phatically. "You take my word for it, if she's dangerous as a
girl to any one in this camp, it's not Mr. Dan's peace of mind she's
disturbing, but that of his new friend."

"You mean Lyster? Ridiculous! A gentleman of culture, used to the best
society, give a thought to such an unclassed individual? No,
madame!--don't you believe it. His interest about the school affair was
doubtless to get her away from camp, and to keep her from being a
responsibility on Dan's hands."

"Hum! maybe. But, from all the dances he danced with her, and the way he
waited on her, I'd a notion that he did not think her a great
responsibility at all."

This conversation occurred the morning after those letters had been read.
The owner of them was installed in the best room Mrs. Huzzard had to
offer, and miners from all sections were cordially invited to visit the
paralyzed man, in the vain hope that some one would chance to remember his
face, or help establish the lost miner's identity; for he seemed utterly
lost from all record of his past--all but that he had loved a girl whom an
unknown partner had stolen. And Overton remembered that he seemed
especially interested in the whereabouts of the renegade, Lee Holly.

The unknown Lee Holly's name had suddenly attained the importance of a
gruesome ghost to Overton. He had stared gloomily at the paralytic, as
though striving to glean from the living eyes the secrets held close by
the silenced lips. 'Tana and Monte and Lee Holly!--his little girl and
those renegades! Surely these persons could have nothing to do with each
other. Harris was looney--so Overton decided as he stalked back and forth
beside the house, glancing up once in a while to a window above him--a
window where he hoped to see 'Tana's face; for all one day had gone, and
the evening come again, yet he had never seen her since he had lifted her
unconscious form from beside the chair of Harris. Her words, "I know now!
Joe--Joe Hammond!" were yet whispering through his senses. Did those words
mean anything? or was the child simply overwrought by that tragedy told in
the letters? He did not imagine she would comprehend all the sadness of it
until she had fallen in that faint.

The night he had talked with her first in Akkomi's tepee, and afterward in
the morning by the river, he had promised to be satisfied with what she
chose to tell him of herself, and ask no questions of her past. But since
the insinuations of Harris and her own pec