reason for anything?"

"But I want to know! Tell me, Felicia, don't you like it here?"

"Yes," said Felicia, with trembling lips, "I like it here, 'cept when
you get sick and are so awful cross with me and Charley and make Charley
cry. I wouldn't want Elsa to see you that way."

Dick turned purple. "Oh, well," cut in Roger, quickly, "Elsa'll have
three men's crossness to put up with down at our camp, Felicia. Just
think of that! And if it should happen that we'd all get cross at once,
probably we'd blow the roof of the engine house off again."

"That's why we want Elsa to stay with us," said Ernest. "You see when
men are cross, the only thing that cures them is having a nice girl
around to make them ashamed of themselves."

"Sometimes already, if it gets too much vhen I make myself mad," added
Gustav, "maybe ve get a squaw to come by our camp to vip us bad boys for
Fraeulein Elsa, eh?"

"If all the men in the world get cross, like you, Dicky," asked Felicia,
wonderingly, "why do ladies marry them?"

"They don't, chicken! No one's married me."

"Maybe Elsa will. Unless Gustav gets her," suggested Felicia.

"Maybe Roger, he gets her, eh?" asked Gustav.

"Oh, no!" in sudden alarm, crossing over to Roger's knee to look up into
his face with a depth of love in her brown eyes that tightened his
throat as he lifted her into his lap. "Roger's going to marry me. Only
Roger, if ever you're as cross to me as you were to Gustav, I shall just
walk out of the house and never, never come back."

It was Roger's turn to blush and he did so thoroughly, while Dick burst
into a roar of laughter in which the other men joined. Under its cover,
Charley hustled Felicia off to bed.

At dawn the next day Roger and Dick started on their melancholy errand.
The climbing was in many instances too precipitous for the horses and
they made many detours. It was late in the afternoon, on a detour across
a wide canyon that they came upon the end of the Von Minden drama. The
canyon was really a part of the desert floor and was deep with sand.
Roger it was, who first noted footprints.

"Look, Dick!" he called. "An Indian must have been here! Look at the
naked footprints!"

Dick rode up beside him. "I wonder!" he said.

Both men glanced about them. "Yonder are some clothes, let's pick up
this trail," suggested Dick.

"By Jove, it's Mrs. von Minden's pink wrapper!" cried Roger, "and over
there are her shoes."

"Rog, we've got to brace o