anvases?"

Curly nodded, looking from Aldous to Stevens to see if he could detect
anything that looked like a joke.

"Hit's a go," he said.

Aldous handed him a check for sixteen hundred and eighty dollars.

"Make out the bill of sale to Stevens," he said. "I'm paying for them, but
they're Stevens' horses. And, look here, Curly, I'm buying them only with
your agreement that you'll say nothing about who paid for them. Will you
agree to that?"

Curly was joyously looking at the check.

"Gyve me a Bible," he demanded. "Hi'll swear Stevens p'id for them! I give
you the word of a Hinglish gentleman!"

Without another word Aldous opened the cabin door and was gone, leaving
Stevens quite as much amazed as the little Englishman whom everybody called
Curly, because he had no hair.

Aldous went at once to the station, and for the first time inquired into
the condition that was holding back the Tete Jaune train. He found that a
slide had given way, burying a section of track under gravel and rock. A
hundred men were at work clearing it away, and it was probable they would
finish by noon. A gang boss, who had come back with telegraphic reports,
said that half a dozen men had carried Quade's hand-car over the
obstruction about midnight.

It was seven o'clock when Aldous left for the Miette bottom. He believed
that Joanne would be up. At this season of the year the first glow of day
usually found the Ottos at breakfast, and for half an hour the sun had been
shining on the top of Pyramid Mountain. He was eager to tell her what had
passed between him and Keller. He laughed softly when he confessed to
himself how madly he wanted to see her.

He always liked to come up to the Otto home very early of a morning, or in
the dusk of evening. Very frequently he was filled with a desire to stand
outside the red-and-white striped walls of the tent-house and listen
unseen. Inside there was always cheer: at night the crackle of fire and the
glow of light, the happy laughter of the gentle-hearted Scotchwoman, and
the affectionate banter of her "big mountain man," who looked more like a
brigand than the luckiest and most contented husband in the mountains--the
luckiest, quite surely, with the one exception of his brother Clossen, who
had, by some occult strategy or other, induced a sweet-faced and
aristocratic little woman to look upon his own honest physiognomy as the
handsomest and finest in the world. This morning Aldous followed a nar