have gone near my dream girl for a
fortune. "I think I'll get clean first," I began, and found myself
laughing for the first time in a week. But as I turned away I glanced
back from the dark passage where Charliet, the French-Canadian cook, was
supposed to keep a lamp and never did, and saw the girl in the living
room look after me,--with a look I had never seen in any girl's eyes, if
I'd seen a hunted man have it.

"Gad, she knows I know she met me--and she doesn't mean to say so," I
thought vividly. What the reason was I couldn't see, or whom there could
be at La Chance that such a girl should find it necessary to tell that
she would not have him disgrace her, and that he must go away. It made
me wrathy to think there could be any one she needed to hit out at like
that. But we had a queer lot at the mine, including Dunn and Collins, a
couple of educated boys who had not been educated enough to pass as
mining engineers, and had been kicked out into the world by their
families. It might have been either of those two star failures in the
bunk house. The only person it could not have been was Dudley
Wilbraham; since aside from the fact that she could easily speak to him
in the shack she could not have told him he must go away from his own
mine. Which reminded me I'd never even asked where Dudley was or one
thing about the mine I'd been away from so long.

But my dream girl, where no girl had ever been, was the only thing I
could think of. I had meant to get some food and go to bed, but instead
I threw my Skunk's Misery clothes out of the window, and got ready to go
out to supper and see that girl again. Who under heaven she could be was
past me, as well as how she came to be at La Chance. I would have been
scared green lest she was the wife of some man at the mine, only she had
no wedding ring on the slim left hand that had beckoned me to the fire.
Yet, "She can't just be here alone, either, and I'm blessed if I see who
she can have come with," I thought blankly. And I opened my room door
straight on Marcia Wilbraham,--Wilbraham's sister!

"_Well_," I said. It was the only thing that came to me. I knew
immediately, of course, that the girl in the living room must have come
out with Marcia; but it knocked me silly to see Marcia herself at La
Chance. I had known Marcia Wilbraham, as I had known Dudley, ever since
I wore blue serge knickerbockers trimmed with white braid. She never
went anywhere with Dudley. She had money