is
lips. It is one subject on which he is not exactly loquacious, as
probably you know."

Again she laughed a little, grim laugh. Dick had opened his lips to
say that he had never met her father, when she continued:

"On the day I met you first, up here by your pipe line, the day you
almost ended my bright young career by starting a half-ton bowlder
down the hill--don't interrupt with repeated apologies, please--I had
my birth anniversary. I was twenty-one, and--my own boss."

"Congratulations, belated, but fervent."

"Thank you; but you again interrupt. On that day when I went home, my
father, in his customary gruff way, turned back just as he was going
to the office where he lives at least eighteen hours out of every
twenty-four, and threw in my lap a bank-book. 'Joan,' he said, 'you're
of age now. That's for you. It's all yours, to do just what you dam'
please with. I have nothing to do with it. If you make a fool use of
it, it'll be your fault, not mine. I'm giving it to you so that if
anything happened to me, or the Rattler, you'd not be helplessly
busted.'"

He jumped to his feet with an exclamation.

"The Rattler! The Rattler! And--and your name is Joan and not Dorothy,
and you are Bully Presby's daughter?"

He was bewildered by surprise.

"Why, yes. Certainly! Didn't you know that--all this time?"

"No!" he blurted. "There is a Dorothy Presby, and a----"

"Dorothy Presby!" She doubled over in a gust of mirth. "The daughter
of the lumberman over on the other side. Oh, this is too good to keep!
I must tell her the next time I see her. After all these months, you
still thought----"

Again her laughter overwhelmed her; but it was not shared by Dick, who
stood above her on the slope, frowning in perplexity, thinking of the
strange blunder into which he had been led by the words of poor old
Bells, his acceptance of her identity, his ignorance that Bully Presby
had kith or kin, and of the mine owner's sarcastic references and
veiled antagonism throughout all those troubled months preceding.

If she were Bully Presby's daughter, he might never gain her father's
consent, though the Croix d'Or were in the list of producers. He
thought of that harsh encounter on the trail, and his assertion that
he was capable of attending to his own business and asked neither
friendship nor favor from any man under the skies; of Bully Presby's
gruff reply, and of their passing each other a second time, in the
streets of Go