stranger--a young fellow with a brown mustache, wearing heavy
Mexican spurs in his riding-boots, whose tinkling he apparently did not
care to conceal. He had perceived her, and was evidently pursuing her,
but so awkwardly and timidly that she eluded him with ease. When she
had reached the security of the hollow tree and had pulled the curtain
of bark before the narrow opening, with her eye to the interstices, she
waited his coming. He arrived breathlessly in the open space before the
tree where the bear once lay; the dazed, bewildered, and half awed
expression of his face, as he glanced around him and through the
openings of the forest aisles, brought a faint smile to her saddened
face. At last he called in a half embarrassed voice:

"Miss Nellie!"

The smile faded from Teresa's cheek. Who was "Miss Nellie"? She pressed
her ear to the opening. "Miss Wynn!" the voice again called, but was
lost in the echoless woods. Devoured with a new and gratuitous
curiosity, in another moment Teresa felt she would have disclosed
herself at any risk, but the stranger rose and began to retrace his
steps. Long after his tinkling spurs were lost in the distance, Teresa
remained like a statue, staring at the place where he had stood. Then
she suddenly turned like a mad woman, glanced down at the gown she was
wearing, tore it from her back as if it had been a polluted garment,
and stamped upon it in a convulsion of rage. And then, with her
beautiful bare arms clasped together over her head, she threw herself
upon her couch in a tempest of tears.

CHAPTER VI.

When Miss Nellie reached the first mining extension of Indian Spring,
which surrounded it like a fosse, she descended for one instant into
one of its trenches, opened her parasol, removed her duster, hid it
under a bowlder, and with a few shivers and cat-like strokes of her
soft hands not only obliterated all material traces of the stolen cream
of Carquinez Woods, but assumed a feline demureness quite inconsistent
with any moral dereliction. Unfortunately, she forgot to remove at the
same time a certain ring from her third finger, which she had put on
with her duster and had worn at no other time. With this slight
exception, the benignant fate which always protected that young person
brought her in contact with the Burnham girls at one end of the main
street as the returning coach to Excelsior entered the other, and
enabled her to take leave of them before the coach office with