with a sick woman inside the wagon, came down from the summit. They was Jake Shackleton and his two wives, and they was the worst looking outfit you’ve ever clapped your eyes on. They was pretty near dead. One er their horses did die, in front of our cabin, and the sick woman--she that afterwards was called Mrs. Moreau--was too beat out to move on. Shackleton, who didn’t care who died, so long’s they got into the settlements, calkalated to make her ride a spell, and when the other horse dropped make her walk. She was the orneriest lookin’ scarecrow you ever seen, and she hadn’t no more life’n a mummy. But she was ready to do just what they said. She was just so beat out. And then Moreau--he was just that kind of a fool--” He paused and looked at Essex, with his beady, dark eyes glistening with a sense of the importance of his communication. His hand sought the glass and he drained it. Then he leaned forward to deliver the climax of his story:-- “Bought her from Shackleton for a pair of horses.” “Bought her for a pair of horses! How could he?” “I’m not sayin’ how he could; I’m sayin’ what he did.” “What did he do it for?” “The Lord knows. He was that kind of a fool. We had her in the cabin sick for days, with me and him waitin’ on her hand and foot, and the cussed baby yellin’ like a coyote. She wasn’t good for anything. Just ust ter lie round sick and peaked and sorter pine. But Moreau got a crazy liking for her, and he was sot on the baby same’s if it was his own. I caught on pretty soon to the way the cat was goin’ to jump. I lit out and left ’em.” “Why did you leave if the claim was good?” “It weren’t no good when no one worked it, and there weren’t more’n enough in it for Moreau alone, with a woman and a baby on his hands. He said first off he was only goin’ to get her cured up and send her to the Eldorado Hotel to be a waitress, but I seen fast enough what was goin’ to happen. And it did happen. They was snowed in up there all winter. In the spring he took her into Hangtown and married her--said he was marryin’ a widow woman whose husband died on the plains. I heard that afterwards from some er the boys, but it weren’t my business to give ’em away. So I shut my mouth and ain’t opened it till now. But Moreau’s dead, and the woman’s dead, and now Shackleton’s dead. There ain’t no one what knows but me and Shackleton’s widow.”