don't understand! You say you have
already seen this woman, and yet"--

"I HAVEN'T seen her," said Jack, composedly, turning from the window.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you and I, Fred, are going to drop this fooling right here
and leave this place for Frisco by first stage to-morrow, and--that I
owe you that dinner."

CHAPTER IV

When the stage for San Francisco rolled away the next morning with Mr.
Hamlin and the editor, the latter might have recognized in the occupant
of a dust-covered buggy that was coming leisurely towards them the tall
figure, long beard, and straight duster of his late visitor, Mr. James
Bowers. For Mr. Bowers was on the same quest that the others had just
abandoned. Like Mr. Hamlin, he had been left to his own resources, but
Mr. Bowers's resources were a life-long experience and technical skill;
he too had noted the topographical indications of the poem, and his
knowledge of the sylva of Upper California pointed as unerringly as Mr.
Hamlin's luck to the cryptogamous haunts of the Summit. Such abnormal
growths were indicative of certain localities only, but, as they were
not remunerative from a pecuniary point of view, were to be avoided by
the sagacious woodman. It was clear, therefore, that Mr. Bowers's
visit to Green Springs was not professional, and that he did not even
figuratively accept the omen.

He baited and rested his horse at the hotel, where his bucolic exterior,
however, did not elicit that attention which had been accorded to Mr.
Hamlin's charming insolence or the editor's cultivated manner. But he
glanced over a township map on the walls of the reading-room, and took
note of the names of the owners of different lots, farms, and ranches,
passing that of Delatour with the others. Then he drove leisurely in the
direction of the woods, and, reaching them, tied his horse to a young
sapling in the shade, and entered their domain with a shambling but
familiar woodman's step.

It is not the purpose of this brief chronicle to follow Mr. Bowers in
his professional diagnosis of the locality. He recognized Nature in one
of her moods of wasteful extravagance,--a waste that his experienced
eye could tell was also sapping the vitality of those outwardly robust
shafts that rose around him. He knew, without testing them, that half of
these fair-seeming columns were hollow and rotten at the core; he could
detect the chill odor of decay through the hot balsamic spices stirred
by