She returned with the party to Los Angeles and the beaches there, and was gone for a month or more. But she returned, quite unexpectedly to Bill and to the town, and made some pretense at being glad to be at home. And all the while gossip was flowing, a turgid underground stream fed by some unknown source. All the while it was taking to itself a bitter flavor which had not been there when it had been merely a thin trickle of feminine resentment. Men were talking,--in confidential undertones at first, later with an uneasy hope that certain rumors would be proven false; rumors that held an ugly meaning for the town. And Bill, keeping pretty much to himself when Doris was not at home, and devoting himself to her whims and her service when she was with him, leaving suddenly for short trips and returning more imperturbable than he had been before, never heard the gossip, or dreamed of what would happen when the whisperings grew into shouts. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE BILL AND THE TAME BANDITS Bill stood on the top step of the front porch, looking down into the scowling faces of a committee of workmen from the mine. Seamed, not too clean some of them, hard-eyed every one, they stood looking up at him, measuring as they were being measured. He had seen them coming up the hill, had thought some accident had happened, had come to meet them. There he stopped short, on guard. He had seen miners' committees before now. They needed no banner to announce their kind and purpose. "Come in, boys," he said, when the silence became marked. "You seem to have something on your chests." He turned to the door, and they followed him, saying nothing. That in itself was of unfriendly portent. Many of these men he knew by sight, a few had speaking acquaintance with him. He had returned the evening before from the Coast, and he felt a swift desire for a full record of the day since he had left Parowan. Something must have happened, some grievance of which he was wholly in ignorance must have arisen in his absence. Bill saw how they stared around at the beautiful room, and looked at one another afterwards with a grim significance. He stiffened mentally. "All right, now, let's have it--since you are here. But the office is the proper place for business, you know. Why didn't you go there?" "It's you we want to see this morning, Mr. Dale," a small, shrewd-faced man said quietly. "Mr. Rayfield and Mr. Emmett have done all they can for us. We'll have to talk straight from the shoulder, now, so we came to the man who's responsible." "All right." Bill sat down and crossed one leg over the other,--a habit of which Doris did not approve. "Responsible for what?"