“Yes, and a mighty narrow escape you had if you were up by the divide yonder. It drops off a good five hundred feet. Cleverness of your horses, I suppose. Positively uncanny the instinct of those little beasts! Well, as it happens, you have been riding only a few rods from the path which you were looking for, only that winds around the divide, and not over it. I am on my way to our camp just below here. You’ll stop to supper with us, of course,” he added, as the lights of his camp suddenly twinkled from behind a spur in the hills. “Not to-night, thank you,” Jean answered. “I am afraid that my father will be worried as it is, and would soon be scouring the mountains for us.” “It might look a little as if you’d run off together,” Mr. Bingham chuckled with obtuse humor. Suddenly Jean, who had been all gratitude, felt that she could, with great pleasure, see him go over the cliff which they had avoided. She would have liked to reply to his remark with something either jocular or haughty; but instead she was conscious of a stiff, shy pause, broken by Loring’s query as to how the ore was running in the Bingham mine. “Decidedly he is a gentleman,” reflected Jean, and then the scene of her talk with her father flashed over her,—the porch, the living-room, the guitar, the song “She’s o’er the border and awa’ wi’ Jock o’ Hazeldean.” Suddenly she laughed aloud. Both men turned in their saddles to see what could have caused her sudden mirth. “Only an echo,” Jean explained. “It sounded like a girl’s voice. It is gone now. Don’t stop!” Mr. Bingham seemed so grieved to have them pass the camp without dismounting that Jean, realizing that a neglect of his proffered hospitality would wound him unnecessarily, consented to take a cup of coffee. Mrs. Bingham brought it to them with her own hands, talking to them eagerly as they drank it. Mr. Bingham drew out his flask and offered it to Stephen; but with a glance at Jean, he declined it and the girl noted the sacrifice with satisfaction. The coffee finished, Jean and Loring bade a hasty farewell to their hosts, who grieved over their parting with that true Western hospitality born of the desolate hills, the long reaches of sparsely populated country, and the loneliness of camp life. The horses were tired; but their riders had no notion of sparing them, and rode as fast as the roughness of the trail permitted. Mr. Bingham’s ill-timed words had jarred upon their companionship, and the horses’ hoofs alone broke the silence which had fallen between them. It was eleven o’clock when they reached Quentin, and Mr. Cameron was pacing the porch impatiently, peering out into the blackness where the moonlight pierced it, as they rode up to the shack. “We are all safe, father; we merely took a wrong turning,” Jean called aloud as they drew rein. “Yes,” observed Mr. Cameron with a stubborn ring in his voice. “I was afraid that you had.”