to herself bitterly.

"What's that you're saying?" he queried, with the nervous quickness of
an invalid.

"Nothing--but that I'm going now." She turned her face aside to hide
her moistened eyes. "Wish me good luck, won't you?" she asked, half
sadly, half pettishly.

"Come here!"

She came and bent over him. He suddenly raised his hands, and, drawing
her face down to his own, kissed her forehead.

"Give that to _him_," he whispered, "from _me_."

She turned and fled, happily for her sentiment, not hearing the feeble
laugh that followed, as Dunn, in sheer imbecility, again referred to
the extravagant ludicrousness of the situation. "It is about the
biggest thing in the way of a sell all round," he repeated, lying on
his back, confidentially to the speck of smoke-obscured sky above him.
He pictured himself repeating it, not to Nellie--her severe propriety
might at last overlook the fact, but would not tolerate the joke--but
to her father! It would be just one of those characteristic Californian
jokes Father Wynn would admire.

To his exhaustion fever presently succeeded, and he began to grow
restless. The heat too seemed to invade his retreat, and from time to
time the little patch of blue sky was totally obscured by clouds of
smoke. He amused himself with watching a lizard who was investigating a
folded piece of paper, whose elasticity gave the little creature lively
apprehensions of its vitality. At last he could stand the stillness of
his retreat and his supine position no longer, and rolled himself out
of the bed of leaves that Teresa had so carefully prepared for him. He
rose to his feet stiff and sore, and, supporting himself by the nearest
tree, moved a few steps from the dead ashes of the camp-fire. The
movement frightened the lizard, who abandoned the paper and fled. With
a satirical recollection of Brace and his "ridiculous" discovery
through the medium of this animal, he stooped and picked up the paper.
"Like as not," he said to himself, with grim irony, "these yer lizards
are in the discovery business. P'r'aps this may lead to another
mystery;" and he began to unfold the paper with a smile. But the smile
ceased as his eye suddenly caught his own name.

A dozen lines were written in pencil on what seemed to be a blank leaf
originally torn from some book. He trembled so that he was obliged to
sit down to read these words:--

"When you get this keep away from the woods. Dunn and another man are
in dead