inched at her
side, and her widely opened eyes staring at him. Suddenly she ran
at him, and, catching the lapels of his coat in both hands, held him
rigidly fast.

"No! no! ye sha'n't go--ye mustn't go!" she said, with hysterical
intensity. "I want to tell ye something! Listen!--you--you--Mr. Fleming!
I've been a wicked, wicked girl! I've told lies to dad--to mammy--to
YOU! I've borne false witness--I'm worse than Sapphira--I've acted a
big lie. Oh, Mr. Fleming, I've made you come back here for nothing!
Ye didn't find no gold the other day. There wasn't any. It was all me!
I--I--SALTED THAT PAN!"

"Salted it!" echoed Fleming, in amazement.

"Yes, 'salted it,'" she faltered; "that's what dad says they call
it--what those wicked sons of Mammon do to their claims to sell them.
I--put gold in the pan myself; it wasn't there before."

"But why?" gasped Fleming.

She stopped. Then suddenly the fountains in the deep of her blue eyes
were broken up; she burst into a sob, and buried her head in her hands,
and her hands on his shoulder. "Because--because"--she sobbed against
him--"I WANTED YOU to come back!"

He folded her in his arms. He kissed her lovingly, forgivingly,
gratefully, tearfully, smilingly--and paused; then he kissed her
sympathetically, understandingly, apologetically, explanatorily, in lieu
of other conversation. Then, becoming coherent, he asked,--

"But WHERE did you get the gold?"

"Oh," she said between fitful and despairing sobs, "somewhere!--I don't
know--out of the old Run--long ago--when I was little! I didn't never
dare say anything to dad--he'd have been crazy mad at his own daughter
diggin'--and I never cared nor thought a single bit about it until I saw
you."

"And you have never been there since?"

"Never."

"Nor anybody else?"

"No."

Suddenly she threw back her head; her chip hat fell back from her
face, rosy with a dawning inspiration! "Oh, say, Jack!--you don't
think that--after all this time--there might"--She did not finish the
sentence, but, grasping his hand, cried, "Come!"

She caught up the pan, he seized the shovel and pick, and they raced
like boy and girl down the hill. When within a few hundred feet of the
house she turned at right angles into the clearing, and saying, "Don't
be skeered; dad's away," ran boldly on, still holding his hand, along
the little valley. At its farther extremity they came to the "Run," a
half-dried watercourse whose rocky sides were marked b