She caught up a book from a desk in passing, and
then slipped like a rosy shaft of the coming dawn across the fading
moonlight, and a moment after her slow voice, without a tremor of
excitement, was heard calling to her companions.
CHAPTER VII.
The conversation which Johnny Filgee had overheard between Uncle Ben and
the gorgeous stranger, although unintelligible to his infant mind, was
fraught with some significance to the adult settlers of Indian Spring.
The town itself, like most interior settlements, was originally a
mining encampment, and as such its founders and settlers derived their
possession of the soil under the mining laws that took precedence of all
other titles. But although that title was held to be good even after
the abandonment of their original occupation, and the establishment of
shops, offices, and dwellings on the site of the deserted places, the
suburbs of the town and outlying districts were more precariously held
by squatters, under the presumption of their being public land open to
preemption, or the settlement of school-land warrants upon them.
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