isobedience on the part of
his following. He was scowling fiercely across at the Utah activities
when she spoke, but at her exclamation the frown softened into a smile
for his favorite niece.

"Startled you, eh? Pahdon me, my deah Virginia. But as I am about to
startle some one else, perhaps you would better go in to your aunt."

She put a hand on his arm. "Please let me stay out here, Uncle
Somerville," she said. "I'll be good and not get in the way."

He shook his head, in deprecation rather than in refusal.

"An officer will be here right soon now to make an arrest. There may
be a fight, or at least trouble of a sort you wouldn't care to see, my
deah."

"Is it--is it Mr. Winton?" she asked.

He nodded.

"What has he been doing--besides being 'The Enemy'?"

The Rajah's smile was ferocious.

"Just now he is trespassing, and directing others to trespass, upon
private property. Do you see that dump up there on the mountain?--the
hole that looks like a mouth with a long gray beard hanging below it?
That is a mine, and its claim runs down across the track where Misteh
Winton is just now spiking his rails."

"But, I don't understand," she began; then she stopped short and clung
to the strong arm. A man in a wide-flapped hat and cowboy
_chaparejos_, with a revolver on either hip, was crossing the stream
on the ice-bridge to scramble up the embankment of the new line.

"The officer?" she asked in an awed whisper.

The Rajah made a sign of assent. Then, identifying Winton in the
throng of workers, he forgot Virginia's presence. "Confound him!" he
fumed. "I'd give a thousand dollars if he'd faveh me by showing fight
so we could lock him up on a criminal count!"

"Why, Uncle Somerville!" she cried.

But there was no time for reproaches. The leather-breeched person
parading as the Argentine town-marshal had climbed the embankment,
and, singling out his man, was reading his warrant.

Contrary to Mr. Darrah's expressed hope, Winton submitted quietly.
With a word to his men--a word that stopped the strenuous labor-battle
as suddenly as it had begun--he turned to pick his way down the rough
hillside at the heels of the marshal.

For some reason that she could never have set out in words Virginia
was distinctly disappointed. It was no part of her desire to see the
conflict blaze up in violence, but it nettled her to see Winton give
up so easily. Some such thought as this had possession of her while
the marshal and