She had stammered it out at last, and, now that the conversation had been led in that direction, he could speak. He sat there quietly, as if by a comrade, and told her all. Told her of his boyhood, his father's death, and that he, in his own right, had nothing in the world but youth and a half-ownership in the Croix d'Or, which threatened to prove worthless. He voiced that dread of wasting his backer's money when he had none of his own to put with it, meeting dollar for dollar as it was thrown into the crucibles of fate. He stopped at last, a little ashamed of having so completely unbosomed himself, for he was by habit and nature reticent. "You have made it a great deal easier for me," she said, with an assumption of gayety. "I can say what I've been thinking of for two days without spludging all over my words." She laughed as if in recollection of her previous embarrassment, and again became seriously grave, and went on: "They say my father is a hard man. At times I have been led to believe it; but he has been a good father to me, and I appreciate it and his worries more, after a four years' absence in an Eastern school, and--well, perhaps because I am so much older now, and better able to judge leniently. I have never known much of his business from his lips. It is one subject on which he is not exactly loquacious, as probably you know." Again she laughed a little, grim laugh. Dick had opened his lips to say that he had never met her father, when she continued: "On the day I met you first, up here by your pipe line, the day you almost ended my bright young career by starting a half-ton bowlder down the hill--don't interrupt with repeated apologies, please--I had my birth anniversary. I was twenty-one, and--my own boss." "Congratulations, belated, but fervent." "Thank you; but you again interrupt. On that day when I went home, my father, in his customary gruff way, turned back just as he was going to the office where he lives at least eighteen hours out of every twenty-four, and threw in my lap a bank-book. 'Joan,' he said, 'you're of age now. That's for you. It's all yours, to do just what you dam' please with. I have nothing to do with it. If you make a fool use of it, it'll be your fault, not mine. I'm giving it to you so that if anything happened to me, or the Rattler, you'd not be helplessly busted.'" He jumped to his feet with an exclamation. "The Rattler! The Rattler! And--and your name is Joan and not Dorothy, and you are Bully Presby's daughter?" He was bewildered by surprise. "Why, yes. Certainly! Didn't you know that--all this time?" "No!" he blurted. "There is a Dorothy Presby, and a----" "Dorothy Presby!" She doubled over in a gust of mirth. "The daughter of the lumberman over on the other side. Oh, this is too good to keep! I must tell her the next time I see her. After all these months, you still thought----"