mons, said: "Anyway, I
thank you for volunteering to rescue me, Mr. Townsend, and wish you
lots of good luck, but please don't start any more bowlders down the
hill, because if you do I shall be robbed of my most enjoyable trip
each day. Good-by."

"Don't be afraid," he called to her, as she started away. "There are
no more bowlders to roll."

He stood and watched her as she rode, masterfully seated on the black
horse, around a crag that stuck out into the trail.

"'Faith in anything is the first requisite for success,'" he repeated
to himself, striving to recall whether or not it was, as she had
intimated, a hackneyed proverb for the young; yet there was something
bracing in it, coming from her calm, young, womanly lips. "That's it;
she has it," he again said to himself. "'Faith.' That's what I need."
And he resumed his tramp up the mountainside with a better courage and
more hope for the Croix d'Or. He was still vaguely troubled when he
made his way back past the power-house, in a sliding, scrambling
descent, his boots starting tiny avalanches of shale and loose rock to
go clattering down the mountainside.

The new men were proving competent under the direction of a boss
pipeman who had been made foreman, and Dick trudged away toward the
mine, feeling that one part of the work, at least, would be speedily
accomplished.

Bill was still striding backward and forward, but devoting most of his
attention to cleaning up the mill, and declared, with a wry smile,
that he never felt better in his life, but never liked talking less.

When the noon whistle shrieked its high, staccato note from the
engine-house, they went up to the mess, and seated themselves at the
head of the table. As a whole, the men were fairly satisfactory. Bill
stared coldly down the table, and appeared to be mentally tabulating
those who would draw but one pay-check, and that when their "time" was
given them, but Dick's mind persisted in wandering afield to the
chance encounter of the morning.

The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner's fashion,
silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to
the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful
repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open
windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while
waiting for the whistle.

"Don't you fool yourself about Bully Presby," one of them was saying.
"It's true he's a hard man, and