nce is now done, and his friends will
afford him all needed protection. Lyle has found her own, her future
is provided for. The wrongs which I have witnessed for years in
silence, will be righted without any assistance of mine. There is
nothing more for me to do, and to-morrow I will start forth on the
old, wandering life again."

His head dropped lower; he was thinking deeply.

"He said the old home was open, and would always be what it had been
in the past. Home! What would that not mean now, after all these
years! But that was long ago. I am dead to them now,--dead and
forgotten. They will be happy with their new-found daughter, and
Everard will be to them as a son, their happiness will be complete,
and I will not mar it by any reminders of the wretched past."

He glanced upward at the surrounding peaks.

"To-morrow I go forth again into the mountains,--those towers of
refuge and strength,--and in their soothing solitudes I shall once
more find peace!"

Then he retired. But to Jack, resting for the last time in his cabin
home, to those then peacefully sleeping in the little mining camp, or
to the others speeding westward through the night, on the wings of
steam, there came no vision, no thought of what the morrow was, in
reality, to bring.

CHAPTER XLIII.

Tuesday morning dawned,--a day never to be forgotten in the history of
the little mining camp, or in the lives of many outsiders as well.

A strange thrill of subdued excitement ran through the little group,
assembled before breakfast in the porch, as they realized that the day
to which they had looked forward with varying anticipations had at
last arrived; and there was, unconsciously, a look of watchful
expectancy on every face.

Even Nature herself seemed in sympathy with them. For a few days the
heat had been intense, devouring with its scorching breath every
vestige of verdure on the mountain sides and foothills, and leaving
them dull and dun. On this particular morning the heat seemed more
terrible than ever, and there was not a breath of air stirring to cool
the oppressive atmosphere. The earth and sky were suffused with a
bright, red light, which gradually died away into a dim, purplish
haze, through which the sun ascended like a ball of fire; while every
blade and leaf hung motionless, as if awaiting breathlessly the coming
of some great catastrophe.

"This portends a storm," said Houston, as he watched the strange
phenomena.

"Yes,