and--vanished.

At this moment he was not more than a dozen yards from her. He rushed
to where she had been standing, but her disappearance was perfect and
complete. He made a circuit of the group of trees within whose radius
she had last appeared, but there was neither trace of her, nor
suggestion of her mode of escape. He called aloud to her; the vacant
Woods let his helpless voice die in their unresponsive depths. He gazed
into the air and down at the bark-strewn carpet at his feet. Like most
of his vocation, he was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his
fashion. Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of
intelligence the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak
endeavor, he accepted its logical result with characteristic grimness,
threw his hat upon the ground, put his hands in his pockets, and said--

"Well, I'm d----d!"

CHAPTER III.

Out of compliment to Miss Nellie Wynn, Yuba Bill, on reaching Indian
Spring, had made a slight _detour_ to enable him to ostentatiously set
down his fair passenger before the door of the Burnhams. When it had
closed on the admiring eyes of the passengers and the coach had rattled
away, Miss Nellie, without any undue haste or apparent change in her
usual quiet demeanor, managed, however, to dispatch her business
promptly, and, leaving an impression that she would call again before
her return to Excelsior, parted from her friends, and slipped away
through a side street, to the General Furnishing Store of Indian
Spring. In passing this emporium, Miss Nellie's quick eye had
discovered a cheap brown linen duster hanging in its window. To
purchase it, and put it over her delicate cambric dress, albeit with a
shivering sense that she looked like a badly-folded brown-paper parcel,
did not take long. As she left the shop it was with mixed emotions of
chagrin and security that she noticed that her passage through the
settlement no longer turned the heads of its male inhabitants. She
reached the outskirts of Indian Spring and the high-road at about the
time Mr. Brace had begun his fruitless patrol of the main street. Far
in the distance a faint olive-green table mountain seemed to rise
abruptly from the plain. It was the Carquinez Woods. Gathering her
spotless skirts beneath her extemporized brown domino, she set out
briskly towards them.

But her progress was scarcely free or exhilarating. She was not
accustomed to walking in a country where "buggy-riding" wa