Sandy nodded and joined him, and the two men ascended toward the seepage where Murray had lain. Bill Hobbs looked from the face of the girl, alight with a strange happiness, to the incisive, quizzical eyes of Murray. He seemed to sense a constraint, flushed slightly, and was turning away when Murray's hand halted him. "Hold on there, Willyum! I'm glad, old man, very glad, that everything's clear for you! By the way, I've an item of news for your paper. You know what I told you about the sanitarium? Well, Mr. Lee is going ahead with his plans, and I'm to be in charge----" "Say!" broke out Hobbs with sudden remembrance. "What happened to Scudder? We seen him out yonder, and Mac laid it to a rattler." "Mac was right, I suppose," said Murray, thoughtfully. "Although I'm not so sure that it wasn't the hand of Providence, Willyum. But lay it to the rattler and play safe. He shot Tom Lee through the arm before the rattler got him; he sure had panic, blind panic! And, by the way, I have another item of news for you----" Murray glanced at Claire, who smiled happily. "Miss Lee," he pursued, "has decided to chance being the wife of a country doctor." A shout from the hillside drew their attention. Tom Lee was standing beside Claire's camp, and out of the seepage of water near by, shouting and waving his hands, was Sandy--dirty, streaked with sand and water, adrip with perspiration and exultancy. "Aiblins, now, will ye look at this!" He pointed to the seepage, a blaze of excitement lighting his face. "We see it," answered Murray, laughing. "What's the matter with it?" "Matter with it?" shouted Sandy, waving his arm at the brow of the hill. "Free gold, that's what! It'll take us smack into rotten quartz, that's what!" A little later, Bill Hobbs, standing by his automobile, rolled a cigarette. "Aw!" he muttered to himself. "Aw, gee! And now I gotta go back to the printshop and work all alone with that old derelict--and Sandy's gotta work all alone at the mine--aw, gee! Ain't it hell how a woman busts up everything! I wisht I was a poor man again!" End of Project Gutenberg's Arizona Argonauts, by Henry Bedford-Jones