“Who is this who wants to run me out?” asked Hunt good-naturedly. “I must be getting awfully unpopular in some quarters.” “Those bad man at Tolley’s Grub Stake. Ah, yes, Señor! She hate you—my goodness, yes!” Betty began to be troubled—as she always was when she heard her brother’s peace threatened. “Have you heard something new, Maria?” she asked the woman. “Cholo, he hear. He come just now from the sheriff. A man come to town and he say he want those bad man.” “What bad man? Not my brother?” cried Betty. “_Madre de Dios!_ Is the Señor Hunt bad?” gasped Maria. “Why, it is Dick the Deevil I say.” “Ah-ha!” muttered Hunt, with more interest than surprise. He did not look at Betty. “This man has something against Dick Beckworth?” “Cholo whisper to me, jus’ now, before I come up here, that the sheriff weel arres’ Dick the Deevil. For robbery and swindle, you say. Si!” “This is news!” ejaculated Hunt, putting on his coat and hat. “I must go down and get the particulars.” “Oh, Ford!” What Betty might have said—how much she might have betrayed of her secret to her brother at that moment—will never be known. Before he could turn to look at her anguished face the house shook, and an atmospheric tremor seemed to pass over the town. An “airquake” was the better term for it! And with it they heard a continuous thundering roar that seemed to mingle with, yet almost drown, the chorus of the rivers which had been a monotone in their ears all day. Maria screamed and flew out of the room. Hunt exclaimed: “Something’s blown up at one of the mines, perhaps. But Joe is all right. He could not have got far away from the hotel.” It was not until he ran down and reached the street that he learned the truth. Nell had pulled in her wet and exhausted pony before the hotel and was surrounded by the excited populace. Joe was with her, and Hunt, seeing both safe, was relieved. The parson listened to her story with amazement and some of the dread that the older inhabitants of Canyon Pass felt. Something like this had happened twenty years before. She had seen a great landslide—a large part of the Overhang she thought—fall into the canyon. Already the rivers were backing up. Filled as they were by the recent unseasonable rains, the flood, if the canyon bed was really closed by the landslide, would soon rise into the town. Hunt and Hurley joined a party that launched a big batteau to go down the Runaway to the first turn in the canyon wall to see just what the danger was. Most of the other inhabitants of Canyon Pass were crowding into Main Street. It might be that all would have to get back to the headlands where the mines were in order to escape the flood.