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JIM AND HARRY ARE ATTACKED BY HIGBY
knowing the girl's sensitive pride. Nance only laughed.
"The Lord '11 provide for the nobodies," she returned, " 's long as there's no Mood on their hands."
In the fifteen years intervening between the day that Daniel Higby had jumped a claim and the present one, he had become exceeding prosperous. The mine had yielded, and was yielding, rich returns, and the money therefrom had supported other ventures, most of them as lucrative as they were unscrupulous. Jim and Harry had gone into that voidless silence from which issueth neither reproach nor threat, reprisal nor exposure. Remained only the widow and little Nance, for whom Jim had sent so eagerly to share his good fortune as they had shared his ill. The first months had been spent in fruitless searching for Jim. No one in the mushroom town had the most remote idea of his whereabouts, the saloon-keeper amazedly declaring that he had sold him whisky one morning and learnt of his disappearance the next. And so Mary had labored at any kind of job available, spending her fragile strength with prodigal
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hand for the sake of little Nance. Her strength began to wane, and there were too many workers, sturdy and blooming, for Mary to fit in. They moved into the most ramshackle house the town boasted, owned by Daniel Higby, and it was from this place that he evicted them when the woman, on whose tired face the last, long sleep was stealing, begged him for respite. She died, and Nance, just reaching fifteen, was taken by Higby 's sister — for purposes manifestly not humanitarian.
The one pleasure in the girl's gray day was the evening gallop over the prairies and into the mountain passes on ' ' Wonder, ' ' her little broncho. Too young to be utterly despairing or wearily cynical, the child-woman confronted the troublous ways of the world with only a vast, aching wonder in her heart. Now and then some kindly cowboy had given her a book. •She had gone to school for a brief time and to church on rare occasions — these things being her basis for reasoning and philosophy. She did not remember ever having done anything to warrant her beloved mother's death, or Delia Higby 's cruelty, or