Meantime, the two brothers who had founded the fortunes of the Bar were
accorded an equally high position, with an equal amount of reserve.
Their ways were decidedly not those of the other miners, and were as
efficacious in keeping them from familiar advances as the reputation of
Mr. McGee was in isolating his wife. Madison Wayne, the elder, was
tall, well-knit and spare, reticent in speech and slow in deduction;
his brother, Arthur, was of rounder outline, but smaller and of a more
delicate and perhaps a more impressible nature. It was believed by some
that it was within the range of possibility that Arthur would yet be
seen "taking his cocktail like a white man," or "dropping his scads"
at draw poker. At present, however, they seemed content to spend their
evenings in their own cabin, and their Sundays at a grim Presbyterian
tabernacle in the next town, to which they walked ten miles, where, it
was currently believed, "hell fire was ladled out free," and "infants
damned for nothing." When they did not go to meeting it was also
believed that the minister came to them, until it was ascertained that
the sound of sacred recitation overheard in their cabin was simply
Madison Wayne reading the Bible to his younger brother. McGee is said
to have stopped on one of these occasions--unaccompanied by his
wife--before their cabin, moving away afterwards with more than his
usual placid contentment.

It was about eleven o'clock one morning, and Madison Wayne was at work
alone on the Bar. Clad in a dark gray jersey and white duck trousers
rolled up over high india-rubber boots, he looked not unlike a peaceful
fisherman digging stakes for his nets, as he labored in the ooze and
gravel of the still half-reclaimed river bed. He was far out on the Bar,
within a stone's throw of the promontory. Suddenly his quick ear caught
an unfamiliar cry and splash. Looking up hastily, he saw Mrs. McGee's
red petticoat in the water under the singularly agitated boughs of an