Surely this man of hers was of the eagle brood.
But there, in her mind, the simile ended.
In early March came a telegram from Whitey Lewis saying that he had
staked the claims, both placer and lode; that he was bound out by the
Telegraph Trail to file at Hazleton. Bill showed her the
message--wired from Station Six.
"I wish I could have been in on it--that was some trip," he said--and
there was a trace of discontent in his tone. "I don't fancy somebody
else pawing my chestnuts out of the coals for me. It was sure a man's
job to cross the Klappan in the dead of winter."
The filing completed, there was ample work in the way of getting out
and whipsawing timber to keep the five men busy till spring--the five
who were on the ground. Lewis sent word that thirty feet of snow lay
in the gold-bearing branch. And that was the last they heard from him.
He was a performer, Bill said, not a correspondent.
So in Granville the affairs of the Free Gold Mining Company remained at
a standstill until the spring floods should peel off the winter blanket
of the North. Hazel was fully occupied, and Bill dwelt largely with
his books, or sketched and figured on operations at the claims.
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