n't forget, daddy,
we're almost out of books. You'll have to send for more by the next
supply train. Constable Williams is to lend me his catalogues to make
out a new list."

She stopped, conscious of a tense stillness from the room beyond. For
a fleeting moment she listened, then hurried out, fastening the last
pin in her belt.

Her father, feet braced, was staring tensely over the grade past the
camp. And in his hand, half raised, was the rifle that always hung in
a rack beside the door.

[1] The term applied to foreign laborers, especially on railway
construction.

CHAPTER III

THE MYSTERIOUS RAFT

Tressa Torrance, inured as sensitive girl could be to the turmoil and
danger of their life on railway construction, experienced a new
sensation of fear. Never had she seen her father use a firearm; his
ready fists were more to his liking. With a breathless rush she stood
by his side, one hand gripping the wrist of the hand that held the
trigger guard.

That precaution first. Then she turned her eyes to where her father
was staring.

Far up the ribbon of river, only a few hundred yards below where it
emerged from its hidden course through the forest, a clumsy raft was
drifting clumsily down. In the gleam of the last sun rays it was but a
silhouette of black--a flat base with live creatures on it. In a
moment it drifted from the glare and in the clear evening air was
visible to the last line.

On it were a man and a woman, and a group of horses. Good cause for
excitement there in the shack up by the grade. Along the mile of the
Tepee that was known to man there was only one raft--at least only one
that had a right to exist--the make-shift affair employed on
construction duty down at the base of the trestle. Within sixty miles
there was not a living soul but the construction gang and the two
Policemen at Mile 127, not a horse but Torrance's and the Police pair.
At least that was the limit of Torrance's information, and none other
had such claim to know.

But this was not the construction raft--and there were the horses.
Torrance had already lost a dozen of his best in some mysterious way.
It was with that thought that he had seized his rifle.

Then the woman!

Suddenly he became aware that something was wrong with the raft--and a
few hundred yards ahead was a stretch of foaming rapids that would
smash it to kindling wood. The woman stood leaning on the shaft of a
broken sweep, watchin