She did not speak, but a rustle in the bushes above them caught his ear; and looking up, he saw a form pass lightly through the shadows and away from them. He could not tell whether it was an Indian, a white man, or even an animal scampering off that way through the bushes. But anything that spied like that and ran when discovered was a thing to shoot at. He dropped his hand to his revolver, but she caught his arm. "No, Dan! Oh, don't--don't shoot him!" He stared at her, conscious that it was no ordinary fear that whitened her face. What did it mean? She herself had just come from the woods--pale, agitated, and with only a semblance of flower gathering to explain her absence. Had she met some one there--some one who-- He let go of her and started to run up the side of the steep bank; but swiftly as he moved, she caught him and clung to him, half sobbing. "Don't go! Oh, Dan, let him go!" she begged, and her grasp made it impossible for him to go unless he picked her up and carried her along. He stooped, took her head roughly in his hands, and turned her face up, so that the light would fall upon it. "_Him!_ Then you know who it is?" he said, grimly. "What sort of business is this, 'Tana? Are you going to tell me?" But she only crouched closer to him, and, sobbing, begged him not to go. Once he tried to break away but lost his footing, and the soil and bits of boulders went clattering down past her. With a muttered oath of impatience, he gave up the pursuit, and stared down at her with an expression more bitter than any she had ever seen on his face before. "So you are bound to protect him, are you?" he asked, coldly. "Very well. But if you value him so highly you had better keep him clear of this camp, else he'll find himself ready for a box. Come! get up and go to the tents. That is a better place for you than here. Your coming out here this evening has been a mistake all around--or else mine has. I wish to Heaven I could undo it all." She stood a little apart from him, but her hand was still outstretched and clasping his arm. "All, Dan?" she asked, and her mouth trembled. But his own lips were firm enough, as he nodded his head and looked at her. "All," he said briefly. "Go now; and here are your flowers for which you hunted so long in the woods." He stooped to pick them up for her from where they had fallen--the white, fragrant things he had thought so beautiful as she came toward him with them in the moonlight. But as he lifted them from the bank, where they were scattered, he saw something else there which was neither beautiful nor fragrant, but over which he bent with earnest scrutiny. An ordinary looking piece of shale or stone it would have seemed to an inexperienced eye, a thing with irregular veins of a greenish appearance, and the green dotted plainly with yellow--so plainly as to show even in the moonlight the nature of the find. He turned to the girl and reached it to her with the flowers.