"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 that stage of the game. "If we can manage to hold our own for just a little while longer, Robert Barrett will be a very rich man, Miss Everton. May I venture to hand you a lot of good wishes before the fact? I know this is only a very old friend's privilege, but----" Her embarrassment was very charming, and, as I saw it, most natural. "I--indeed, I wasn't thinking any more of Mr. Barrett than I was of--of you and--and Mr. Gifford," she faltered. "I simply couldn't bear to think of this terrible thing dropping upon you out of a clear sky if--if you hadn't been doing anything to deserve it. Can you defend yourselves in any way?" "We can try mighty hard," I asserted. "That is what I meant when I said that we were not going to be driven off to-morrow. Possession is nine points of the law. We have our little foothold here, and we shall try to keep it. I'll tell Barrett when he wakes, and we'll be ready for them when they come. Now you must let me take you back home. You really oughtn't to be here alone, you know." She made no objection to the bit of elder-brother-ism, but half-way up to the summit of the spur she had her small fling at the conventions. "I don't admit that I ought not to have come alone; neither that, nor your right to question it," she said definitively. "You protest because you are conventional: so am I conventional--but only so far as the conventions subserve some good end. There are situations in which the phrase, 'it isn't done,' becomes a mere impertinence. This is life in the making, up here in these desolate hills, and we who are taking part in the process are just plain men and women." "That is true enough," I rejoined; and other than this there was little said, or little chance for saying it, since the distance over the spur was short and she would not let me show myself under the Lawrenceburg masthead electrics.