tch so much as one lonesome
pair, all the time I was dealing. I'm ashamed of myself. I haven't
seen such a mean, crooked game of stud dealt since I come East!"

Garry was very quiet the next morning when he and Steve went back to
their work; before noon came his uneasiness had become very apparent to
the man whom he was assisting. But neither his silence nor his
nervousness any longer worried Steve. Instead, the latter let himself
smile over both those outward evidences of inward panic, whenever his
thoughts were on Garry at all. For the latter's diffidence as the day
aged became a flushed and warm-checked thing, until at four in the
afternoon Steve could no longer withhold the suggestion for which
wordlessly, Garry was asking.

"Joe was more than half right," he remarked, one eye to his level, "in
spite of the fact that we refused to take him seriously. We can't let
those people come in and find everything too hopelessly uncomfortable,
so perhaps you'd better run ahead now, Garry, and see what he has
accomplished. I don't want to leave this spot myself until I have some
figures upon which I know I can rely. But you might run ahead, if you
will. I'll be along later."

It was couched in the form of a request, but Garry's face flamed. He
went, albeit a bit reluctantly. And he stopped more than a few times
in his climb from the edge of the timber to the door of Steve's shack.
But once he had passed over the threshold to find that unrecognizably
trim room empty, his face grew heavy with disappointment; he was on the
point of going back outside to scan the bowl of the valley when a tall,
short-skirted figure, enveloped in a voluminous apron which Fat Joe in
a moment of mistaken zeal had once provided for the cook-boy, flashed
through the passage-way from the kitchen annex and barely missed
catapulting into his arms. Miriam Burrell, pink-faced from the heat of
the roaring wood-stove, and smudged with flour on forehead and cheek,
lifted her apron and swung it like a flag of victory.

"I've found it," she sang triumphantly. "I've found out what was the
matter! I'd just forgotten the baking-powder, that was all! Next
time----"

Then she recognized him. With outstretched hands still clutching the
edge of her apron, she stood, almond eyes widening, and scanned him
from head to foot. Even Steve, who had been with him every moment, had
noticed the hour to hour change that had been taking place in Garry's
appea