"They say he's going to marry Mrs. Mallory. She's the one with the red
hair."
It struck young Elliot that the miner was dismissing Mrs. Mallory in too
cavalier a fashion. She was the sort of woman at whom men look twice,
and then continue to look while she appears magnificently unaware of it.
Her hair was not red, but of a lustrous bronze, amazingly abundant,
and dressed in waves with the careful skill of a coiffeur. Half-shut,
smouldering eyes had met his for an instant at dinner across the table
and had told him she was a woman subtle and complex. Slightest shades
of meaning she could convey with a lift of the eyebrow or an intonation
of the musical voice. If she was already fencing with the encroaching
years there was little evidence of it in her opulent good looks. She had
manifestly specialized in graceful idleness and was prepared to meet
with superb confidence the competition of debutantes. The elusive shadow
of lost illusions, of knowledge born of experience, was the only
betrayal of vanished youth in her equipment.
CHAPTER II
ENTER A MAN
The whistle of the Hannah blew for the Tatlah Cache landing while Strong
and Elliot were talking. Wally Selfridge had just bid three hundred
seventy and found no help in the widow.
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