“It certainly looks mighty lonely to me for them boys to start off up that mountain alone,” sighed Pa McBirney. “But I couldn’t endure it to think of the stock going unfed.” “You don’t suppose those dreadful people will get after Hi, too, do you?” Carin whispered to her mother. Mrs. Carson started and looked troubled. “I declare Carin, I don’t know. I’m all at sea. I’ve read of things like this, but nothing of the sort ever came into my life before, and I can’t more than half believe it.” “That’s just the way I feel, mamma. There’s a ring at the doorbell. Perhaps it’s the sheriff.” It was the sheriff, Mr. James Coulter, a heavy man with small eyes and a square jaw, and with him was Haystack Thompson. “You’ll have to excuse me for coming along,” Haystack apologized. “But I’m in this hunt to stay. Life’s been lagging along pretty slow with me lately and now here something comes that looks to me like a man’s work, and I’ll be plumbasted, if I don’t want a hand in it.” Thomas McBirney held out his hand. “You always was one for adventures, Mr. Thompson,” he said, with emotion in his voice. “We’re grateful for your help.” So they sat together, planning and scheming, till Carin fell asleep on the sofa, and the oil burned out of the lamps. The rain fell heavier and heavier and blew in gusts against the pane. And when Carin staggered up to bed with the help of Mammy Thula, it seemed to her as if all the pleasant things had stopped happening and only trouble was at hand. Very much the same sort of an idea was lying in the bottom of Ma McBirney’s mind, though she tried to answer cheerfully when her Thomas spoke to her, and she said her prayers as if she had perfect faith that they were to be answered. But the truth was, she was too worried just then to have much faith. She imagined the frightful things that might be happening to her poor Azalea, and she realized more than ever how dear the child had become to her, and how she loved her merry ways and her odd turns of mind, and her way of acting as if the world was hers. But, more than that—Oh, much more than that just at that particular moment, was her anxiety for her own James Stuart. What was her boy doing just then, she wondered. The rain was simply threshing against the pane, and she knew in what torrents it would pour down the mountain side, ripping new gulleys for itself and deepening the old ones. It was black as only night and cloud can make the world, and the horses would be wearied and fretted. “I doubt we were right in letting those poor boys go up the mountain to-night, Thomas,” she said, just as the good Pa McBirney was sinking into slumber. “We might better have let the creatures go hungry for a while than to risk the lives of those boys.”