w, adding gently, "Poor forehead that was wounded in my service! But it
is getting late, Ralph, and my father will be feverishly anxious about
me."

Grace was right in this, because, long before we borrowed the rancher's
Cayuse pony and set out again, Colonel Carrington and the others reached
the bank of the river, and saw only a broad stretch of muddy current
racing beneath the rigid branches of the firs. Then after they had
searched the few shingle bars--the one we landed on was by this time
covered deeply--the old man sat down on a boulder apart from the rest, and
neither dare speak to him, though Lawrence heard him say softly to
himself:

"My daughter--my daughter! I would to God I might join her."

They turned homeward in solemn silence, though perhaps a last spark of
hope burned in the Colonel's breast that by some wholly unexpected chance
we had reached it before they did, because Lawrence said he seemed to
make a stern effort to restrain himself when they saw only Miss Carrington
sitting dejectedly near the window. Thereupon Lawrence was glad to escape,
and Ormond, who rode out to gather the miners for a systematic search,
left them mercifully alone.

Afterward the old man brokenly narrated what had passed, and then there
was a heavy silence in the room, out of which the sunlight slowly faded,
until, as Miss Carrington told me, the ticking of a nickeled clock grew
maddening. At last she rose and flung the window open wide, and the
sighing of the pines drifted in mournfully with a faint coolness that came
down from the snow. Meantime, Colonel Carrington paced with a deadly
regularity up and down, neither speaking nor glancing at her, until he
started as a faint beat of horse hoofs came out of the shadows.

"Only Geoffrey returning!" he said bitterly. "But I have been listening,
listening every moment for the last hour. It is utterly hopeless, I know,
and we must bear the last black sorrow that has fallen upon us; but yet I
cannot quite believe her dead."

The tramp of hoofs grew nearer, and the Colonel leaned out through the
open casement with the hand that gripped its ledge quivering.

"That is an Indian pony, not Geoffrey's horse, and a man on foot is
leading it," he said. "They are coming this way; I will meet them."

Miss Carrington, however, laid a restraining grasp upon him, and very
slowly the clock ticked off the seconds until, when two figures came out
through the thinning forest into the clearin