I knew Bill well enough to let him relapse just so many minutes; then I said: "Judge Chase's wife is lovelier at sixty than most girls at sixteen, but I hadn't an idea she figured so romantic ally in the early days as to send anybody overboard."
"H'm," replied Bill reflectively.
The horses traveled on without attention, and I waited in patience.
"You know what it was like," he began at last. "Men with guns from all over the Union and gold the heaven we sweated for. Prayers, and court, and the gambling tables all running under one roof, and nary a woman's face showing up in the mass to give us courage. To be sure, there were vixenish ribs o' Satan who robbed, and killed, and drank with the worst of us; but until '51 we'd never the woman for reverence. Then, by degrees, the lawyers and a stray merchant or two aired their families, but things wasn't dizzy till pretty Grace Blanchard got out with her father.
"Understand, she carried herself as she'd ought to; but, understand, there was men among us as was born and bred to live with blood. The mass of us had to take out our satisfaction in looking at her; but for two the favor in old Blanchard's eyes was easy reading, and it wasn't long seeing the course the straw took.
"Ned Emory was a long, lean, blond fellow, with a blamed fine face and a way that made friends of the toughest. They said he looked a swell when he called at the Blanchards', but I never saw him but like the rest of us,—red-shirted and overalled, and an angle to his pistols that made him a joy.
"George Stokes—'Shorty,' we called him—was a man with an answer that ripped like a knife and a head that made success of everything, because it could work crooked as well as straight. He'd been on the bench, but he'd located a vein at Mariposa, and was overseeing up there in '52. Naturally, he lost opportunities, not being right on the spot, and the danger began.
"The Blanchard house was swelled larger than most of the cabins, and had two long windows that opened onto a porch. Things might never have been so bad but for those two lidless eyes in front.
"One fatal night Shorty Stokes rode into the settlement,—but I'm getting ahead of affairs."
