“Aw! Would I?” Ida gasped and almost strangled. For the first time during this the most trying day of her life she felt wholly herself. “You may just bet your life I would. I need new duds the worst way, even if I’m not a West Sider. I’ve been on a ranch for nearly a year and a half, and although Mr. Compton won’t take me to any balls, there are the movin’ pictures and the mats--matinees; _and_ the street, where I have to show up once in a while! I used to think an awful lot of my looks and style, and I guess it’s time to begin again. I can sew first rate, make any old thing. Do you mean it?” “Indeed I do! I _want_ to be of help to you in every way.” She rose and held Ida’s hand once more in hers, although she did not kiss her as another woman might have done. “Will you come tomorrow--about two?” “You may bet your bottom dollar I’ll come. I haven’t thanked you, but maybe I’ll do that some other way.” “Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. Blake lightly. IX Butte, “the richest hill in the world” (known at a period when less famous for metals and morals as “Perch of the Devil”), is a long scraggy ridge of granite and red and grey dirt rising abruptly out of a stony uneven plain high in the Rocky Mountains. The city is scooped out of its south slope, and overflows upon The Flat. Big Butte, an equally abrupt protuberance, but higher, steeper, more symmetrical, stands close beside the treasure vault, but with the aloof and somewhat cynical air of even the apocryphal volcano. On all sides the sterile valley heaves away as if abruptly arrested in a throe of the monstrous convulsion that begat it; but pressing close, cutting the thin brilliant air with its icy peaks, is an irregular and nearly circular chain of mountains, unbroken white in winter, white on the blue enamelled slopes in summer.