"Oh, no, don't have her here. She wouldn't like to be here all the time," begged Felicia. Then she blushed and retreated behind Roger's chair. She refused half tearfully to explain her statement when Dick urged her, at first jokingly, then in a commanding manner. "Tell me, Felicia, don't you like it here?" drawing her to his side. "Oh, let her alone, Dicky," begged Charley. "Why insist on a child's reason for anything?" "But I want to know! Tell me, Felicia, don't you like it here?" "Yes," said Felicia, with trembling lips, "I like it here, 'cept when you get sick and are so awful cross with me and Charley and make Charley cry. I wouldn't want Elsa to see you that way." Dick turned purple. "Oh, well," cut in Roger, quickly, "Elsa'll have three men's crossness to put up with down at our camp, Felicia. Just think of that! And if it should happen that we'd all get cross at once, probably we'd blow the roof of the engine house off again." "That's why we want Elsa to stay with us," said Ernest. "You see when men are cross, the only thing that cures them is having a nice girl around to make them ashamed of themselves." "Sometimes already, if it gets too much vhen I make myself mad," added Gustav, "maybe ve get a squaw to come by our camp to vip us bad boys for Fraeulein Elsa, eh?" "If all the men in the world get cross, like you, Dicky," asked Felicia, wonderingly, "why do ladies marry them?" "They don't, chicken! No one's married me." "Maybe Elsa will. Unless Gustav gets her," suggested Felicia. "Maybe Roger, he gets her, eh?" asked Gustav. "Oh, no!" in sudden alarm, crossing over to Roger's knee to look up into his face with a depth of love in her brown eyes that tightened his throat as he lifted her into his lap. "Roger's going to marry me. Only Roger, if ever you're as cross to me as you were to Gustav, I shall just walk out of the house and never, never come back." It was Roger's turn to blush and he did so thoroughly, while Dick burst into a roar of laughter in which the other men joined. Under its cover, Charley hustled Felicia off to bed. At dawn the next day Roger and Dick started on their melancholy errand. The climbing was in many instances too precipitous for the horses and they made many detours. It was late in the afternoon, on a detour across a wide canyon that they came upon the end of the Von Minden drama. The canyon was really a part of the desert floor and was deep with sand. Roger it was, who first noted footprints. "Look, Dick!" he called. "An Indian must have been here! Look at the naked footprints!" Dick rode up beside him. "I wonder!" he said. Both men glanced about them. "Yonder are some clothes, let's pick up this trail," suggested Dick. "By Jove, it's Mrs. von Minden's pink wrapper!" cried Roger, "and over there are her shoes." "Rog, we've got to brace ourselves," Dick pulled up his horse. "When folks thirst to death in the desert, they often strip off their clothes and run around in a big circle."