had consoled himself as he
dropped off to sleep the night before. But he was angry--"madder 'n
hops," in his own vernacular.

"Good-mornin'," he saluted. "And it's plain by your face you had a
comfortable night of it, and no thanks to me."

"You weren't worried, were you?" she asked.

"Worried? About a Welse? Who? Me? Not on your life. I was too busy
tellin' Crater Lake what I thought of it. I don't like the water. I
told you so. And it's always playin' me scurvy--not that I'm afraid of
it, though."

"Hey, you Pete!" turning to the Indians. "Hit 'er up! Got to make
Linderman by noon!"

"Frona Welse?" Vance Corliss was repeating to himself.

The whole thing seemed a dream, and he reassured himself by turning and
looking after her retreating form. Del Bishop and the Indians were
already out of sight behind a wall of rock. Frona was just rounding
the base. The sun was full upon her, and she stood out radiantly
against the black shadow of the wall beyond. She waved her alpenstock,
and as he doffed his cap, rounded the brink and disappeared.

CHAPTER V

The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one.
He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product
of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that
of the Mediterranean vandals. A captain of industry and a splendid
monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever
drawn together from the ends of the earth. An economic missionary, a
commercial St. Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force.
Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy,
he bent all men to his absolutism. Government of Jacob Welse, for
Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel.
Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain
of a dozen Roman provinces. At his ukase the population ebbed and
flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up
or disappeared at his bidding.

Yet he was a common man. The air of the world first smote his lungs on
the open prairie by the River Platte, the blue sky over head, and
beneath, the green grass of the earth pressing against his tender
nakedness. On the horses his eyes first opened, still saddled and
gazing in mild wonder on the miracle; for his trapper father had but
turned aside from the trail that the wife might have quiet and the
birth be accompli