Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/31

Rh "Well, I made that man. When I first ran against McCormick he was working in the mines up in Tuolumne, with the water squelching in his boots. In those days a dollar to Jerry looked about as big as a cart-wheel. His wife was glad enough to do a little washing, and his daughter—the youngest ones were n't born then, but the eldest, the one that married the English lord, was—used to run round bare-foot, and bring her father his dinner in a tin pail."

"I 'm sure she does n't know what a tin pail is now," said Gault, a mental picture rising in his mind of the magnificent Lady Courtley as he had seen her on her last visit to her parents.

"No," said the old man; "I hear she 's one of the Vere de Veres. And I can remember her, a little freckled-faced kid with her hair in her eyes, hanging round the tunnel of the Little Bertha, waiting to give her father his dinner."

"Do you know the younger McCormick girls, Miss Reed? Lady Courtley was before your time," said Gault, in an attempt to draw Viola into the conversation.

She looked surprised, and then gave a little laugh and shook her head.

"I 've never even seen them," she answered.

"Oh, they don't know Viola," said the colonel—not with bitterness, but as one who states a