Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/18

4 dressed in Bedford-cord riding breeches. Cordovan puttees and shoes, and a gray flannel shirt, all the worse for wear, but fitting him with a perfection that was aggressive even in poverty. Jim was blond and blue-eyed amid his tan. His broad shoulders should have been straighter and his chest should have shown more development. His good chin made one wonder why he was receiving monthly checks from New York, until you saw how stubborn it was, and reflected that all remittances are not necessarily those of charity or tolerance. As a matter of fact, Jim's checks came from the only portion of his inheritance that he could not lay his prodigal fingers upon in its entirety, but as he never discussed his private affairs with anybody, nor showed interest in theirs, he was classed as one of those who are paid to stay away from the family rooftree. His camp sobriquet was "The Dude."

There was Wat Lyman, whose white beard fanned wide and low across his faded blue shirt and whose time- and weather-beaten face, like a carving in mahogany, was seamed like the payrock he had spent his life in seeking—Wat Lyman, prospector, and the only miner of the four of them, a giant whose eyes were a little dim and whose muscles were a little lacking in fibrin, but whose word was his bond and whose courage never faltered.

There was the man who called himself Frank Healy, whose dark eyes were too close together, too small, too shifty, and whose hands suggested that he handled a deck of cards far better than a drill. A