Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/199

Rh trip. No sense in starting too soon. Larkin 'll come when I let him know we're ready."

"Sticking round that fool girl who thinks she's a movie actress, I suppose," said Healy. "She's a"

"A very good friend of mine and all of us," said Stone. "If it wasn't for her, Healy, the coyotes would be cracking your bones long ago, after the buzzards had got through with them." It seemed very evident to him that Healy had attempted certain convalescent blandishments that had been nipped in the bud by the girl. He rather wondered at it, though he was well satisfied with the way things had turned out. Peggy Furniss was not, Stone fancied, the type to attract Healy. The gambler would be apt to prefer a fuller-blown, bolder type or else the opposite extreme, the clinging vine of innocence. Healy's taste would run toward the exploitation of the one or the despoiling of the other and Peggy Furniss was neither. Pretty enough, prettier than when they had first seen her, for the past ten days of returned health had exiled all hollows and been gracious to all curves; she was far from being a fool.

There was a spring beneath some trees not far from the sanitarium and they rested there until sundown, sleeping through the afternoon. Between eight that night and five the next morning they achieved twenty miles in the cool of the night, marching under the stars and a nearly full moon that rose late in the afternoon and was still plain, but wan, in the west when they made a dry camp for breakfast.