The reader has, of course, long suspected that Mr. Rayborne and Long John and Mark Hilton were one. How he came to be what he was he could scarcely tell. He had loved Helen Tracy devotedly. He sometimes thought he loved her still in spite of the bitterness which had sprung up between them, he hardly knew how or why, as he looked back upon it. She had thought herself safe with him because he knew the worst there was of her. But because he knew it he was, after the first few months of feverish adoration were over, more on the alert, perhaps, than he should have been. He did not trust her and she knew it and grew restive under his watchful surveillance. He had no right to distrust her,—no right to be jealous,—no right to criticise her actions, and because he did, she, in a spirit of retaliation, taunted him with his birth and position and poverty, until he could endure it no longer and left her, half resolving, before a week was passed, to go back, for his little baby daughter had, if possible, a stronger hold upon him than her mother. Then his pride came up and he said, “I’ll stay away till she sends for me. She knows where I am.” But she did not send, and from some source he heard she was getting a divorce. This hurt him more than all the hard words she had ever said to him, as it cut him off from her forever. But there was still the baby. “For her sake I’ll be a man and some day I’ll go to her and tell her I am her father,” he thought. Alas for the mistakes which change the current of one’s whole life. Chancing upon a Chicago paper in which were comments upon the recent divorce of “the beautiful Mrs. Hilton, so well known in fashionable circles,” there was mention made of her recent bereavement in the death of her little girl. Mark could not remember when he had cried before, but he did so now. Everything was swept from him,—his wife, his home, and his infant daughter. “God has turned against me, if there is a God,” he said, “and I care nothing what becomes of me how.” For days he was in a most despondent mood, scarcely eating or sleeping, and paying but little attention to anything passing around him. Jeff, who had come with him from Chicago, roused him at last by suggesting that they go to the mines of Montana. Although so young, Jeff was beginning to have a great influence over Mark, who felt so discouraged and hopeless that it was pleasant to lean upon some one even if it were a boy. They went to Montana and into the mines, but on the day of the accident both were away at some distance from the scene of the disaster, prospecting for themselves. When the news reached them and Mark heard that he was supposed to be dead and that Jeff was missing, it was the latter who said, “Let’s _stay_ dead and missing, and take another name, and go on further west or south, and begin new with the world. I think it will be fun.”