That was true enough, and Shandon knew it. But there was that tremendous IF.

"It's all right, Ettinger. All but the water! And since the water is the whole thing, and I don't see where you're going to get it—"

"Wait a minute!" cried Ettinger, his eager hand clutching at Shandon's arm. "I tell you I'd a sold that ranch for twenty-five dollars an acre six months ago an' been damn' glad to git out at that. An' right now I could sell for a hundred an' fifty the acre! An' I'm damned if I do it! My nose smells somethin' when a man wants that place that bad, an' I git busy follerin' the smell. If I ever sell at less than two hundred dollars I'm gone crazy."

His excitement growing as the vision of much gold became clearer, he ran on with hasty explanations. He had five hundred acres; Norfolk had close to a thousand and he had made Norfolk begin to think for the first time in his life. He himself had a little money in the bank and Norfolk had some. There were other men, little ranchers, whom they could whip into line. And Wayne Shandon had the water!

Shandon looked at him in amazement, thinking at first that the man was a little mad. But Ettinger's shrewd eyes were sane enough.

"We go right up to your lake," he cried shrilly. "We git busy with some engineers an' pick an' shovel men. We blow the side of a hill all to hell an' what happens? The water just comes a bulgin' down into Dry Creek, an' all we got to do down in the valley, twenty, thirty miles away, is dig ditches an' watch our land turn into a gold mine!"

In a flash Shandon saw the utter simplicity of the whole scheme. Whereas now the river from Laughter Lake shot down the mountains through its rocky gorge, watering his own land and running through little narrow, rocky valleys to the lower slopes, it might here near the head be deflected so that it sped at first through the canon of the upper Dry Creek, and following a natural course be brought with little expense to Dry Valley. Ettinger's proposition was no fanciful dream; it was hard, unvarnished fact. And, as so often happens when a man sees a radiant possibility, he wondered that he had not seen it for himself long ago.

Here was the golden opportunity his soul, in a mist, had yearned for! He shot out his hand gripping Ruf Ettinger's until the little man squirmed. But even the pain of nearly crushed fingers did not drive the grin from Ettinger's face.

"You're on," he cried exultantly. "Shandon, we'll frame a deal that'll make millionaires out of us."

"And man's work!" was the thought stirring Shandon's heart and brightening his eyes.

They rode on, as Ettinger had planned from the beginning, and covered the two miles to Laughter Lake in a few minutes. They rode up the shoulder of the ridge to the level of the lake; and there Ruf Ettinger's eager finger pointed out where the work was to be done.

It was work which Nature might have planned when the mountains were carved, the lake set in its deep bowl. Fifteen feet from this end of the lake the water swept into a narrow channel, a ridge running down from each side. Here was the spot to deflect the waters before they sped on down over the steep fall. Upon the south side there was a jagged cut in the saw-toothed cliff line. Even now the lowest part of that cut, when once the free soil was scooped out, was not ten feet above the level of the water.

"I rode up here purt' near a week ago," said Ettinger. "I looked this over an' rode back all the way down Dry Creek. It's dead easy, Shandon."

Already Ettinger visualised the cut deepened and widened here with flood gates to control the current. He spurred his horse up the bank as far as he could force the animal, then got down and scrambled on, gesticulating and talking swiftly. Shandon followed him. In a little they came to a point from which they could look back upon the lake, and forward to the windings of the canon through which Dry Creek ran in winter and spring.

"It can be done," muttered Shandon slowly. "It can be done, Ettinger. I don't know what it will cost, five thousand or ten or twenty; but I do know that those lands down in Dry Valley are going to jump over the moon."

Ettinger made little clucking sounds with his mouth, his way of expressing joy unbounded.

"An' you don't see it all yet," he chuckled. "Lord, I've been layin' awake nights figgerin' on it. We'll bond everything that's loose in the valley. I've got Norfolk settin' tight and we'll round up a lot of the little fellers. It's sort of late, maybe, but them other fellers ain't got everything sewed up by a jugful."

"What other fellows?" asked Shandon, mystified.

Then Ettinger, in his rare good humour loosened his tongue until it poured out everything there was in his seething brain. He told of the scheme of Martin Leland and Sledge Hume, for Garth Conway had dropped an incautious word and the shrewd brain of Ettinger had worked out the puzzle. He told how the three men were trying to do this very thing, how they had planned on getting the water themselves, how Martin Leland had tied up thousands in options and purchases, how Ettinger had been one too many for them and had beat them to Shandon. He chuckled over everything, but most of all over the fact that Martin Leland had tried to buy him out. Old Leland was the keenest business man in the county, was he? Well, Ettinger had fooled him! Ettinger had blinded him with a promise to sell next week for seventy-five thousand. By that time, when Leland came to him—

"What's all this?" frowned Shandon. "You say that Leland, Conway and Hume are already at work, planning to put water from the Bar L-M into Dry Valley?"

"Already?" cried Ettinger. "They been clawin' at the job over a year now. The Lord knows what makes 'em so slow; think nobody else in the world can see straight, or shy on the money end, maybe. Anyhow they've gone to it tooth and toe nail; they've sunk thousands into it, thousands I tell you! An' now, you an' me, Shandon, can make the bunch of 'em eat out of our hands! They can't do nothin' without your water; that's where we got 'em."

Wayne Shandon's eyes grew bright with a vision, the muscles of his jaw hardened. In sober truth his opportunity had come to him. Hume, a man he hated, Leland, a man who had called him laggard, spendthrift, scoundrel, had put many thousands of dollars into a project which he could smash into pieces. Ettinger had said it: the two of them could make Leland and Hume eat out of their hands! They could get Norfolk and the little fellows; they could tear out the side of the ridge, release what waters they chose, make their ditches, and by improving only their own property make Leland's and Hume's holdings worth nothing. Leland had started it; Leland's unreasonable censure had been a challenge. Here was his answer!

It was business, straight business. Had Leland and Hume been his friends it would have been different. But they deserved no consideration from him. It was his water; he had the right to dispose of it as he saw fit. He would be treating Leland as fairly as he had been treated. Why had they not come to him in the first place? Why had they not offered him the opportunity to get in on the ground floor with them? He would have given them the water then, glad to see Wanda's father prospering. But they were holding out, they were waiting for something, they had made sure of his consent to let them have what they wanted. Why? When they had everything cornered they would offer him a small sum, they would believe him fool enough to leap at it, mouth open, like a fish. Even Garth Conway, his own cousin, had not told him! What consideration did Conway deserve?

"By Heaven!" cried Shandon.

And then he fell suddenly silent.

"We got to git busy in a hurry, Shandon," Ettinger ran on swiftly. "When old Sure-Thing Leland comes to me to close the deal I want to laugh at him."

Slowly the light died out of Shandon's eyes. Was this, after all, the opportunity for which he had yearned? He grew uncertain, a little troubled. An opportunity for what? For becoming worthy of Wanda, for being a man, square and just, a man who must make a new name for himself, a name which would never bring discredit to her when she became Wanda Shandon? In trying to ruin Sledge Hume for the sordid motives of hatred and gain, in trying to strike back at Wanda's father in vengeful bitterness, would he be doing a thing of which later he would be proud to have her know? Was he proving his manhood by accepting for his first business partner a man like Ettinger, who laughed over his feat of tricking another man by a lie? Was he not seeking to blind himself to the right and the wrong of it? This was the sort of thing that Sledge Hume would do; should Wayne Shandon do it? Was his first venture after the priceless gift of Wanda's love to him, to be a thing like this? Had this been the opportunity he had yearned for, to grasp gold full handed, to wreak vengeance, to retaliate against unfair treatment by striking back treacherously? Martin Leland had been unjust, yes. But had there not been strong human reasons for that injustice? Had not his own wild living been cause enough? Was he, from the sharp words of an old man who was jealous in his love for his daughter, to draw an excuse to strike at his own cousin and Wanda's father?

"Ettinger," he said quietly. "I can't do it. You had better keep your promise to Leland."

Ettinger's jaw dropped, his brows puckered in astonishment.

"What's the matter with you?" he demanded sharply. "Can't you see the play? We got the chance to git the water on the land and make them fellers pay for it or sell to us at our own figger, ain't we? Why, it's as good as gold, man! If you don't see enough in it as it stands you are in a place where you can hold 'em up for a bonus to boot."

Shandon turned away, Ettinger's point of view suddenly disgusting him. His golden opportunity had crumbled into dust and ashes. And although the little man by his side waxed voluble in alternating rage and supplication, Wayne Shandon's final word was a positive,

"No!"



CHAPTER XI

WANDA'S DISCOVERY

A supreme happiness had filled Wanda Leland's heart for a few golden hours, so thoroughly permeating every fibre of her emotional being that when sorrow came afterward it could not entirely drive out the whispering gladness.

Never had the forest land seemed so big, so vast and still as during the slow days which followed. She went to it for the comfort she could not bring herself to ask of her mother just yet, and it mothered her, crooned and whispered and sang to her. Through the dew filled mornings she wandered silently; rarely did she return to the house until the sun was low in the west. Never had this world she loved seemed so vitally close to her, so big in a new sense, so eloquently an expression of the divine eternal. Her heart swelled and the talk of the pine tops entered it.

They were sad, glad days. Gladness sang in her heart when in the sun-flooded mornings she rode out alone, and perhaps her devious way brought her to the spot where Red Reckless had swept her up into his arms for the first time, when his kiss had brought love into full blossom in her breast. Sadness brought its shadow and listlessness when day after day passed and she did not see him again, when the eager hope of the morning that he too would ride to that spot to meet her died down in the afternoon's invariable disappointment. Gladness when she thought of him, just of him; sadness when she thought of her father's stern face.

Red Reckless had made no attempt to see her, or to communicate with her. Even while she sought to find excuses for him, that hurt her more than her loyalty would let her whisper to herself. He would come soon. He would know where to find her, know that her woman's heart was taking her to the spot where that heart had really become a woman's. He was thinking of her now as she thought of him. Her heart heard his heart talking to it across the forests and streams.

A woman's heart trusted him, but a maiden's pride permitted no question when Garth rode over as he did twice during the following week. When Garth remarked casually that his cousin was the same old chap he'd always been, and that he seemed to have nothing in his rollicking brain more serious than the breaking of a wild devil of a colt and a horse race which he had set his heart upon, Wanda bent her head a little over her book and gave no other sign of having heard the statement elicited by her mother's question. But the news hurt, too, just a little. There was a quick sting that came and was gone as her love for him surged up again, and it was the same sort of sting, only stronger, that she had felt as a little girl when she thought of him as happy in his boyish pursuits with any one but her. It did not matter now whether it was Little Saxon or Big Bill. She told herself in her own little room that she was a jealous cat. But—

"Oh, dear God, how I love you, Wayne!"

Then, when the days passed and she did not hear from him, there came for the first time a quick fear which was the first ally of that twinge of jealousy. The fifth day came, the day on which he was riding to Laughter Lake with Ruf Ettinger, and she could not know that his every thought was of her. She only felt that, had she been the man, she would not have stayed away. And there came the question and the fear,

"Does he love me as I love him?"

The old, lovers' question ever since Aucassin and Nicolette; the matter for long debate and reiterated argument: "It may not be that thou shouldst love me even as I love thee!" She found herself blushing hotly as she rode alone through the forest at the thought that she was again going to meet him, and that he did not come to meet her. She felt suddenly ashamed and angry both with him and with herself. Was she, to him, like a ripe apple that had dropped into his hand at the touch? Did he think other—?

Her face crimson she reined the startled Gypsy around with a savage jerk, turned her back squarely upon the Bar L-M, and without a look behind her rode swiftly in the opposite direction. She rode for an hour, not turning once, although many a time her heart fluttered wildly and then grew painfully still at some slight noise which to her yearning ears sounded like the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her.

To-day she crossed the narrow valley toward the cliffs rising like a wall upon the far side of Echo Creek. Stubbornly she shut her mind from its daily wanderings; her camera, that she had not used for a week, was going to work for her to-day. The birds that had come trooping back from wintering in the south—robins and blue birds, blue jays and woodpeckers, larks and yellow hammers—made merry din in the morning air. Shep, running on ahead as usual, disturbed half a dozen grouse from the underbrush in a little canon, and the muffled roll of their whirring wings threw Shep into brief consternation and prolonged subsequent joy. She saw the bob and flash of a rabbit's tail, noticed again and again the lean, muscular body of a tree squirrel, heard upon a wooded slope the snapping and crashing of brush that told of the leaping flight of a deer. The woods were alive with animal folk, her "friends" called to her from every tree and tiny valley, they peeped out at her from burrows and hollow trees.

"We are going to quit being a little fool," she told Gypsy with tremulous emphasis. "And we are going to get a real picture to-day."

A day or so before she had heard with scant attention and no subsequent interest something which in the old careless, love free days sooner would have sent her riding this way in haste. One of her father's men, Charley or Jim, had found a dead cow under the cliffs and had seen signs of bear. He had returned to the spot later and had killed the animal, a she bear, and had seen one of her cubs making its swift, awkward way into the brush. Recollecting the story, and because to-day she yearned feverishly for something to do, Wanda turned Gypsy toward the cliffs, thinking how she should like, if her fortune were very great, to be able to show Wayne Shandon when he did come to her, the picture of a bear cub playing in the woods.

"I've had so much fun hunting for him!" she would say then. And Wayne would never know how unmaidenly she had been.

Before she had come within a thousand yards of the place where the carcass of the cow was lying she slipped from the saddle and picketed Gypsy. Her lunch she left tied to the saddle strings; camera and field glasses went with her.

Already, in the fast advancing summertime, she had donned her hunting costume. The soft green of blouse and short skirt, of cap and stockings, blended with the many tints of green of the copses and groves and meadows through which she went swiftly and silently. She slipped from tree to tree, making no more sound than the chipmunk scampering almost from under her feet. Her eyes brightened, the colour warmed in her cheek, her heart grew eager. For, sure enough, fortune was good to her; there were two little bear cubs, round and fat and playful, rumpling each other where they rolled in the sunlight in a small grassy open space.

They were a hundred yards away when she saw them, too far for a picture; but as soon as her eyes fell upon them she vowed that she must have a picture. There was little breeze this morning in the quiet woods, but that little blew from where she stood straight toward the spot where the cubs were frollicking. She must circle, come out down yonder behind a pile of rocks, slip behind the great cedar right at the base of the cliffs, and edge on from there on her hands and knees.

But she paused a moment, fascinated, watching them. They were sitting up, their small brown heads shaking from side to side, their sharp eyes watching each other, their little red tongues lolling. They were such baby things, their awkward bodies so like the little bodies of babies just taking the first faltering step, that she wanted to rush at them and pick them up and hug them.

There was the angry snarl of a rifle, sudden and sharp and evil, and one of the little brown bears made an inarticulate whining moan and its playful spirit ran out in red to dye the grass. Its brother fell over backwards in its fright; there came a second shot, the whining of a bullet glancing from a rock, and the cub plunged into the brush. She saw it a moment, lost it, saw it once more running as only the frightened wild things can run as it sped down into a little hollow which hid it from the hunter and thus saved its life, and then she discerned it climbing wildly, clawing its terrified way up the great cedar against the cliffs. When no third shot came she knew that the hunter had not seen it and then, with an angry fire in her eyes, she turned to learn who he might be. Approaching her from the edge of the grove, a complacent smile upon his face, his rifle under his arm, was Sledge Hume.

"Oh!" she cried when he had come close, thinking that he must have seen her. "Why did you do that? It was like murder!"

He stopped dead in his tracks, and then swung toward her. He was so close that she saw a quick, startled look leap up in his eyes.

"Murder?" he said sharply. "What do you mean?"

He had not lifted his hat, it was not Sledge Hume's way to trouble himself with the small civilities. He came on again until he stood quite close to her, staring coolly into her flushed face.

"They were playing just like babies!" she cried breathlessly. "Why did you kill it?"

He laughed.

"Hardly for its skin, since I suppose it isn't worth much," he answered carelessly. "Hardly for its meat as I'm not going to trouble with it. Why, I suppose just for fun then. Because," his tone and eyes touched with a hint of contempt for what to him was a woman's squemishness, "because I wanted to."

Her eyes flashed her growing anger back at him.

"It was so unnecessary," she said bitterly. "They were playing so prettily and happily."

"I watched them for ten minutes before I shot," he said. "Their play was interesting, I'll admit. But they were bears, just the same. They'd grow up some day and I wonder if they'd take mercy then on a pretty little baby calf if they came upon it playing? Your father'd thank me, my tender hearted Miss."

She bit her lip and turned away from him. He watched her a moment, then called,

"Are you riding back to the house? My horse is right back there and I'll ride with you."

"No," she answered quietly. "I'm not going back just yet."

She walked on to where the dead cub lay—stood looking down on it a moment and then moved on. Hume watched her while he filled his pipe and lighted it, and went in turn to look at his game. He turned the little beast over with his foot, noted with satisfaction the hole which the bullet had torn through the soft body, and then strolled toward his horse. Wanda saw him ride away in the direction of her home, smoking his pipe.

"All men like to hunt, to kill things," she mused. "Are they as cruel about it as he is? Would Wayne have watched the little things playing for ten minutes and then, when he tired of it, shot them in the midst of their play?"

Not until Sledge Hume had topped a gentle rise and dropped down and out of sight upon the farther side, did the girl turn quickly to the great cedar up which she had seen the escaping cub scramble. She was certain that he had not come down. When at first she did not see him she circled the tree slowly, expecting from each new angle to catch a glimpse of the roly-poly brown body. And when, after fifteen minutes peering upward through the widely flung, horizontal branches, she saw him, a swift inspiration came to her; her quarry had not escaped her yet.

The tree, one of the giants of her father's ranch that she knew very well, thrust its crest upward so close to the cliffs that many of the branches had been bent this way and that, flattening against the granite. The lowest limb, twenty feet above the girl's head, was as thick as many a tall tree hereabouts, and was like a giant's arm, bent at the elbow, thrusting the rocks back. She could make her way up this far, working along a ragged fissure in the cliff; thence she could edge out upon the broad limb until she came to the trunk itself. And once there, to Wanda in her hunting costume and with her knowledge of tree climbing, the rest of the way, from limb to limb, might be difficult but would certainly not be impossible or fraught with unaccustomed danger.

The cub had climbed until coming to a limb which like the lowest one scraped against the rock not half a dozen feet from the tapering trunk, he had crept out on it and was lying upon a ledge of rock. Wanda hoped that here was the opportunity of a lifetime. She would climb as high as that limb, and find the cub's flight shut off by the sheer wall rising perpendicularly behind him. Then she would make him pose for her, whether he liked it or not.

Flushed and panting the girl made her way upward until finally she caught with both hands the big lower limb. Field glasses and camera in their cases strapped to her belt in no way interfered with the free play of her muscles. She tested the branch a moment, smiled at herself for hesitating to trust her light weight to a thing which would have carried tons, gripped a firmer hold and swung free of the rocks. Here would have been a picture for her mother had she come with her this morning; the lithe graceful body swinging twenty feet high in air, only hard slab and broken boulder beneath her. Then she drew herself up as a boy does "chinning himself," threw a heel over the limb, and in a flash lay breathing deeply and triumphantly, the most difficult step of her climb achieved.

Slowly, steadily she made her way upward. In the main it was simple enough for Wanda for it was the sort of thing she did over and over week in and week out. Once, already fifty feet from the ground, she did something that would have been simple enough under other circumstances and yet which put a quick flutter in her heart. It was something which would have made the heart grow still in the breast of Wayne Shandon had he seen, which would have brought a paralysing fear for her to a man who loved life for the gamble in it and who took his chances recklessly.

She was perched fearlessly upon a sturdy horizontal limb, her body tight pressed against the trunk, her hands gripping at the roughened bark, steadying her as she balanced. A quick glance upward showed her a bare stretch of bole with the nearest limb on her side of the tree just barely beyond her reach. Slowly she straightened, lengthening her pliant body the imperceptible fraction of an inch, gradually thrusting her two arms up high above her head, still with her hands steadying her as they clung to the bark, her moccasined feet curving to the limb on which she stood. And now she could just touch with the tips of her fingers the broad branch above.

Then she did the thing which would have been simple enough had she stood on the ground instead of balancing high in air; she measured the few inches in distance, she drew her fingers lingeringly from the bark, holding them still above her head, she tautened the muscles of her splendid young body to the work they were called upon to do, bent her knees little by little, and then fearless still but agitated, she leaped upward, and grasped the elusive branch.

For a moment she swung there, secure now and confident, and then, as she had gained the first step in her climb so now she made this one. A slow tensing of biceps, a drawing up of the pendulous body, the quick flash of a heel thrown over the limb, and she lay upon it, laughing softly. It was good and glorious to be young, to have a body that obeyed one's will, to have a steady heart.

Presently she began once more to clamber upward, her way comparatively easy now. Thus at last she came to the branch upon which, as on a bridge, the little brown bear had crossed to the ledge of rock. And together there came to her a distinct disappointment and a pleasurable surprise.

Again the cub had slipped away from her; perhaps by now he was half a mile away and tumbling his awkward and terrified way among the crags.

From below the ledge had seemed to be four or five feet wide; now she saw that it was nearer ten. The conformation of the rocks, beetling above it, had led her to imagine that a straight wall of cliff rose abruptly just at the back of the ledge. In reality they overhung the rudely level space like out-jutting eaves over the sun-deck that might have been carved to his taste by some old cliff dweller in front of his solitary retreat. For there was a cavern here under the frowning brow of granite, different from the many caves of which the girl knew in the rugged mountains only in that it was so roomy and at the same time so secret a place.

Before she left her resting place, she saw the way the cub had gone. Leading upward from the extreme end of the ledge, at the right, there was a deep seam or crevice in the granite, almost filled and choked with fallen rocky debris from above, but affording a trail that even a man might travel to the top of the cliffs another fifty feet above. There was a quantity of fine sandy soil at the lower end of the narrow cut and on the edge of the ledge, and her trained eyes had slight difficulty in seeing the signs of little bruin's headlong flight. As he scurried upward he had left the marks of his toes in long unmistakable scratches.

"I wonder," thought the girl with a little thrill at what her fancy pictured for her, "if any of the rest of the family are at home?"

The mother bear had been killed; one cub was dead; the second had fled to the cliff tops. Here, where bears were growing scarcer every year, there was little danger of her meeting the pater familias. And yet—

"If I should meet a bear in there," she laughed to herself, "I wonder who'd be scared most?"

She made herself as comfortable as she could, drew her camera from its case, focused it upon the yawning, black mouth of the cavern and waited a patient quarter of an hour, noiseless and listening and ready. For she was familiar enough with the California brown bear to know that he will not attack when the way of retreat is clear; that while, after he gets into a fight he extracts a great deal of delight from it, still if given his choice he would rather run and keep on moving until he had covered anywhere from ten to sixty miles.



When nothing but silence answered her, she leaned out on the limb and tossed her hat into the mouth of the cave. After it she threw some big pieces of bark, making them land well inside with no little noise. As there was still no sound she waited no longer.

The branch out upon which she edged her slow way was both sturdy in itself and made doubly safe by the fact that it lay across the ledge, reaching with its tips to the rock wall at the side of the natural door. In a moment she had scrambled across, had leaped to her feet and was peering into the vast, shadowy interior.

There are few of us for whom a cave does not have a rare attraction, an appeal little short of fascinating, that has in it something of romance perhaps, certainly something of mystery and a dim, vague stirring of primitive and vital feelings, a shadowy harking back to the early life history of mankind. To Wanda Leland, in so many essentials a child of the wild, such a cavern as this was a bit of wonderland. Her swift running, pioneer blood tingled; her heart gladdened with a glow of discovery and exploration. Perhaps cave men had dwelt here, secure and watchful, in the forgotten ages; the idea thrilled. Certainly no man of her own time or her father's knew of the place: that thought made the spot her own, and intensified her eager delight in finding it. It had, to her sensitive, imaginative nature, an aura that she felt had clung to it always. It was a bit of the wild, the retreat of the wild things, sternly expressive of a savage grandeur.

Her sensations a strange composite of many dim, intangible, inexpressible emotions, Wanda tiptoed to the opening, paused listening, took two or three quick steps and was inside the cave. For a moment she fully expected to see the sight she dreaded, a pair of gleaming points of light blazing at her menacingly. And for a little she saw nothing but shadowy, unreal shapes. Her heart leaped wildly as the startling fancy came to her that these were the phantoms of the long dead time when men had lived here, ghosts of the older race.

Then she laughed softly again, once more accused herself of being "stupid," and began her explorations. Little by little as she grew accustomed to the scant light here she made out dim bits of detail. First she realised that her first conjecture had been quite right, and that this was the biggest cave by far that she had ever seen. She moved forward half a dozen steps, walking warily for fear of a fall and found that the light from the entrance died into deep darkness before it could search out the sides of the great cliff room. Then she went back out upon the ledge and gathered from the debris choked fissure an armful of broken bits of dry wood, twigs and needles from the cedar. In the pocket of her blouse were the matches which she always carried with her on her trips and in a moment a crackling flame near the cave door shot its wavering light deep into the dark interior. Then again she hurried in, eager to see what lay before her.

Nowhere was the rock roof lower than ten feet save where far back it slanted toward the floor. The floor itself sloped so gently toward the back that it seemed quite level. She judged at first glimpse, as the firelight drew from the gloom a glinting granite surface here and there, that the chamber was twenty feet wide, that it reached back into the cliffs some fifty feet. She moved back toward what seemed the rear wall, found the floor pitching steeply ahead of her, noticed a rush of fresh air stirring her hair and paused suddenly, listening. A low sound that at first she could neither locate nor analyse, came faintly to her as from a great distance.

With her hand on the rock wall she moved forward again slowly and cautiously. Still the floor pitched steeply as she went on, still the rush of air was in her face and with it the low rumble, growing more distinct. It was like nothing so much as rolling thunder, very far off, or the half heard beat of the ocean on a distant, rock bound coast. Again abruptly the way under foot grew almost level, she was on a plane some six feet lower than the ledge outside, and as she took another step forward, passing round a great slab of granite that jutted out in her way, she came upon an unexpected glint of light and a sight, seen dimly, that made her cry out in startled surprise.

From far above, from some indefinite, hidden opening; the light from the big outdoors filtered down upon her. There was a brooding dusk here made vibrant with the clamouring voice that was no longer like distant thunder but resolved itself into the echoing fall of water. Water that came from the darkness above, that flashed a few feet through the dim light, that leaped out and plunged into the darkness again, shouting and thundering as it dropped into a yawning ink black void rimmed with granite boulders. She crept closer, her ears filled with the din, her eyes bright with the strange, weird, almost unearthly beauty of the place. She crept so close, gripping one of the boulders with tightening fingers, that she could peer downward into the chasm that swallowed the water. It was only a small stream, such as is born in the High Sierra of melting snows, but its dizzy fall, its mad leaping, the echoes that were never still, caused a murmurous sound that swelled and lessened fitfully but was never still.

She found a loose stone and pushed it over the edge, leaning forward swiftly to listen, seeking to trust to her ears since her eyes could tell her nothing of the depth that lay below. She heard the stone strike, clatter against the rocky sides, strike again and again, the sound growing fainter until at last it was lost altogether in the noise of the water.

She stood up, drew back and looked across the chasm which lay like a gash upon the rocky floor. She judged it to be fifteen feet wide, maybe wider; upon the far side and perhaps fifty feet further back, there was a splotch of light indicating a way out there into the open day. But the bottomless abyss shut off all passage to the other side, its echoes growling threateningly as though they were what they seemed to the girl's quickened fancies, the restless mutterings of giant things imprisoned in the deepest bowels of the earth.

"If I ever wanted to run away from all the world," she mused fantastically, "I'd come here!"

And then, suddenly shuddering, she went back hurriedly to the open.



CHAPTER XII

THE TALES OF MR. WILLIE DART

Being a girl very much in love, her lover had been already as long out of her thoughts as he could ever be, and now he came back into them and became the centre of them.

She sat down just outside the doorway of the cave, hat, gauntlets, glasses and camera at her side, her knees clasped in her hands and stared away through the cedar's intricate, rustling needles and across the tops of the forest sweeping away from the cliffs across the verdant miles, and day dreamed. This newly found cave was her own, absolutely her own. No other man or woman in the world knew of it. She would come here again, always careful that no chance eye saw her; she would bring little things to make of it a lady's bower set above the leafy world. There would come, in due season, cushions which she would work secretly in her bedroom at home and which she would fill here with fragrant pine needles and sweet scented herbs; there would be a book or two; little, unused things would disappear from Julia's kitchen, a tea pot, a bit of coffee, knives, forks and spoons; and some day when the full summer had brought the sunshine that would dissipate the shadows of these last days Wayne Shandon would come here, would stand under the cliffs looking up wonderingly; would climb her magic ladder and dine with her.

As she sat, leaning back against the rocks, daydreaming as Youth cannot help doing, her eyes wandered far across her father's ranch. She found the view new to her. Yonder nothing but the fresh green of the tops fir and pine had thrust upward in the spring; beneath them, seen only now and then as it frisked out of shadow and glinted in sunlight, Echo Creek; beyond the creek—

She sat up straight, suddenly picking up her field glasses. Yes, beyond all this she saw the knoll upon which her father's house stood, even the building itself through its clump of cedars. But her glasses, raised higher sweeping back and forth, had found the river, and travelling on picked up the Bar L-M buildings and corrals!— Next time she would bring the larger glasses, and leave them here, hidden in the cave.

For a long time she gazed across the river, her heart beating quickly with the hope that she might see, somewhere in the wide view, the man who was in her heart. Finally, with a sigh, she lowered her glasses, letting them follow Echo Creek speeding down the long slope of her father's valley. And, doing so, it happened that there came into the disc of her vision a man whom she knew she had never seen before. For a few minutes she watched him riding up the valley, idly amused at the awkward manner of his progress. When his horse walked he clung tenaciously to the saddle horn; when the animal trotted he gave her the impression that at any step he was going to fall off. At last, when she had lost sight of him among the trees, and her interest lagged, she made her way down from the cliff, went back to Gypsy and turned her horse's head toward home.

The man whom she had watched clinging to his horse's back so desperately was not only a new-comer to the Sierra and a stranger, but a poor sort of person to be alone where there is a dearth of paved sidewalks and streets with names and numbers. He had lost himself many times since leaving El Toyon the day before, and now, with the main valley road as plain before him as a man could wish a road to be, he forsook it and came on blindly along a second road that the Echo Creek wagons had travelled last week for wood. And Wanda, riding down to the creek, met him when he had reached a state of perspiring despair.

"Say!" he called shrilly when, barely in earshot, he caught his first view of her. "Say, wait a minute, won't you?"

Wanda, smiling a little at the evident distress which gave her her first impression of the man, came on to meet him. She stopped Gypsy with a swift, gentle touch upon the reins, while he yanked his sweating horse about by pulling manfully at both reins held one in each hand.

"Say," was his next word of greeting, "ain't this the doggondest, peskiest wild man's land you ever shot a glimmer of your eye at? Gee, ain't it fierce, lady?"

Wanda's smile brightened in spite of her. He shook his head and pursed his underlip and mopped his reeking face.

"I'm just in a cold sweat all over," he confided ruefully. "What with the rubbing of this saddle on the outside,—an old pirate with eyes like a young sheep and whiskers like Santa Claus robbed me of twenty bucks for it back yonder in that jay town,—and my bones inside trying to poke through the skin, I'm just peeled like a seal whose skin some flash dame is wearing for a coat. Say," with a groan as he shifted a little in the saddle which he blamed for his woes, "you don't live so awful far from here, do you?"

"No," she smiled. "Just across the valley."

"Nix on that!" he cried sharply, as if in sudden alarm. "They been talking that way to me ever since I got lost the eighty-second time. 'Down to a cross road,' they'd say, lying as would shame a second story man caught with the goods. 'Then turn to your right and go straight ahead and it's just a little piece.' I ain't ever hurt you, lady, and I wouldn't, not for a hundred dollars. But I'm awful sore being told it's just over yonder. How far is it, measured in something civilised, like blocks?"

He was the most anxiously earnest little man Wanda had ever seen, and the most dejectedly miserable. Still vastly amused she began to feel a little sorry for him. He was such a veritable babe in the wood for helplessness.

"Really, it isn't far," she assured him. "Just a trifle over three miles."

"Lord," he groaned, staring at her reproachfully. "The way you folks talk about distance out here makes my flesh creep. But, say, is that the nearest place?"

"Yes."

"Then can I go home with you, Miss? And will you scare up something for me to eat? I'm so starved I'd eat egg shells."

He was such a harmless looking, innocent, pitiable creature with his plaintive voice and childish eyes that her amusement turned to pity.

"If you are very hungry and tired," she suggested gently, "you can lunch with me now. I always bring something along to eat."

His eyes brightened and a smile set quick dimples in the round face. He released his bridle reins promptly, put his two hands on the horn of the saddle—Wanda noticed that they were hands like a girl's, soft and white with beautiful, tapering fingers and rosy nails—got a stiff leg over the cantle, wriggled over on his stomach and as his horse moved a little he fell off. For a moment he remained sitting.

"Birds was made to fly and fishes to swim," he remarked impersonally and philosophically. "Me, I'm going to walk after this. I ain't ever going to split myself in two over a horse again."

"You'll have to ride to the house."

"You don't know me, Miss. I'm Mr. Willie Dart, and when I make up my mind like I done just now it's final. I'll walk those three miles on foot, and when I can't walk no further I'll crawl, and when I can't crawl I'll lay down and die. But I'm through being a cowboy."

Thereupon he arose rheumatically, carefully dusted his gay checkered suit, gave much attention to the crease in his jaunty little hat, adjusted his bright blue tie, daintily tapped his cuffs back into his coat sleeves and bestowed a beaming, cherubic smile upon Wanda.

"Let's eat," he suggested.

She dismounted and spread out her luncheon upon the paper in which it had been wrapped, kneeling down on a grassy plot near the creek. Mr. Dart hovered over her in frank eagerness, giving vent to various chuckling sounds bespeaking deep satisfaction as he saw that there was cold chicken and ham, cheese and buttered bread. Then they ate, Wanda sparingly, pretending to have little appetite, Mr. Dart swiftly and joyously and noisily. And, with his mouth crammed full and his cheeks puffed out gopher-wise, he talked. He demanded her name and her father's business; he wanted to know what she was doing so far from home and if she wasn't afraid; he ascertained that buffaloes were extinct in this part of the West if they had ever been here which was to be doubted; he thrilled and drew closer to the girl upon learning that a bear had been shot near this spot; and, abruptly, he asked if she knew a guy named Shandon?

"Wayne Shandon?" she asked curiously.

"That's him. Red Head for sure, ain't he?"

She admitted that he was, hesitated a moment at his next question, and then answered it by saying that Mr. Shandon was a friend of her family.

"Good kid, ain't he?" he went on, a little flushed from his eating. "Friend of mine, too. We're great chums, me and Red. Ain't he ever told you about me, Willie Dart?"

"I don't think so. You have known him long?"

He poked into his mouth the last quarter of the sandwich in his left hand, secured a bit of cheese with his right, and answered:

"Long? Say, Wanda, I've known that boy since he was a kid! Me and him worked together and slept together and et together up in the Klondike all year back in ninety-six."

"Ninety-six?" she frowned. "Mr. Shandon wasn't in the Klondike in ninety-six! He was right here."

"Oh," admitted Mr. Dart easily, "I ain't sure it was ninety-six. Might have been ninety-seven. Funny he ain't ever told you about me. Never mentioned, did he, how we got into a snow drift one time and had to eat our dogs and I got him out final?"

"No," she said, wondering a little what sort of being he would prove to be if one came to know him. He did not look as though he had ever lived the rough life he mentioned so glibly; certainly his hands were not the hands of a frontiersman.

"Maybe it's because I made him promise not to talk about it," he went on carelessly. "The papers was full of it up there and I got kinda sore being made so much of. He's grateful though. But he hadn't ought to be. He more than squared the deal six months ago when we run up against one another in New York. It was this way:"

And asking no encouragement he plunged eagerly into his tale. It devolved from the first word that Red was sure a corker, a guy you could tie to until snowballs foregathered in a clime in which, according to popular fancy, they are an extreme rarity. He was on the dead level, he was at once a game kid and a red hot sport. Red had seen the name of his friend in a society sheet and had looked him up at the Astoria. Mr. Dart had been naturally overjoyed to renew acquaintance with an old pal. And as it happened Red was to step in between him and certain death.

Mr. Dart had been going it a bit and had got into a foreign set. He mentioned casually a couple of French dukes and a German prince with fat, puffy eyes. There were others of them. They had played cards together at one time and another and it seemed a general truth that foreigners were bad losers. Besides, one of the French dukes, a shiny man like a waiter in a cheap cafe, had a very lovely wife. Mr. Dart esteemed her with a snow white friendship. But the French Duke was jealous.

Mr. Dart's fine, white fingers gracefully annexed a piece of buttered bread and the tale went on. They had decoyed him to a dreary downtown haunt. They were all there, all armed with revolvers. In a moment it would be all night with Mr. Willie Dart. Enter Red, the game kid. A scene of thrilling unreality in which the game kid temporarily disabled or permanently crippled every man of the would-be assassins. Mr. Dart finished the tale and his bit of bread together, offering the thoughtful, concluding remark, that so much powder smoke in the close room had made him cough.

"You seem to be on very intimate terms with the foreign nobility," Wanda replied quietly, though she kept her dancing eyes away from him.

Willie Dart lifted his shoulders.

"Them rummies don't qualify for finals, when you come to know 'em, Wanda. Honest, they don't. I never got the mit of one of 'em in my fist it didn't feel like a dead fish. There ain't a one. Say! Didn't Red ever tell you about Helga?"

"Helga?" She shook her head. "Who is Helga?"

"The only decent piece of nobility I ever sat across the table from," enthusiastically. He had produced a pack of Little Soldier cigarettes and lighted one before resuming. "She's Roosian, is Helga; a Roosian Princess. Funny Red never told you about her. Gee, he's just like an oyster, that kid, ain't he? Here's the straight dope on that business; I know because I was along."

It seemed that Mr. Dart and Red had been two of a fashionable yachting party that had gone frisking down under the Palisades and out into the open sea. The Princess Helga, a sure enough stunner, take it from Mr. Dart, had the men all dippy from the crack of the gun to the break of the tape. He admitted with a sigh which absorbed a great deal of his cigarette smoke, which after an eloquent pause made pale exit through his nostrils, that he hadn't got over her effect on him yet.

Well, they were out beyond Sandy Hook, and the wind was blowing and the white foam flying and the yacht beating it down the coast like the mill tails of—like anything, you know. Suddenly there was a scream and the Princess Helga was overboard. The yacht passed her about a half mile before anybody thought about turning it around, they were all that excited. But Red, say he didn't lose his head two seconds, not him. Say, he was overboard like a shot, and he had gone down under the water and had come up with the Princess Helga in his arms. After that—

Well, Mr. Dart rather guessed, with another sigh and subsequent expulsion of cigarette smoke, that it was a pretty hard case. The Princess Helga hadn't looked at another man since.

Wanda having conceded merrily that Mr. Dart's tales were intensely interesting and marked by the ring of truth, was further informed concerning the private affairs of Mr. Dart himself. He had taken the notion to come out and see his old friend; his one reason in the world for being here lay in that determination.

"I'm surprising him," he admitted complacently. "Red'll be clean tickled to death to see me. Most likely we'll go into business out here together. I'm looking for an invest—"

Suddenly he let out a wild scream, scrambled to his feet, and fled behind Wanda, his ruddy cheeks suddenly paling.

"My God!" he chattered. "Look at that thing!"

Wanda looked and saw what since a child she had called a "Snake-lizard," a very frightened snake-lizard at that, which with tail aloft was scampering wildly from near Dart's place at luncheon into the nearby thicket. Her own sudden fright that had been aroused by Dart's headlong dash and piercing yell gave way to a peal of laughter.

"Look here, Wanda," he said sharply. "On the level, that thing ain't deadly, is it? I been setting on it for half an hour, I know. It might have been biting me all the time, I'm so numb I wouldn't have felt it."

She assured him, chokingly, that there was no cause for alarm. Dart rubbed himself and brightened. But his face fell again as she went on to inform him that the creatures were so numerous that in his walk home he might encounter a dozen.

So it was that Mr. Willie Dart changed his mind and decided to ride the three miles across the valley.



CHAPTER XIII

SLEDGE HUME MAKES A CALL AND LAYS A WAGER

"Now, my erstwhile Noble Benefactor, brighten up and look happy. I've got some red, white and blue news for you. I like you first rate, I'm strong for the grub and I guess I can stand for the country being stood on edge. I've come to stay!"

The door had been flung open and Mr. Willie Dart came gaily into Wayne Shandon's bed room carrying a big book in his hands, trailing a long wisp of fragrant smoke from one of his host's cigars behind him. Shandon looked at him with a sober, thoughtful frown, and seemed in no way hilariously impressed with Mr. Dart's glad tidings.

Already the latter had been at the Bar L-M several days. During this time Shandon had not seen Wanda; he had come close to blows with Ruf Ettinger; he had been variously and grievously annoyed by Mr. Dart; certain other matters had gone wrong; and altogether he was in no pleasant mood.

"Look here, Dart," he replied savagely, kicking off his boot so hard that it struck against the far wall of the room, and continuing his undressing with a fierceness that brought a momentary speculative squint into Mr. Dart's innocent eyes. "What's your game, anyhow?"

"Game?" Willie Dart put a great deal of reproach into his tone. "Nix on that, Red, old sport. When a man travels three thousand miles in a damned stuffy car and then on top of that rides a horse like I did clean over the backbone of the universe, just through gratitude to his Noble Ben—"

"Oh, damn the gratitude," cried Shandon. "I'm tired of hearing of it. I most heartily wish that I'd let matters take their own course."

"Now," resumed Dart, again smilingly, having softly closed the door and made himself comfortable in a chair, "what's the use of pals getting off wrong with one another? You slipped up and got your tongue twisted when you said what's my game. What you'd ought to have said was what noble purpose is kicking around in my manly boosum. You don't seem to put any faith in me, Red."

Shandon's short laugh prefixed his short answer.

"Do you wonder I don't?"

Then Mr. Dart chuckled.

"Come right down to it, Red, I don't! But you wrong me. Gratitude, my Noble—"

"Call me that once more and I'll heave you through the window," snapped Shandon. "If you've got anything to say, say it. I'm going to bed."

"Don't mind me," Dart hastened to say. "It won't bother me at all. What I was going to say was this: Here I've come all the way from New York—"

"No doubt because you were run out!"

"Just through a sense of gratitude. What can I do to show that gratitude has been the only worry to keep my appetite down to capacity? I've been here a week, ain't I? Well, the first thing after I got rested up which has been about four days now, I begun thinking about that. And it come to me like this: Old Red's got troubles; he needs a friend that would live in a temperance town just to help him. Here's a place for Willie Dart to fit in and do some good!"

Shandon groaned.

"If you start in—"

"I've started already," beamed Dart. "I ain't had much time for fine work, yet, and I don't know the play quite as well as I might, but I've been planting little seeds of kindness promiscuous."

"What do you mean?" frowned Shandon.

"Now don't go to getting excited. I'm going to tell you, ain't I? First place, the day I got into these forests primeval, I run across a fairy that could be Mrs. Willie Dart in a minute if I wasn't sworn to single harness by my dad on his dying bed down in Argentine."

"Last time he died it was in Nova Scotia," remarked Shandon drily. "Go ahead."

"As I was saying she was fine and foxy," resumed Dart pleasantly. "We made up a little lunch and went out for a picnic, just her and me. Soon as we got to feeling like old friends and I found out she knew you, I said, 'Look here, Wanda—"

"What!" cried Shandon, bolt upright.

Mr. Willie Dart blew a playful puff of smoke at him and picked up the tale:

"I said, 'Look here, Wanda—'"

"Wanda who?" sharply.

"Leland, of course. Wanda Leland. Got it now? How am I ever going to get anything said if you keep butting in like that, Red? I said, 'Look here—'"

"You look here!" muttered Shandon. "I don't like to hear you talk about her at all. If you've got to do it, call her Miss Leland. Understand?"

"Aw, rats, Red. What's the use of that kind of talk between friends? She don't care."

"Well, I do. And I mean it."

"Oh, all right. Well, anyway, we was setting on a log together and we got to talking like fellers and girls do, you know. Good God, Red, quit your glaring at me like you was an old tomcat screwing yourself up to jump a mouse. I never kissed her even, I swear I didn't. I found out she knew you and I begun right then being a real friend. Say, Red, if you could have heard the fairy tales I dropped into that fair maiden's pearly ear!"

His dimples twinkled and danced and deepened upon his round face. Shandon, staring at him fearfully, demanded to be told what the fairy tales had consisted of. Willie Dart eagerly complied.

"I set right in watering your stock, old scout. I told her you were a hero and a guy a man could trust a gold watch to that didn't have any marks on it to prove who it belonged to. I begun by informing her how you came to my rescue when a hard fate had me on the embers of despair."

"You told her that?" in amazement.

"Oh, don't get alarmed. I set forth the account in such a way that while your part was not lessened my own was not exactly—"

"In other words you twisted it entirely out of shape," laughed the other. "You forgot to say that a detective nabbed you while you were picking my pocket and that I—"

Willie Dart raised a soft white hand.

"I showed her how you saved my bacon," he said easily. "What's the difference how you done it? Then, when I got through that and I could see she was thinking what a grand man you are and she never noticed it before, I slipped a card off a fresh deck and related your adventures with the Roosian princess."

The dimples that had fled as his host mentioned a certain word which Mr. Willie Dart did not like to hear now came back. Shandon stared at him wonderingly.

"What in the devil are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the Roosian princess," chuckled Dart. "I told Wanda all about her, what a nifty dame she is, you know, and how you saved her life and how she put her arms around your neck and cried and—"

"Good Lord," groaned Shandon. "I could wring your neck, Dart. What in the world made you lie to her like that?"

"This here is a prime cigar, Red. Better send for a fresh box, this one is drying up. Now, I'm going to tell you something: My mother was a fortune teller and maybe that's why it is, but anyway I can dope up what people are thinking lots of times. I hadn't any more than said Red Shandon to her than I got wise to that little girl's trouble. Say, Red, she's just naturally stuck on you! It's a fact! Now, when a woman's stuck on a guy, what's the way to make her go clean nuts over him? What's the answer? Why, just tell her about the other woman like I told Wanda about Princess Helga."

"Helga?" cried Shandon in sheer wonder. "What Helga?"

"The Roosian princess," beamed Willie Dart.

"Dart," very sternly. "You lie to me now and I'll wire the police of New York that you are here. I ought to do it anyway; I would have done it when you came if I hadn't been a fool and you hadn't filled me up with your lies until I was sorry for you. Why did you say Helga? Where did you learn that name? What Helga do you know?"

Dart hesitated briefly, his childlike eyes smiling frankly, the shrewd side of his strange brain very busy.

"When you took me up to your room that day in New York and threw some grub into me," he replied at last with apparent carelessness, "and left me for a minute, why I just sort of looked things over. There was a letter with Helga signed to it. The name's awful funny, ain't it? She is Roosian, ain't she?"

"What do you know about her?"

"Just that she was much obliged to you for the information you promised to send her about something or other. It ain't anything to send you up the river for, Red."

"What did you tell Miss Leland?"

"Miss Leland? Oh, Wanda, you mean." Mr. Dart repeated the tale he had told Wanda with the many fanciful embellishments which it seemed necessary for him to give to any story that he found it necessary to repeat.

"I sure enough boosted your game, Red. Say, kid, it worked for fair. You ought to have—"

Even after the threats which Wayne Shandon made to him that night Willie Dart stayed on. Shandon declared he would drive him off the place with a buggy whip, and Willie Dart said that he'd come back if he was chased away. Shandon mentioned the police of New York, and Dart asked him reproachfully if he delighted in wounding him in his most sensitive part; wanted to know if his Noble Benefactor was the sort to drive a man back into the mire he had just emerged from, to thwart all effort to lead a pure, sweet, rural existence. Finally Shandon contented himself by forbidding Dart to meddle in the future with anything not in any way a part of his own business; and nourished the secret hope that a few weeks of the humdrum of mountain life would tire this sparrow of the city gutters. Whereupon, when alone with his big book and a fresh cigar, Willie Dart soliloquised as follows:

"He's up against a good many things, poor old Red is. He's as bad in love with Wanda as she is with him. Her old man is soured on Red and is making the toboggan slide all bumpy. Then there's some sort of trouble with Ettinger. There's a deal on somewhere I ain't wise to, and Red ain't in on it. Wanda's old man is in on it, so's the Weak Sister, meaning Garth, so's a gent name of Sledgehammer Hume. I guess time's ripe for little Willie Dart to mix in and see what's what. He's a square kid, is Red, and I'm going to help him put his affairs in order."

And then making himself comfortable as he pondered in the biggest chair in the well furnished living room, he sighed, twisted his cigar a moment thoughtfully, sighed again, put his feet on the table and turned to the pages of the big book. His fancy was caught by numerous and attractive illustrations in a volume dealing with the mythology of the ancients, and he was soon convinced that he was acquiring a scholarly knowledge of the history of the old Greeks and Romans.

Wayne Shandon was distinctly surprised the next morning as he entered the corral to encounter Sledge Hume sitting a sweating horse and evidently in wait for him.

"You were looking for me?" he asked shortly. The last time he had spoken to Hume was to quarrel with him, and to be drawn into hot words with Arthur because of him. He made no pretence at making his tone more than coldly civil.

"Yes," returned the other as bluntly. "I rode over from old man Leland's on business."

Shandon frowned. His quick thought was that Martin, unwilling to communicate personally with him, had sent this envoy. With this idea in mind he said,

"If Mr. Leland has any business with me—"

Hume laughed his short, insolent laugh.

"I didn't say I came on his business," he said.

"I just stayed over there last night and came on this morning, early, to catch you before you left the house. It's my own business, Shandon. I'm not in the habit of taking other men's worries on my shoulders."

"What is it?"

"Just this!" coolly. "Whenever I hear of any money lying around loose it's as good as mine unless some other fellow beats me to it. You must have done a whole lot of talking; anyway word has gone all over the country, clean down to my place and beyond, that you're putting on a horse race. How about it?"

"I don't see just where you come in?"

"You will in a minute if you care to. I hear the race is to be pulled off the first thing in the spring, as soon as the snow's gone? How about it?"

"Correct."

"You're going to ride, of course?"

"I am."

"Little Saxon?"

"Yes."

Hume eased himself in the saddle and looked down at Shandon keenly. A little sneeringly he demanded,

"What are you going to make it? A little penny ante game?"

Shandon stared at him curiously. Hume laughed again under his gaze and said arrogantly, after the born manner of the man,

"If you'll make the stakes worth a man's time I'll make you hunt your hole, Shandon."

A little flush crept up into Shandon's cheeks and his eyes hardened. It would be so easy to quarrel again with this man; the very sight of him, supremely egotistical and contemptuous, stirred a natural dislike into something very close to positive hatred. But these days he was making it his business to hold himself in check, he was turning his back against the old headlong ways, and he said quietly,

"Make your proposition. I see you've got one to make."

"I'll ride you any race you like, anywhere you like and at any time; provided it's a gentleman's game and not penny ante."

"Done," answered Shandon promptly. Had he refused it would have been the first time in his life he had refused a wager offered as this one was. "Name the sum and if it's anything I can raise I'm satisfied. And," his eyes steely, "I'll name the sort of race!"

"Some one said that you were going to start things with a purse of five hundred," remarked Hume. "I don't do business on that scale. I'll lay you an even thousand."

"I'm pretty close up right now," was Shandon's answer. "I've spent a good bit lately and I don't want to sacrifice any more cattle. But—"

"Oh, well," laughed Hume, "it doesn't make any difference. I thought that you might have a little sporting blood, you know. You must have done a lot of talking, Shandon."

"—but," Shandon went on, his voice raised to cut into the other's jibe, "I can sell a few cows if necessary. And while I'm doing it it is just as easy to raise five thousand as one."

"Oho!" cried Hume. "Little Saxon is proving up, eh?"

"Little Saxon can beat his brother Endymion any day in the week in the sort of race we're going to run. It's going to be ten miles, across country, across the damndest country you ever saw, Sledge Hume! It's going to be a distance race and an endurance race. And since it's going to be here in the West it's going to be Western. I don't care if you run or don't run and I don't care if it is for five cents or for five thousand dollars."

There crept into Sledge Hume's cold eyes a look of such shrewdness that Shandon was struck by it then, and remembered it long afterward.

"When I go into a deal," was Hume's swift answer, "it's because there's something in it. You put up your five thousand if you're so cocksure, and put it up now and I'll cover it! With one thoroughly understood provision, Shandon. The man who comes in first at the end of that ten miles, be it you or me, gets the money. There's going to be no chance to get cold feet and pull out. If you don't ride at all, if you get scared and decide to get sick or break a leg to save five thousand, I ride alone and get it just the same. Remember I didn't ride over this morning for love of racing or for love of anything else; I saw a chance for some money, easy money."

"Draw up an agreement to that effect," answered Shandon, a darkening of his eyes showing that Hume's taunt had stung. "I'll sign it. Find a trustworthy man to hold stakes and I'll put up my five thousand within ten days after you put yours up. Is that satisfactory?"

Hume answered that it was, and named two or three men in El Toyon as possible stake holders. When he mentioned Charlie Granger, proprietor of the El Toyon hotel, Shandon said curtly,

"Charlie's all right. He's square."

So the matter was decided as coolly, and apparently with as much indifference, as if it had been a matter of no particular importance. Hume made no pretence of desiring to continue a conversation that would be a mere waste of time and words now that his business was done, and swinging his horse about raked it with his spurs and galloped back toward the Echo Creek. Wayne Shandon, suddenly a little thoughtful, turned and went to the stable. Little Saxon jerked up his head and looked at his master with glaring, untamed eyes.

"We've got to get busy, Little Saxon," he said, looking with critical eyes at the lithe, powerful, rebellious body.

"Say, Red! Ain't you on to his game?" Shandon had not noticed that Willie Dart was anywhere near, but was hardly surprised when the little man popped up, wild eyed and excited. "Once you get your cash down he's going to put you out of the running! That guy'd put ground glass in a baby's milk bottle for the price of a beer. Gee, Red. You sure enough do need a keeper!"

Which position Willie Dart was already seeking manfully to fill.



CHAPTER XIV

IN WANDA'S CAVE

Willie Dart's sunny nature seemed to grow ever brighter as the days wore on. Once or twice he sighed at Wayne Shandon's failure to respond to his levities; and when he felt particularly unappreciated he carried his dimpling personality to the bunk house where he was hailed with delight. When a flask that had come in with Long Steve, who had made a brief trip to the outer world, disappeared before that joyous gentleman had consumed half of the potent contents, and when later the empty flask was found in the covers of Emmet's bunk, Willie Dart looked on with sorrowful, innocent eyes while Steve and Emmet resorted to physical argument. When a game of crib was being played while half a dozen men looked on, and a portion of the deck vanished, only to turn up ten minutes later in the hip pocket of Tony Harris, who had not once been near the table and was most thoroughly mystified, no one thought of blaming the cheerful Mr. Dart. It was only when he offered privately to collect for Big Bill a debt of six bits long owing to him from Dave Platt that the real gift of those wonderful hands of his began to be at all apparent.

Then, too, the method of his progress over the range was another source of unfailing delight and unbounded admiration. He had ridden a horse to the Bar L-M, but no man of them ever saw his little legs astride a horse again. He found, back of the blacksmith shop, the wreck of an old cart which years ago had been used for breaking colts; he improvised shafts and seat; he discovered the encouraging fact that Old Bots, a shambling derelict who had lost an eye when Wayne Shandon was quite young, was gentle and trustworthy. After that, wherever he went abroad, and he travelled all over the countryside, he rode in the cart, steering Old Bots this way and that with much shouting, prodding and jerking of reins. And he drove where perhaps no man had ever driven before. His smiling confidence in Old Bots, in his rattling, creaking old cart, in his own ability as a driver were all characteristic of his joyous optimism.

In the meantime Wayne Shandon had at last seen Wanda. His reasons for making no effort to see her immediately after his heated interview with Martin Leland were clear in his own mind; he expected to find that they had been equally as clear to her, and that she would have understood. But the Wanda he found one riotously brilliant morning was rather cool, distant, unapproachable.

He had ridden up on the cliffs which towered at the upper end of the Echo Creek ranch, from which he could look down the valley and see her when she left the house, as he felt confident that she would. He saw her when it was not yet nine o'clock. She was riding out across the valley toward the cliffs opposite at the north end of the valley, toward the cave she had found there. Shandon marked the course she was taking, swung his horse across a ridge and hastened to the meeting with her. He came upon her as she dismounted near the big cedar against the rocks.

"Wanda!" he called softly.

She turned toward him, her face paler, he thought, than it should be. He slipped from the saddle and came swiftly toward her, his eyes shining, his arms out. Then she raised her hand, stopping him.

"Good morning, Wayne," she said quietly.

"Wanda," he cried, a little perplexed. "What is it? Aren't you glad to see me?"

She smiled, put down the parcel she had been carrying, and perched upon a big broken boulder forcing her eyes to look merrily into his. And what she read in his look sent a quick, glad flutter into her heart. But she did not let him know it.

"Glad to see you?" she replied gaily. "Why, of course I am. But," teasingly, a little cruelly, "aren't you the least bit afraid?"

"Afraid of what?" he asked blankly.

"Of papa!" she retorted, her dimples playing because she meant to look as though she was quite a heart whole maiden, and because the very ring of his earnest voice swept away all the uncertainty that had come to her during these last days of waiting. "You are on his land, you know."

"Surely you don't imagine—" he began.

She laughed lightly.

"My dear Wayne, how should I know?"

"I don't understand you, Wanda," he said a little stiffly. "After what happened the other day—"

In spite of her a little glowing colour ran up into her cheeks.

"Goodness," she exclaimed, persisting in the part she had vowed many times a day she would play for him, "haven't you forgotten that? Really, after you'd had time to think about it didn't you have to laugh? Weren't we a couple of precious kidlets?"

For a moment he stared at her as though dazed. This was a Wanda he had never seen before; he did not know what to make of her. And then suddenly he put his head back, the gladness that had sung in his heart when first he rode to meet her surged back and he laughed the great, deep, happy laugh the girl knew so well.

"You little witch!" he cried gaily, as gaily as Wanda had spoken at first and more genuinely so. "You've just set out to plague me. And I'll show you how I treat little girls who tease!"

Without more ado he came close to the rock upon which she sat looking down at him with demure eyes, swept her off into his arms and kissed her before he put her down.

"Now, Wanda Witch," he said softly, his eyes laughing into hers. "Are you sorry? And do you love me so hard it almost hurts?"

"So," she said when at last he released her, not certain in her heart that she had held out quite long enough, "that is the way you treat little girls who tease, is it? All little girls who tease? The 'Roosian' princess, for instance?"

"The what?" he demanded, having for the moment forgotten Dart's wild tale.

"Helga," she told him quite as seriously as she could, rearranging her disturbed hair and meanwhile looking up at him with eyes that were beginning to defy her and smile.

As he remembered, as he thought of the things Dart had told her to "boost his game" he became for one of the rare times in his life just a trifle embarrassed. She must think him a fool for letting that little cur yap all kind of nonsense into her ears, or the ears of any one who would listen. He flushed under her teasing eyes.

"I'm going to wring Willie Dart's little neck the first thing when I get home," he said. "Look here, Wanda—"

"Oho!" Her brows lifted and she looked at him speculatively. "So there really is a Helga, is there?"

But he was laughing again, again threatening to kiss her adorable red mouth if she did not behave and tell him all about herself.

"If you had really wanted to know couldn't you have ridden over sooner?" she asked.

Then he told her why he had stayed away, how he had wanted to see her every day, how he had thought that she would understand.

"Your father forbade me the ranch," he reminded her. "At first I thought that it would be impossible for me to bring myself to set foot upon property belonging to him. I thought of sending word to you by Garth, by Dart even, asking you to meet me somewhere, anywhere that I would not be trespassing. And, dear, even before I would ask you to meet me, if you still cared!" with mock seriousness, "I wanted time to fight things out with myself, a few days in which to see if there was not some way out better than this one. I hoped, even, that your father would change his mind, that he would be fair with me as it is his way to be. And then at last, when I could not wait any longer, I came. And now, my Wanda Witch, I am going to stay until you come and put both arms around my neck and admit that you love me so hard that you've been perfectly miserable since you saw me!"

"And Helga?" she insisted lightly but with just a hint of curiosity.

"If you go on that way much more," he assured her, "I'll say, 'Damn Helga!' Tell me about yourself."

There was much to tell and it came at last as they sat together under the cedar, oblivious of the world about them, careless of what might lie in the future for them. There was the story of her rides, the murder of a bear cub, the meeting with Willie Dart, and—

"And, first of all," she cried triumphantly, "the discovery of a wonderful secret."

She refused to tell him what it was until he obeyed her bidding. She sent him scouting to see that no human eye could spy upon them, and then she sent him climbing the cedar.

"What's this?" he rebelled. "At least tell me whether I'm supposed to gather an armful of clouds or wait until dark and bring down some stars."

"Go straight up until I tell you to stop," she laughed. "And be sure you don't fall."

"Would you care very much, Wanda?" he asked loverlike and foolishly.

"I should," she informed him, her eyes twinkling. "For I shall be climbing right under you."

"Oh, I know, then. We're going to heaven."

And up he went. Laughing, calling back and forward like two children, their hearts gay and surcharged with something sweeter than mere gaiety, they made their way steadily, he always above, she just below him and carrying the parcel done up in a newspaper.

"You might at least let me carry our baggage upon our journey," he offered more than once. But she insisted that this too was a part of the secret.

At last he came to the limb that lay out across the ledge of rock and would have kept on climbing, he was so busy looking down at the rosy face that was looking up at him. But she commanded him to use his eyes for something else than just to make love with, and he understood.

"You mean to say you've been up here before? That you've gone out across that sort of a bridge?" he exclaimed in amazement. "Aren't you afraid of anything in the world, Wanda?"

"Yes," she answered. "Yes, to both questions. I'm inclined to be afraid of spiders; I think that I'd be afraid of an alligator. And now the secret!"

"A cave," he cried. "Way up here! How in the world did you happen to find it?"

When he had crossed first and given his hand to her she came swiftly to his side, thanked him with a nod and set him to work.

"This is my own private estate," she told him. "No one enters my portals until he has been invited. You are not invited yet. In that seam in the rock you will find plenty of wood and dry cones. If you'll put them at the doorway I'll let you know when you can come in. And, Wayne—"

"Yes?"

"No one knows of this place except we two. Keep behind the cedar, won't you, so that if any one should be about you won't be seen?"

Wayne gathered great armfuls of wood, piled cones conveniently, and in the meantime got no single glimpse of the interior of the cavern. For Wanda had slipped within, had drawn over the wide opening the screen of branches her own hands had made against the occasion, and was completely hidden by that and the curtain which reinforced it against a ray of light. He could hear her singing softly, happily as she went back and forth. At last her voice came to him, calling merrily.

"You may come in, Mr. Shandon. Don't bring the wood with you yet; just come to look and admire."

He thrust aside the screen, stepped through and his short exclamation amply repaid her for the many hours of preparation.

A dozen tall candles burned here and there, set into niches in the rough walls, gummed in their own grease to knobs of stone, their pointed flames standing still like fairy spear blades menacing the shadows which still clung to the lofty ceiling. Giving added light was a blazing fire of pine cones at the far side of the cave, near the mouth of the passage leading to the cleft where the water shot down. Strewn across the whole floor, masking its rough surface, were pine needles which, while they made a thick mat underfoot, filled the cave with their resinous tang. And there was another odour, agreeable, homelike. Shandon looked again at the fire; set on each side of a bed of coals were two flat stones, perched on the stones a battered, blackened old coffee pot.

"I called you a witch, didn't I, Wanda?"

"You might at least have called me a Fairy," she retorted, her eyes bright with the joy of a day-dream come true.

"Did you conjure this out of a broken eggshell with a wand? Is this how you got your name, Wanda?"

She took him on a tour of exploration, pointing out each little thing which she had already seen alone, which, when she had seen it had promised her a day like to-day when she could show it to him. They went down the sloping passageway and stood for a little while silently before the chasm with its din of falling waters. They speculated upon what might lie upon the farther side if a man could cross. They came back to the fire and Wayne was shown how the air drew through the cave so that the passageway at the back gave exit to the smoke. They had just a peep, for Wanda would allow him no more now, into a hidden recess not five steps from her fireplace where there were mysterious packages hinting that they might be bacon and butter and sugar and coffee. And then they came back to the screened entrance and stepped outside. Wanda held up her field glasses to him.

"Look out that way," she ordered him. "No, Goosy. Not at the trunk of the tree. Between those two branches yonder. What do you see?"

He adjusted the glasses while she watched his face. And he found the clearing about the Bar L-M headquarters, the buildings themselves set upon the knoll.

"It's wonderful," he cried. "Why, we could signal—"

"Wait a minute," she interrupted brightly. "This isn't your discovery, not a bit of it. It's all mine and I'm jealous of it. And I've thought it all out. Now, if you'll come inside we'll have a cup of coffee and a sandwich which you'll eat politely just as though you were hungry."

"I'm starved!"

"And I'll tell you my invention. First, though, while I serve luncheon you can be the hired man and bring in all your wood. I'm perfectly willing to be cook but I refuse to get my wood any longer."

When he had completed his task he came to her. She had poured two tin cups of coffee, sweetened and cooled with condensed milk, and upon a clean piece of bark served her sandwiches. And they sat on the floor upon heaped-up pine needles and she told him her plan.

There was an old spy glass at the Bar L-M, wasn't there? All right. Then his first duty when he got back home would be to spend a patient time locating with it her cedar and the cliffs back of it. To-morrow morning, early, she would be here—no, no. Not in the cave nor even upon the ledge outside; they must guard so carefully against their secret being lost; but upon the big boulder at the top of the cliff. She would have her field glasses. He could step out upon the front porch at the Bar L-M, and if any of the boys were about he could pretend to be looking idly at a herd of cows somewhere, or at a hawk or at anything but at her. They could see each other quite distinctly.

"If it wasn't so far we could talk on our fingers!"

"Do I have to remind you again that this is my discovery, my invention?"

She tried so charmingly to be severe, and failed so delightfully that he assured her he was going to put down his coffee cup and come over and kiss her. But when she threatened that if he misbehaved she would not stir out of the house again for a week he sighed and finished his coffee and listened obediently.

"Suppose," she went on, "that you stood very still on your porch, both hands holding your spyglass? That would mean one thing. Suppose you leaned lazily against the door post? That would mean another. If you came down the steps, if you took off your hat, if you put on your hat, if you sat down on the bench, if you turned your back to me, if you lifted both arms above your head as if you were yawning and stretching, if you stooped to pick up something, if you stooped once, walked five steps and stooped again—don't you see that even with your whole outfit looking on we can say 'Good morning,' and 'Good night,' and anything else we choose to say? Isn't it splendid?"

For an hour they worked on what Wayne termed the Wanda-code. She had a pencil and tiny memorandum book and they made duplicate copies of their code of signals as they worked them out. Thus:

1. Standing straight, both hands up—I love you, dear, with my whole heart. (That was Wayne's contribution to the code, and he insisted that it be number one in the book.)

2. Leaning against a tree or post—I must see you immediately.

3. Removing hat—Be careful. We are being watched.

4. Turning back—Something has happened to prevent our meeting to-day.

5. Stooping once—That's all. Good bye.

And so on until there were no less than two dozen signals each with its meaning, each to carry across the miles a lover's message.

They agreed upon the exact time when every day their love would laugh at the miles separating them; an early hour when they had waited just long enough to give Wanda time to ride hither and the Bar L-M men time to have gone about the day's work. And if Wayne were not upon his porch then Wanda was to understand that he was already riding to meet her.

"But your mother," he said. "Doesn't she often go with you?"

"Not when I want to be alone," Wanda smiled back at him. "Mamma knows, Wayne."

"You have told her? Your father told her?"

"It isn't something that papa talks about, dear. I told. And, Wayne—"

Suddenly they ceased to be children playing and became very serious. For while the love brimming their young hearts had been like a fountain from which laughter bubbled up, still its song had not deafened their ears to the murmur of life about them. There were things to be told each other, questions to ask and answer, their own future to look soberly in the face.

Day after day Shandon had looked for word from Martin Leland, had counted on receiving from him an offer for the water to be employed in bringing fertility to Dry Valley. He told her of Ruf Ettinger and his counter scheme, how close he had come to being drawn into it; he wondered if something had happened to cause Leland and Hume to give up their proposition.

No, whatever this proposition was they had not given it up, Wanda was sure of that. Her father was away much of the time; she knew that he had been often in Dry Valley, that he had had some sort of dealings with Ruf Ettinger. She had heard him say to her mother last night that the man was a hog, that when offered an unheard of price for his land he had held out for something still better, and that Leland had broken off negotiations with him entirely. Yes, it must be the same proposition about which Ettinger had gone to Shandon. Strange that Garth had not told him anything. She knew that Garth regularly met her father and Sledge Hume; she knew that whatever the business was that had drawn Leland and Hume together had drawn Conway into it also.

That matter finally disposed of, left with the unsatisfactory conclusion that Garth had his own reasons for remaining silent, and that Shandon would soon hear from Leland, Wanda broached the other subject which had all along been the one cloud upon her happiness. Driven to the rim of her mind by her gayer moods it was still there, sinister and black upon the horizon.

"I should have told you the other day," she said slowly, "the day when we found so much else to talk of. You will understand why papa has refused to let you come to the house."

"What is it, Wanda?" he asked eagerly, hoping there would be a direct charge so that he might vindicate himself.

"Have you no idea, Wayne?" a little curiously. "Have you never had a suspicion of the reason that makes papa hate you so?"

"He disliked my father—"

"It is not that. Maybe that makes him the more ready to suspect you—" And then she blurted it out, a little defiantly, laying her hand softly upon his arm. "He thinks, he has thought all along, that you killed Arthur!"

He stared at her gravely, the shock of such a charge too great to be appreciated to its fullest extent in a moment.

"He thinks that I killed Arthur?" he repeated incredulously. And then, bitterly, "My God, Wanda. This is too horrible."

"Listen, Wayne. We must talk this over calmly and see what is to be done. You see papa has disliked you because he hated your father. Oh, it's unjust but it's so human! He has believed all the hard things men have said of you and they have said many. He knows that the day before Arthur was killed you and he quarrelled. Then you went away, you were gone a year and he didn't think that you would ever come back. You came back, you made me love you. Believing as he did, papa did the natural thing when he refused to let you come again."

"He had no right to believe it," he cried angrily. "I shall tell him so. I shall make him tell me of a single thread of the wildest circumstantial evidence to point to this hideous thing!"

"It will do no good," she said simply. "Nothing in the world can be done unless—oh, I have thought so much about this, Wayne—unless the real murderer can be found. Surely if you offered rewards, if you hired detectives, if you talked with MacKelvey—"