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But Chloe had taken no note of the personnel of the scowmen, nor of the fact that the freight of the head scow consisted only of pieces that obviously contained provisions, together with her own tent and sleeping outfit, and several burlapped pieces marked with the name "MacNair." Idly she wondered who MacNair was, but refrained from asking.
She did not attempt to keep the story from Captain Dan Rugley when she got back home on the fourth evening. "Smart girl!" the old ranchman said, when she told him of the make-believe treasure chest she had carted halfway to Amarillo, burlapped, corded, and tagged as though for deposit in the city bank for safe-keeping. "Smart girl!" he repeated. "Fooled 'em good.
And, as Ratty had said, the chest, burlapped, corded, and tagged, stood in the main hall of the ranch-house, ready for removal. It was a long way to the Peckham ranch-house, at which Frances meant to make her first night stop. The greater part of the journey would then be over. The second night she proposed to stay at the hotel in Calas, a suburb of Amarillo.
"There's an awful big picture," Trudy was saying; "it's all burlapped up, so you can't tell what it is. It's easy to judge people from their pictures." Trudy had graduated the year before from a large and fine girls' school and she knew all about pictures. "I think you can tell more by chairs," Mrs. Fayre said; "their easy chairs are very good ones. I think they're very nice people."
One who is not rich cannot afford to transport thirty-odd tons of outfit into the heart of the wilderness, at the tariff of fifteen cents the pound. So, throughout the days of the journey, the man gazed with avarice upon the piles of burlapped pieces, while his brain devised the scheme. Thereafter, in the dead of night occurred many whispered consultations, as Vermilion won over his men.
The dining-room was unfurnished; though the table and chairs were in it, they were still burlapped, and the barrels of dishes were not yet unpacked. Mrs. Rose and her sister, Mrs. Bayliss, sat on packing-boxes too, and made merry at their own discomfort. "Seems 'sif we'd never get straightened out," said Mrs. Rose, taking another sandwich on her plate, "but I s'pose we will.
By the middle of September such household goods as the Daltons had planned to take with them were packed, burlapped, crated, and labeled. It had been Mrs. Dalton's idea to sell the rest of the furniture and the farm at auction, but just here she encountered an unexpected but stubborn resistance from her husband.
At the mouth of La Biche a half-dozen burlapped pieces were removed from a cache in a thicket of balsam and added to the outfit. And at Fort Chippewayan the scows with their contents were examined by two officers of the Mounted, and allowed to proceed on their way. On the Yellow Knife, Chloe Elliston anxiously awaited Lapierre's return.
Perhaps Mr. Tooley had overlooked that part of her message. Captain Rugley was delighted that his old partner was coming West; the announcement seemed to have quieted his mind. But he lay on his bed, watching the corded chest, with his gun hanging close at hand. That is, he watched one of the corded and burlapped chests.
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