eflective quiet and her lips
drooped with a touch of wistfulness, the allurement of her beauty was
arresting and undeniable. Brent fell to wondering what life could hold
for her.

The time must come, he thought, when a beauty like that in a land of
plain and drudgery-enslaved women, must bring for her something like a
crisis. She was twenty-one and unawakened, but that the men about her
should long allow her to remain so was as unlikely as that a
pirate-crew would leave treasure unfought for. A rising tide of human
passion about her seemed as inevitable as this actual flood had
been--and perhaps as swift of coming.

But if the amorous selections of that crude minstrelsy made any
impression upon her, she gave no indication. Before the songs ended
she withdrew to the rude shelter that had been fashioned for her and
wrapped herself in her blanket. But the pistol holster lay close to
her hand. When she rose at day-break they had turned out of the stream
upon which they had embarked into the broader river that it fed and
about them floated a wavering mass of ice from broken gorges above.

Brent shivered and dabbed grudgingly with cold water at the face upon
which a stubble of beard had begun to bristle. But the girl carried an
icy bucket into her shack and reinforced its forward wall with blanket
and rubber coat, not as a protection against the knife-edged sharpness
of the air but against prying eyes. Then she bathed unhurriedly and
fastidiously.

When she emerged the bloom of her cheeks and the luster of her thick
hair would have been the envy of a boudoir where beauty-doctors have
done their utmost. And that day too, save for the smouldering eyes of
the discomfited Jase Mallows, the wolf-like pack treated her with a
cautious deference of bearing.

When at the end of two days the water was dropping as rapidly as it had
risen, Alexander announced, "I reckon we've got a right gay chanst now
ter put in at ther Coal City boom, hain't we?" And several heads
nodded assent. Brent noticed that Jase Mallows' face wore a smile
which did not altogether escape malignity, and at the first opportunity
he inquired: "What were you smiling about, Mr. Mallows, when they spoke
of Coal City?"

The backwoods dandy scowled and gave back the churl's response, "Thet's
my business."

"Certainly," Brent acceded coolly. "You don't have to answer me. I
didn't suppose it was a matter you were ashamed to talk about."

Mallows ben