“I didn’t expect to find what I did find, you can bet on that,” said his client, as he bent forward to apply the tip of his cigar to the lamp chimney. CHAPTER VIII PRIZES OF ACCIDENT It was half-past five the next morning when Kit Carson paced away from the hotel stables into the rosy daylight. With the freshness of the hour on his face the Colonel passed along the hushed street and then out into the red road between its clumps of dusty foliage. As he skirted what yesterday had been his own land he looked on it with a new eye. It could be made to support them well. No matter how low Allen might sink they need never want again. The hilly part, where the spring was, could be sold or leased to some of the enterprising city hotel men. Or, if they objected to that, they could increase their market gardening to the dimensions of a large agricultural enterprise. They could rent to a rancher a portion of the rich, uncultivated land now lying idle, and thus gain an income sufficient for them to develop their own particular domain. To people of thrift and energy the possibilities of the tract were large. Alice could die in peace. Her girls were provided for. As the cottage came into view the rider reined up and gazed at it. No smoke issued from the chimney. They all still slept. In the crystal stillness of the morning it looked peacefully picturesque, half veiled in its greenery of shrubs and vines. The air about it was impregnated with the delicate breath of the roses that lined the path from the gate to the balcony. He gave a slight shake to his rein, and Kit Carson, who had been impatiently pawing with a proud forefoot, moved forward. The rider’s glance wandered to a window under the sloping roof, veiled by a blue curtain. Was that the girls’ room? The girls! The two faces rose before his mental vision and he turned his eyes from the window and let them pierce, far-seeing and steady--into the distance, into the future. Before he came to Foleys he had not cared, he had not dared, to look into the future. He had cowered before its emptiness. Now the faces of the sisters rose softly bright in its melancholy obscurity, the faces of Alice’s daughters--daughters that should have been his. A week after he reached San Francisco he had a letter from June, a childish, incoherent letter, full of impassioned terms of gratitude, broken into by distressed comments on her mother’s health. Then, in more sprightly vein, she told him of how Mr. Barclay was stopping over at Foleys for a few days and came nearly every day and helped them in the garden, and Mr. Rion Gracey, riding back from Foleys to the Buckeye Belle one evening, had dropped in for a visit, and stayed to supper.