Here she lies! Shame and propriety forgotten! Immodestly exposed to
grinnin' heathens!"
"You let the _Helen Mar_ alone," I says pretty mad. "She ain't
so bad as drowned corpses riding mules."
Then Stevey put in cautiously, and said he'd never really made up
his mind, and had doubts of it which he was ready to argue, supposing
Sadler had any facts to put up as bearing on his and Irish's
condition in nature.
Sadler said they had gone up the mule path expecting to climb
Sarasara, but getting near the top of her, she began to act as if she
disliked them, Sarasara did, and she threw rocks vicious and more
than playful; so that they left her, and went on up the pass to look
for the mule train. They didn't know anything had happened in Portate.
We put the mule-drivers up that night and charged them South
American rates. That was the way Stevey Todd and I started keeping
the _Helen Mar_ as a hotel. Sadler and Irish didn't care for the
business. They went down to Portate and got jobs with the Transport
Company, but Stevey Todd and I stayed by the _Helen Mar_, and
ran the hotel.
All the year through or nearly, the mule trains might come jingling
at any day or hour, coming from inland over the pass to the sea, with
the packs and thirsty drivers, who paid their bills sometimes in gum
rubber and Peruvian bark.
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