't blame you; after what you have
suf--after all that has happened."

If I hadn't been completely lost in admiration for her keen sense of
justice, and more or less bewildered by her beauty and her nearness, I
might have caught the significance of what she was trying to say. But
I didn't.

"No; I didn't mean that," I denied warmly. "I do believe every word
you have said. No one who knows you could disbelieve you for a moment."

"But you don't know me," she put in quickly.

I saw how near I had come to self-betrayal and tried to fend my little
life-raft off the rocks.

"You will say that we have met only once before to-night, and then only
casually. Will you permit a comparative stranger to say that that was
enough? Your soul looks out through your eyes, Miss Everton, and it is
an exceedingly honest soul. I know you must have strong reasons for
coming to tell us what Blackwell is doing; and if I didn't quite
understand the motive at first--with you your father's daughter, you
know, and your father in the service of the----"

"I know," she interrupted. "But you lose sight of the larger things.
If you have been telling me the truth about your ownership of this
claim, a great wrong is going to be done. I couldn't stand aside and
let it be done, could I?"

Something in her manner of saying this recalled most vividly the little
girl of the long ago, hot-hearted in her indignation against injustice
of every sort.

"No, I am sure you couldn't: I don't believe you know how to compromise
with wrong of any kind. But you ought not to take my unsupported word
about the matter of ownership. Let me call Barrett."

"It isn't necessary. If you say that you three have an honest right to
be here, I believe you implicitly. And what I have done is nothing.
My father would have done it if he hadn't--if he didn't----"

"You needn't say it," I helped out. "Your father thinks we are trying
to hold the Lawrenceburg people up, and I don't blame him. When he was
up here the other day--the day you were both here--he thought he caught
us red-handed. It wasn't so; he was quite mistaken; but for reasons
which I can't explain just now I couldn't very well take the only
course which would have undeceived him."

"I--I think I understand," she returned, guardedly. "You--you haven't
been stealing ore from the Lawrenceburg sheds?"

I laughed and said a thing that I wouldn't have said to any other
living human being on earth at