an the fortune he wanted to part with.
_Hiff-f!_"

Before the eyes of both girls rose the clamor of color "blooming round"
in old Tory Cave--the armful of passe blossoms flung down at the
"rattler" scare.

"Yes--his Mother Earth has been good to him," muttered the whimsical
voice. "Very good! Yet--yet such are earth-sons that he'd turn his back
on her to-morrow--go off on a wild-goose chase after some other
world--even a dead one--if only that moon-storming Thunder--Bird--"

"What! You don't mean to say--oh! did he write to my father about
it--write to my father and sign himself 'T. S.'?" broke in Pemrose,
glancing back along the trail which she had traveled these past few
months and finding it stranger, more baffling than the Man Killer's.

"May--may--have done so," came the answer, with a faint chuckle. "I
asked him when pressed for a name to give his mother's--his middle
one--Selkirk. But he a lunar can-di-date! Not if I know it! With me, the
moon may have the money--but not the boy!"

"The moon may have the money!" Pemrose Lorry glanced at the mud-stained
knapsack lying by the sufferer,--the knapsack tucked away in which was
the golden egg, the precious record; she would not unearth it and glance
at it, because the second look, at least, belonged to her father.

This mature madcap upon the ground, this queer, practical joker,
chastened now, if never before, had played on him a cruel prank, but, at
least, he was not the fool who loved money for its own sake.

"If--only--I could do anything for him!" yearned the girl passionately.
"Oh! I'd want father--father--to feel that I did ev-ery-thing for him."

And, as once before in a watery pinch, the thought of Toandoah's honor,
Toandoah's debt to this trapped March hare, was the vital breath of
inspiration.

"Have--have you any matches?"

Suddenly she bent to the ashen ear.

"In my br-reast pocket, yes." It was a feebly appreciative flicker.

"A fire! I--I a Camp Fire Girl--and not to think of it sooner! Una! Una!
Get busy! Gather wood, quickly--quickly--all-ll the dry wood you can!"

And the friendly little cedar gave of its one brown arm, the spruce
chit, the birch stripling, the pine urchin--all the hop-o'-my-thumb
timber that flourished in this wild pass--contributed of the dead limbs
torn from them by last winter's blasts, to burn up the chill in the old
Man Killer's heart.

Una's little nose, piquantly tiptilted, warmed from a fashionable
orchid-colo