The Gold Trail

"Well," said the latter, "isn't the thing plain enough?" The secretary smiled. "Oh, yes," he said. "Still, I'm not sure they'll send it over the wires in quite that form." His employer agreed to the modification he suggested, and the message as despatched to Cassidy read simply, "Why are you stoppin

However, he said nothing to the others that morning, but beckoned Weston aside, and stood a moment or two looking at him, with a grimly whimsical twinkle in his eyes. Weston had not suffered greatly during the struggle of the previous evening, but there was a discolored bruise on one of his cheeks a

"It will never be quite the same again," she observed, evidently in reference to the latter, and then waved one hand as though to indicate the panorama, for she was usually voluble and disconnected in her conversation. "This, as I said last night, is wonderful—in fact, it almost oppresses one. It ma

Take these glasses and look at it." Weston, who took the glasses, swept them along the hillside across the lake. It rose very steeply from the water's edge, but the slope was uniform, and as a good deal of it consisted apparently of lightly-covered rock and gravel the pines were thinner, and there w

What do you suggest?" Weston looked around him carefully. "There's a little hollow under the ledge yonder. You should keep fairly warm there close together with the blankets over you." Kinnaird demurred to this, but Weston, drawing him aside, spoke forcibly, and at length he made a sign of acquiesce

He seemed perfectly contented, and very much at his ease, and it was a little difficult to believe that this was the sharp-voiced mart who had ordered her to put on his jacket early on the previous morning. Now he was smiling languidly, and there was a graceful carelessness that was almost boyish in

Weston looked up sharply as a patter of approaching footsteps rose out of the shadows behind him. Some of the men were evidently coming back from the settlement earlier than he had expected. In a few minutes three or four of them appeared among the trees, and he recognized them as some of his friend

Grenfell had clearer eyes and skin, and was steadier on his legs, for he had slaked his thirst with river-water for some time now. Weston was a little leaner, and his face was grimmer than it had been, for the whimsical carelessness had faded out of it. Both of them were dressed largely in rags, and

He had lived very sparingly of late, and had contrived that Grenfell got rather more than his share of the cut-down rations. It was clear to him that the older man's strength was rapidly failing. He kicked the embers of the fire together, and, after laying on a few resinous billets split the night b

The man's face was half buried among the withered needles which were thick in his unkempt hair, and he lay huddled together, grotesque and unsightly in ragged disarray. Weston vacantly noticed the puffiness of his cheeks, and the bagginess beneath his eyes. The stamp of indulgence was very plain upo

"I'm a chopper. You'd have seen the pieces fly if I'd sailed into that hotel bar a little while ago." Weston fancied that this was probable, for the man was dexterous, and there was applause when he set the bright blade whirling, and passed the haft from hand to hand. Most of the loungers could do a

He looked at the others for applause when he succeeded in hitting it. "Let up," said a comrade. "The boss lives in there." The man flung another stone, a larger one, which rang upon the iron roof. "Well," he said, "I guess that ought to fetch him." It evidently did so, for the door of the shanty ope

He was full-fleshed and red of face, and the artistically cut garments striped in soft colors conveyed a suggestion of ease and leisure which seemed very much out of place on him. One could not imagine this man lounging on a sunlit beach, or discoursing airily on a cool veranda. "Got here," he said

The deep roar it made broke soothingly through the drowsy heat, and Ida listened languidly while she watched the pines slide past. "I wonder what has become of the major," she said at length, with a little laugh. "It is too hot for fine casting, and he probably has had enough of it. After all, it re

In any case, there was a subtle change in her manner toward Weston. She had never attempted to patronize him, but now she placed him almost on the footing of an intimate acquaintance. It was done tactfully and naturally, but Mrs. Kinnaird noticed it, and took alarm.

"It's pretty and nothing more," he said. "That girl's too diffuse—she spreads herself. She might have painted if she'd been poor; though that's not a sure thing either." "Why isn't it?" asked Weston, who had, however, no great interest in the matter. "She has too level a head," Grenfell said.

They were, until a few decades ago, usually in possession of the Statesmen who worked their own land. The Statesmen have gone—economic changes vanquished them—but the houses they inherited from the men who bore pike and bow at Bannockburn and Flodden are for the most part standing yet. They have mad

Her intentions were no doubt laudable, but the methods she adopted to set the stranger at her ease were not those most likely to endear the insular English to their cousins across the Atlantic. Ida, to begin with, had not only a spice of temper but also no great reverence for forms and formulas, and

She was thinking of that afternoon at Scarthwaite, and wondering, as she had done somewhat frequently since then, what had impelled her to speak in that impulsive fashion. It had not been, as she now recognized, merely a desire to justify Clarence Weston in the eyes of his English relatives, for she

It lies clean and sightly between its mountain and the river under the clear Canadian sky. On the evening in question the faintest trace of thin blue vapor etherealized its clustering roofs and stately towers, and the great river, spanned by its famous bridge, gleamed athwart the flat champaign, a w

What was more to the purpose, he offered to provide them with a horse, camp-gear and provisions, in exchange for a certain share in the mine should their search prove successful. The share was rather a large one, but, as the man pointed out, it was very probable that they might not strike the lode a

He had also looked about him with a certain suggestive curiosity every now and then, and though he had once or twice admitted that he could not positively identify anything he saw, his air of restrained eagerness had made its impression on Weston. A half-moon had sailed up into the eastern sky when

"A few drops of this might have saved our partner," he said. "Now he has gone on; may the trail he has taken be a smooth and easy one." Then he drank, standing, a deep, invigorating draught, which seemed to cool his fevered blood and put new life in him. He gasped for a moment or so, and drank again

They now carried their leader in a hammock, as he had been wounded by several pieces of cast-iron fired out of a gaspipe gun; but they also brought back the dusky gentlemen who had been responsible for the abortive rising. Gregory Kinnaird had, it transpired, blundered into a couple of ambushes, but