to me. "Mr. Stretton, you're not angry with me
for coming with you?"

"You know I'm not." But I did not know what I was. Any one who has read
as far as this will know that if ever a plain, stupid fool walked this
world, it was I,--Nicholas Dane Stretton. Put me in the bush, or with
horses, and I'm useful enough,--but with men and women I seem to go
blind and dumb. I know I never could read a detective story; the clues
and complications always made me feel dizzy. I was pretty well dazed
where I sat beside that girl I knew I ought to find out about, and her
nearness did not help me to ask her ugly questions. If she had not been
Dudley's,--but I broke the thought short off. I said to myself
impersonally that it was impossible for a girl to do any monkey tricks
about the La Chance gold with a man like me. Yet I wondered if she meant
to try!

But she showed no sign of it. "I had to come," she said gently. "Marcia
really wants Billy Jones's wife: she won't let me wait on her, and of
course Charliet can't do it. You believe me, don't you? I didn't come
just for a drive with you!"

I believed that well enough, and I nodded.

"Then," said my dream girl quietly, "will you please stop the horses?"

I looked round. We were miles from the mine, around a turn where the
spruce bush ceased for a long stretch of swamp,--bare, featureless, and
frozen. Then, for the first time, I looked at Dudley's girl that I was
fool enough to love.

"What for?" I demanded. "I mean, of course, if you like," for I saw she
was white to the lips, though her eyes met mine steadily, like a man's.
"Do you mean you want to go back?"

She shook her head almost absently. "No: I think there's something
bumping around in the back of the wagon. I"--there was a sharp, nervous
catch in her voice--"want to find out what it is."

I had packed the wagon, and I knew there was nothing in it to bump. But
I stopped the horses. I wondered if the girl beside me had some sort of
baby revolver and thought she could hold me up with it, if I let her get
out; and I knew just what I would do if she tried it. I smiled as I
waited. But she did not get out. She turned in her seat and reached
backwards into the back of the wagon, as if she had neither bones nor
joints in her lovely body. Marcia was right when she said it was
perfectly educated and trained. For a moment I could think of nothing
but the marvellous grace of her movement as she slid her hand under the
tarpaulin t