"Why, Mrs. Bently, are you a miracle worker?" Jane, pleased for the children's sake, inquired. Laughingly the woman confessed that the ice-cream had been the reason she had asked for one hour in which to prepare. "So many folks motorin' past want ice-cream," she told them, "and so Pa Bently fetched a new contraption from Denver last time he was up there, an' it'll freeze ice-cream in one hour easy." Then she disappeared to soon return with a mountain of a chocolate layer cake. "You'll have to get along without candles, Miss Jane," the good woman said, "an' the frostin' ain't very hard yet, but I reckon it'll pass." The girl, who had felt scornful of these "natives," as she had called them only a short month before, was deeply touched and she exclaimed with real feeling: "Mrs. Bently, I do indeed appreciate all the trouble that you have taken. I have never had a nicer party." A moment later Jane saw the two cowboys leave the dining-room. Almost unconsciously she pressed her hand against her heart to still its rapid beating as her panicky thought was questioning: "Do you really want to send that letter to Jean Sawyer? There is yet time to get it. Do you want him to know just how dishonorable you were about the money?" She half rose, then sank down again, for through the swinging door she had seen Mr. Bently handing the Packard mail pouch to the cowboy. It was too late. Then, chancing to meet Merry's troubled glance, Jane smiled as she said with an effort at gaiety: "Gerald, if all of your wishes are to be fulfilled as magically as this one has been, you are to be a lucky boy." "There's two things we've wished for lately that don't happen, aren't there, Danny?" The small boy looked up at his big brother, who smiled down, as be replied, "I suppose you mean that we have not found Meg Heger's box. What is the other unmaterialized wish, Gerry?" The boy's wide eyes expressed astonishment. "Why, Dan Abbott, I do believe you've forgotten that we wished we might find the lost gold mine." The older boy laughingly confessed that was true. Dan had found a gold mine that he valued much more than the one to which Gerald referred. It was Mrs. Bently who said, "It wasn't a lost mine, exactly, dearie. The vein they'd been workin' petered out, although there are folks who reckon that vein branched off somewhars, but the miners went away hot-foot when the Bald Mountain Strike was made." Then she concluded: "There's not much use huntin' for that lost vein, how-some-ever. Time and again there's been wanderin' miners diggin' around in them parts, but they allays give up and go away."