shrieking sentence: "Lost forevermore!" That was it! Joan was lost!

He looked up at the superintendent's quarters, which had been his
home, and saw that its lights were out. Bill, he conjectured, always
hard working and early rising, had tumbled into his bed, unconscious
of this tragedy. He struck off across the gulch, and took the trail he
had so frequently trodden with a beating heart, and high and tender
hope. It led him to the black barrier of the pipe line, the place
where first he had met her, the sacred clump of bushes that had held
and surrendered to him the handkerchief enshrined in his pocket, the
slope where she had leaned down from her horse and kissed him in the
only caress he had ever received from her lips, and told him that he
should be with her in her prayers.

Reverently he caressed with his hands the spot where she had so often
sat on a gray old bowlder, flat-topped. His heart cried for one more
sight of her, one more caress, one more opportunity to listen to her
voice before he dealt her the irrevocable wound that would end it
all.

Not for an instant did he waver. The tempter, whispering in his ear,
told him that he could conceal his knowledge, advise Sloan to sell,
take his chance with Joan, and let the sleeping dog lie, forever
undiscovered. It told him that Sloan was admittedly rich beyond his
needs, and that with him the Croix d'Or was merely a matter of
sentiment, and an opportunity of bestowing on the son of his old-time
friend a chance to get ahead in the world.

But back of it all came the inexorable voice of truth, telling Dick
that there was but one course open, and that was reparation; that to
his benefactor he owed faith and loyalty; that Presby must pay, though
his--Richard Townsend's--castles crumbled to dust in the wreckage of
exposure. He must break the heart and faith of the girl who loved him,
and whom, with every fiber of his being, he loved in return.

She would stand in the world as the daughter of a colossal thief! Not
a thief of the marts, where crookedness was confused with shrewdness
far removed from the theft of the hands; but a thief who had burrowed
beneath another man's property, and carried away, to coinage, his
gold. Between Bully Presby and the man who tunneled under a bank to
loot the safe, there was no moral difference save in the romance of
that mystic underground world where men bored like microbes for their
spoil.

"Joan! Joan! Joan!" he muttered aloud,