Never had Canyon Pass heard Nell Blossom sing so sweetly. The girl’s tones fairly gripped the heart-strings of her hearers and wrung them. The tears rolled down good old Mother Tubbs’ face. Sam sat beside her, looking straight ahead more like a gargoyle than ever, afraid to wink for fear the salt drops would carom from his bony cheeks. Steve Siebert in his corner, and Andy McCann in his—as far apart as the width of the room would allow—looked like their burros, carved out of desert rock. Nothing seemed to move those old fellows. But the rest of the congregation—even the roughnecks on the back seats—were subdued when the song was done. After the service Hunt apprehended a new note in the manner and speech of his flock. He scarcely realized that his own talk had been more spiritual than usual because of the emotion roused within him by Nell’s song. There was a hush over the room. The noisy fellows went out on tiptoe. Voices were subdued. For almost the first time the atmosphere of this rough room where they “held meetings” had become that of a real house of worship. “Steve Siebert is right,” the parson told himself not without gravity. “It is time that I should show my own respect beyond peradventure for the religion I preach. Betty must shake the mothballs out of that coat.” * * * * * Lizard Dan tooled his six mules across the East Fork. The water was more than waist deep, and the beasts swam for part of the way, and the inside passengers sat on the small of their backs with their boots up on the cross-straps. The driver urged the team with voice and whip up the muddy rise to the Wild Rose. His desert-stained face was full of wrinkles of excitement. Joe Hurley, who chanced to be lingering at the door of the hotel, spied the emotion in the bus-driver’s countenance. “What’s got you, old-timer?” asked the mining man, strolling down to the step below the driver. “Something on the road over from Crescent City bite you?” “I got bit all right,” growled Lizard Dan. He stooped to put his tobacco stained lips close to Joe’s ear. “The sheriff of Cactus County rode over on the seat with me. Yeppy! And he dropped off back yonder to talk to Sheriff Blaney.” “Something doing?” “Youbetcha! The Cactus County sheriff was tellin’ me. He’s been after a guy that turned a trick last summer—fore part of the summer in fact—’way out beyond Hoskins. He was some pretty shrewd short-card tin-horn, if you ask me.” “A gambler? Anybody know him?” asked Joe quite idly. “I didn’t get his name. The sheriff was pumpin’ me a lot about who was new—if any—in Canyon Pass. I told him,” and Dan grinned widely, “that ’bout the newest citizens we had yere was Parson Hunt and his sister.” “You’re some little josher, aren’t you, Dan?” said Joe, grimly. “What had the feller done?”