Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by without incident other than the indictment by the grand jury of Crawford Stanton, Barney M'Graw, and a number of others on a charge of conspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of the grand _battue_ in which Sheriff Harding had figured as the master of the hunt, had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery in the lately finished power-house. Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni a wandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike in Sunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty years earlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely, the tale-bringer confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike; but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading to the old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he had seen smoke arising. As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was not at fault. On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, clad in serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy Stetson and buff top-boots in good countenance by riding astride in a man's saddle, was pushing her mount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little rise the abandoned camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravel sprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and its crumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitable entirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch. At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and shaded her eyes with a gauntleted hand. On a bench beside the door of the single tenanted cabin a man was sitting, and she saw him stand to answer her hand-wave. A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in a sling and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands, was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, but she pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing at him out of a pair of slate-gray eyes and saying: "How often have I got to tell you that you simply _can't_ help a woman out of a man's saddle?" The man smiled at that. "It's automatic," he returned. "I shall never get over wanting to help you, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I can go?" Flinging the bridle-reins over the head of the wiry little cow-pony which was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creek valley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sit down. "You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?" she teased, sitting beside him. "Every time I come it's always the same thing: 'When can I go?' You're not well yet." "I'm well enough to do what I've got to do, Corona; and until it's done.... Besides, there is Jibbey." "Where is Mr. Jibbey this morning?"