ence got
the better of you to such an extent that you tried to wipe a sin away by
giving the money back."

"Perhaps I did," she answered, quietly. "I had to settle his conceit some
way, for he did bother me a heap sometimes. But I'm done with that."

She seemed rather thoughtful during the frying of the fish and the slicing
down of Mrs. Huzzard's last contribution--a brown loaf.

She was disturbed over the footprints seen by the Indian woman--the track
of a white man so close to their camp that day, yet who had kept himself
from their sight! Such actions have a meaning in the wild countries, and
the meaning troubled her. While it would have been the most simple thing
in the world to tell Overton and have him make a search, something made
her want to do the searching herself--but how?

"I was right in my theory about the old river bed," he said to her, as she
poured his coffee. "Harris backs me up in it, and it was ore he found, and
not the loose dirt in the soil. So the thing I am going to strike out for
is the headquarters where that loose dust comes from."

"Oh! then it was ore you found?" she asked.

Harris nodded his head.

"Ore on the surface--and near here."

That news made her even more anxious about that stranger who had prowled
around. Perhaps he, too, was searching for the hidden wealth.

When the supper was over, and the sun had slipped back of the mountain,
she beckoned to the squaw, and with the water bucket as a visible errand,
they started toward the spring.

But they did not stop there. She wanted to see with her own eyes those
footprints, and she followed the Indian down into the woods already
growing dusky in the dying day.

The birds were singing their good-night songs, and all the land seemed
steeped in repose. Only those two figures, gliding between the trees,
carried with them the spirit of unrest.

They reached an open space where no trees grew very close--a bit of marsh
land, where the soil was black and tall ferns grew. The squaw led her
straight to a place where two of the fern fronds were bent and broken. She
parted the green lances, and there beside it was a scraping away of the
earth, as though some one walking there had slipped, and in the black
sandy loam a shoe had sunk deep. The Indian was right; it was the mark of
a white man, for the reds of that country had not yet adopted the footgear
of their more advanced neighbors.

"It turn to camp," said the squaw. "Maybe some whi