believe you have touched grub to-day!"

Ruth grunted out some indifferent reply.

"Thar hezen't been a slice cut off that bacon since I left," continued
Rand, bringing a side of bacon and some biscuits from the cupboard, and
applying himself to the discussion of them at the table. "You're gettin'
off yer feet, Ruth. What's up?"

Ruth replied by taking an uninvited seat beside him, and resting his
chin on the palms of his hands. He did not eat, but simply transferred
his inattention from the door to the table.

"You're workin' too many hours in the shaft," continued Rand. "You're
always up to some such d--n fool business when I'm not yer."

"I dipped a little west to-day," Ruth went on, without heeding the
brotherly remonstrance, "and struck quartz and pyrites."

"Thet's you!--allers dippin' west or east for quartz and the color,
instead of keeping on plumb down to the 'cement'!"*

* The local name for gold-bearing alluvial drift,--the bed
of a prehistoric river.

"We've been three years digging for cement," said Ruth, more in
abstraction than in reproach,--"three years!"

"And we may be three years more,--may be only three days. Why, you
couldn't be more impatient if--if--if you lived in a valley."

Delivering this tremendous comparison as an unanswerable climax, Rand
applied himself once more to his repast. Ruth, after a moment's pause,
without speaking or looking up, disengaged his hand from under his chin,
and slid it along, palm uppermost, on the table beside his brother.
Thereupon Rand slowly reached forward his left hand, the right being
engaged in conveying victual to his mouth, and laid it on his brother's
palm. The act was evidently an habitual, half mechanical one; for in
a few moments the hands were as gently disengaged, without comment or
expression. At last Rand leaned back in his chair, laid down his knife
and fork, and, complacently loosening the belt that held his revolver,
threw it and the weapon on his bed. Taking out his pipe, and chipping
some tobacco on the table, he said carelessly, "I came a piece through
the woods with Mornie just now."

The face that Ruth turned upon his brother was very distinct in its
expression at that moment, and quite belied the popular theory that
the twins could not be told apart. "Thet gal," continued Rand, without
looking up, "is either flighty, or--or suthin'," he added in vague
disgust, pushing the table from him as if it were the lady in qu