"Which is merely another way of saying that you were unforgiving enough to wish to see me hanged?" he suggested, with a sour smile. "It wasn't altogether that; no." There was a pause and then she went on: "I suppose you know what has been happening since you ran away--what has been done in Lawrenceville, I mean?" "I know that I have been indicted by the grand jury and that there is a reward out for me. It's two thousand dollars, isn't it?" She let the exact figure of the reward go unconfirmed. "And still you are going about in public as if all the hue and cry meant nothing to you? The beard is an improvement--it makes you look older and more determined--but it doesn't disguise you. I should have known you anywhere, and other people will." Again his shoulders went up. "What's the use?" he said. "I couldn't dig deep enough nor fly high enough to dodge everybody. You have found me, and if you hadn't, somebody else would have. It would have been the same any time and anywhere." "You knew we were here?" she inquired. He made the sign of assent. "And yet you didn't think it worth while to take your meals somewhere else?" He made a virtue of necessity. "I should certainly have taken the small precaution you suggest if the clerk hadn't told me that your father had gone up to the Gloria district. I took it for granted that you had gone with him." The lazy smile came again in the brown eyes, and it irritated him. "I am going to believe that you wouldn't have tried to hide from me," she said slowly. "You'll give my conceit that much to live on, won't you?" "You mean that I ought to have been willing to trust you? Perhaps I was. But I could hardly think of you as apart from your father. I knew very well what he would do." "I was intending to go on up to the mines with him," she said evenly. "But last evening, while I was waiting for him to finish his talk with some mining men, I was standing in the mezzanine, looking down into the lobby. I saw you go to the desk and leave your key; I was sure I couldn't be mistaken; so I told father that I had changed my mind about going out to the mines and he seemed greatly relieved. He had been trying to persuade me that I would be much more comfortable if I should wait for him here." It was no stirring of belated sentiment that made Smith say: "You--you cared enough to wish to see me?" "Naturally," she replied. "Some people forget easily: others don't. I suppose I am one of the others." Smith remembered the proverb about a woman scorned and saw a menace more to be feared than all the terrors of the law lurking in the even-toned rejoinder. It was with some foolish idea of thrusting the menace aside at any cost that he said: "You have only to send a ten-word telegram to Sheriff Macauley, you know. I'm not sure that it isn't your duty to do so." "Why should I telegraph Barton Macauley?" she asked placidly. "I'm not one of his deputies." "But you believe me guilty, don't you?"