Elithe, who was bathing his forehead, was silent a moment, and then said: “I’ll take the music and play it for them. Rob can go with me on your horse. I shall be a poor substitute for you, but better than nothing. Shall I go?” Mr. Hansford hesitated a moment, and then, knowing that she would be just as safe with those rough men as if each were her brother, consented. “Aren’t you at all afraid?” her mother asked, and Elithe answered, laughingly: “Afraid? No. Why should I be? If I were in a great danger I would go to the miners sooner than to any one else, and then Mrs. Stokes and her mother are there now.” She was soon ready, looking, as her brother Rob said, “very swell” in her gown of blue flannel and a fanciful little riding cap, trimmed with gilt cord and tassel. It had come in a missionary box the fall previous, and was so becoming to her well-shaped head and short curls that she always wore it to the mines, where the men said she looked like a daisy. It was a glorious day, for the spring was early that year, and both Elithe and Rob felt the exhilaration of the pure mountain air and the fine scenery as they made their way over wild wastes of plains and then struck into the gorge which led to the Deep Gulch, the terminus of their journey. CHAPTER VIII. THE STRANGER AT DEEP GULCH. They found the miners in their Sunday clothes, some sitting on the ground, some on big boulders and piles of debris, some standing, and all smoking and waiting anxiously the arrival of Mr. Hansford. When they saw only Rob, with Elithe, their countenances fell. “Where’s the parson? Isn’t he coming?” they asked, gathering around Elithe, who told them of her father’s illness, and said she had brought the new music and would play and sing it for them. This was some consolation, but, evidently, there was something else on their minds, and at last Bill Stokes said, “If we hadn’t expected your father we should have sent for him. There’s a sick fellow here, crazy as a loon by spells, and we don’t know what to do. I s’pose he orto have a doctor.” “Where is he, and who is he?” Elithe asked, and Stokes replied, “We’ve got him into my cabin, where Lizy Ann can look after him. He did lay on a buffalo skin a spell in one of the boys’ huts, cussin’ and howlin’ with tremens,—snakes, and all that.” “Oh-h!” Elithe said, with a shudder. “It’s dreadful. Where did he come from? What is his name?”