“I'll be lookin' fer ye,” she said simply. VI The old man went with him up the creek and, passing the milk house, turned up a brush-bordered little branch in which the engineer saw signs of coal. Up the creek the mountaineer led him some thirty yards above the water level and stopped. An entry had been driven through the rich earth and ten feet within was a shining bed of coal. There was no parting except two inches of mother-of-coal--midway, which would make it but easier to mine. Who had taught that old man to open coal in such a way--to make such a facing? It looked as though the old fellow were in some scheme with another to get him interested. As he drew closer, he saw radiations of some twelve inches, all over the face of the coal, star-shaped, and he almost gasped. It was not only cannel coal--it was “bird's-eye” cannel. Heavens, what a find! Instantly he was the cautious man of business, alert, cold, uncommunicative. “That looks like a pretty good--” he drawled the last two words--“vein of coal. I'd like to take a sample over to the Gap and analyze it.” His hammer, which he always carried--was in his saddle pockets, but he did not have to go down to his horse. There were pieces on the ground that would suit his purpose, left there, no doubt, by his predecessor. “Now I reckon you know that I know why you came over hyeh.” Hale started to answer, but he saw it was no use. “Yes--and I'm coming again--for the same reason.” “Shore--come agin and come often.” The little girl was standing on the porch as he rode past the milk house. He waved his hand to her, but she did not move nor answer. What a life for a child--for that keen-eyed, sweet-faced child! But that coal, cannel, rich as oil, above water, five feet in thickness, easy to mine, with a solid roof and perhaps self-drainage, if he could judge from the dip of the vein: and a market everywhere--England, Spain, Italy, Brazil. The coal, to be sure, might not be persistent--thirty yards within it might change in quality to ordinary bituminous coal, but he could settle that only with a steam drill. A steam drill! He would as well ask for the wagon that he had long ago hitched to a star; and then there might be a fault in the formation. But why bother now? The coal would stay there, and now he had other plans that made even that find insignificant. And yet if he bought that coal now--what a bargain! It was not that the ideals of his college days were tarnished, but he was a man of business now, and if he would take the old man's land for a song--it was because others of his kind would do the same! But why bother, he asked himself again, when his brain was in a ferment with a colossal scheme that would make dizzy the magnates who would some day drive their roadways of steel into those wild hills. So he shook himself free of the question, which passed from his mind only with a transient wonder as to who it was that had told of him to the old mountaineer, and