Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/48

36 his Montgomery Street peregrinations, he preserved silence. This was his daughter. He said to himself, with a sudden squaring of his gaunt shoulders, that he only mentioned her to his intimates, and as his intimates existed mainly in his own imagination, Viola Reed's name was almost unknown.

John Gault, who belonged to a later era of California's prosperity than the colonel, had heard that there was such a person, but had never seen her. He did not fraternize with the old man, whom he regarded as a painful landmark in the city's record of blighted hopes and ruined careers. Like many of his kind, he had an intense, selfish dislike for all that played upon his sympathies or moved him to an uncomfortable and discomposing pity.

One afternoon in the past winter he had gone across town to South Park to see some houses left him by his father, for which he had received a reasonable offer. On the way home, passing through one of the small cross-streets that connect the larger thoroughfares, he had encountered Colonel Reed and a lady. He would have passed them with the ordinary salutation, had not the lady, who had been gazing into the wayside gardens, turned her head as he approached and looked indifferently at him with what he thought were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen.