"Vil Holland!" exclaimed Lord Clendenning. "My word, d'ye think he'd dare? Yes, Watts told us that he brought in the pack because Sinclair was in a hurry. The bloody scamp! He should be jolly well trounced! I'll do it myself if I see him, so help me Bob, I will!" Bethune turned to the girl. "You have examined his effects. Was there evidence of their having been tampered with?" "I'm sure I don't know. If he left any papers or maps or things like that in there it most certainly has been tampered with, for they are not there now." The man smiled. "I think we are safe in assuming that there were no maps or papers of value in the outfit. Your father was far too shrewd to have left anything of the sort to the tender mercies of Vil Holland. By cutting the pack Vil merely gave evidence of his unscrupulous methods without in any way profiting by it. And, as for the map and photographs in your possession, I should advise you to find some good hiding place for them and not trust to carrying them about upon your person." Swiftly Patty glanced at the speaker. That last injunction, somehow, did not ring quite true. But he had turned to the door, and a moment later when he faced her to bid her adieu, the boyish smile was again curling his lips, and he mounted and rode away. CHAPTER VII IN THE CABIN For a long time after the departure of her visitors, Patty Sinclair sat thinking. Was it true, all this man had told her? She remembered vividly the beautiful tribute he had paid her father and the emotion that had gripped him as he finished. Surely his words rang true. They were true, or else the man was a consummate actor as well as an unscrupulous knave. She recalled the boyish smile, the story of Lord Clendenning's terrible journey, and the impatience with which he had silenced the Englishman's self-criticism. What would be more natural than that two men thrown together in the middle of the hill country, as her father and Bethune had been thrown together, should have pooled their interests, especially if each possessed an essential that the other did not. There had been somehow a sincerity about the man that carried conviction. She liked his ready admission that her father's knowledge of mining greatly exceeded his own. And the assertion that he had advanced sums of money for the carrying on of the work sounded plausible enough, for the girl knew that her father's income had been small--pitiably small, but enough, he had always insisted, for his meager needs. Unquestionably, up to that point the man's words had carried the ring of truth. Then came the false notes; the open accusation of Vil Holland, and the warning as to the concealment of the map and photos which she had twice purposely refused to admit that she possessed. This was the second time he had gone out of his way to warn her against Vil Holland. On occasion of their previous meeting, he had hinted that Holland might pose as a friend of her father--a pose Bethune, himself, boldly assumed.