“That’s exactly it,” he cried, smiting the desk with the flat of his palm. “We need to get out into the world, among people who are just as different from ‘our kind,’ as you term them, as possible. There we can expand. Out in Canyon Pass. I believe I could be a real help to that community. What is it Joe says?” He glanced again at the letter before him. “Yes! I might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass. Ditson Corners has merely a pumping station to circulate the blood of the community, patterned after the one at the reservoir on Knob Hill.” She did not speak again. When Hunt looked around she had stolen from the room. “Poor Bet!” he muttered. “The idea of change alarms her as it might have alarmed Aunt Prudence. Joe Hurley is right—he’s right beyond a doubt!” CHAPTER III—A SHADOW THROWN BEFORE A rider had his choice in journeying to Canyon Pass from a southerly direction—say from Lamberton, which lies between the railroad and the desert—of following the river trail to be deafened by the boisterous voice of the flood, or of climbing to the high lands and there jogging along the wagon track which finally dipped down the steeps to the ford of the West Fork and so into the mining town. Spring was drifting into the background of the year. The cottonwood leaves were the size of squirrel ears. The new fronds of the piñon had expanded to full size and now their needles quivered in the heat of the almost summer-like day. Joe Hurley, sitting his heavy-haunched bay, giving as easily to the animal’s paces as a sack of meal, followed the wagon track rather than the river trail and so came to that fork where wheel-ruts from a westerly direction joined the road along the brink of the canyon wall. A cream-colored pony came cantering along the trail from Hoskins, its rider as gaily dressed as a Mexican vaquero—a splotch of color against the background of the evergreens almost startling to his vision. But it was the identity of this rider that invigorated the tone of the mining man’s reflections. “Nell Blossom! The only sure-enough cure for ophthalmia! Am I going to have the pleasure of being your escort back to Canyon Pass? It will sure do me proud. The Passonians are honing for you, Nell.” “I’m going back to the Pass—yes, Mr. Hurley,” she said, pulling down her pony to the more sedate pace of his big bay. “Where you been since you left us all in the lurch? There was almost a riot at the Grub Stake when Tolley found out you had gone.” “Boss Tolley hasn’t got anything on me,” she said defensively. “I’d never sing there again, anyway.” “Somebody said you’d lit out for the desert with Steve Siebert and Andy McCann,” and he chuckled. “They started the same day you vamoosed.” “I might just as well have gone with those old desert rats. Pocket hunting couldn’t be much worse than Hoskins.”