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Updated: May 6, 2025
He jabbered constantly, his mutterings at last coming to her in jumbled words as Benny drew on. He was talking about "gold," and he chuckled. He mentioned names, Brodie's and Jarrold's and Gratton's and another name, and he chuckled again. Gloria peered cautiously from the shelter of her rock. He was very near now, struggling with the smaller pack and his rifle and the heavy bundle in his sack.
She noted trifles; she saw a painting over Gratton's head a seascape her father had given her for her fourteenth birthday.
In Gratton's own hand, set opposite the clerk's number seven indicating her room, were the words: "Gratton & Wife, S.F." She turned crimson; went white. "I'll telephone later," she said faintly, and went again to the door and this time out into the autumn sunshine. All of the high adventure was dead ashes; the "lark" was lost in a sinister enterprise. Gratton's wife Mrs. Gratton He had done that!
Brodie, though his rifle had not swerved, was listening. "No, not hiding in the dark corners," he said ponderously. "Not Mark King, rot him.... Ben Gaynor's girl, you say? Then we're red hot on the right trail, boys! You know what her and King would be after!" Gratton's stunned brain began to function wildly. "The gold is here, Brodie!" he cried out wildly.
Then she sat with the instrument in her hand, waiting. Once she heard Gratton's step close to the stairs and jumped to her feet, thinking that he was coming up. But he passed by and the house grew silent again. She wondered when Mark King would come! This afternoon to-night to-morrow?
And yet her indomitable spirit had in the end triumphed over Gratton's scheming; King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless "No! No and no and no!" "Just a little kid of a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity of mature age.
The tones of the voices were unmistakable. Three voices there were, each with its own peculiarity, none of them Gratton's. First a big, booming voice; then a sharp, staccato-quick voice; thereafter a high-pitched, querulous utterance, nervous and irritable. Disagreement, if not out-and-out quarrel, had already come to camp.
"King had got to it before us, but I've found it. I was coming back to tell you " Brodie had small liking for a coward and now his bull's voice cut Gratton's chatter short. "No solid mountain of gold is going to save your hide " Benny began to jig up and down in a frenzy of excitement. "Hold your hand, Brodie, you big fool," he shouted.
Thus she watched as Brodie gripped the slack of Gratton's coat shoulders and shoved the body out into the snow. She even marked how the living man spat after the dead. "Go to the coyotes," he muttered. "They're your kind." Gloria knew that if she took a step Jarrold would clutch her again. So she stood very still.
You and I enter into a pact right now, purely business, you understand." He was speaking more and more rapidly in the grip of a new emotion. "Whatever we find we divide, fifty-fifty; " King's sudden laughter, no pleasant sound in Gratton's ears, checked the rush of words. To accept Gratton as a partner on a fifty-fifty split of the spoils! Was the man crazy?
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