Wunpost worked late and hard, shoveling the muck away from the trees and clearing a section of the corral; but not until Cole Campbell came down the next day was the Stinging Lizard road even mentioned. It was gone, they all knew that, and all their prayers and tears could not bring back one rock from its grade; and yet somehow Wunpost felt guilty, as if his impious words had brought down this disaster upon his friends. He rushed feverishly about in the blazing sun, trying to undo the most imminent damage; and Billy and Mrs. Campbell, half divining his futile regrets, went about their own tasks in silence. But when Campbell came down over the mountain-sheep trail and beheld what the cloudburst had done he spoke what came first into his mind. "Ah, my road," he moaned, talking half to himself after the manner of the lonely and deaf, "and I let it lie idle six weeks! All my ore still sacked and waiting on the dump, and now my road is gone." He bowed his head and gave way to tears, for he had lost ten years' work in a day, and then Mrs. Campbell forgot. She had remained silent before, not wishing to seem unkind, but now she spoke from her heart. "It's a visitation!" she wailed; "the Lord has punished us for our sins. We should never have used the road." "And why not?" demanded Campbell, rousing up from his brooding, and he saw Wunpost turning guiltily away. "Ah, I knew it!" he burst out; "I misdoubted it all the time, but you thought you could keep it from me. But when I came down from Panamint, to see where the waterspout had struck, and found it tearing in from Woodpecker Canyon, I said: 'It is the hand of God!' We had not come by our road quite honestly." "No," sobbed Mrs. Campbell, "and I hate to say it, but I'm glad the road is destroyed. What you built we came by honestly, but the rest was obtained by fraud, and now it has all been destroyed. You have worked long and hard, Cole, and I'm sorry this had to happen; but God is not mocked, we know that. I tried to keep it from you, and to keep myself from knowing; but he told me himself that he salted the mine on purpose, so that Eells would build us a road!" "Aha!" nodded Campbell, and looked out from under his eyebrows at the man who had befriended him by fraud. But he was a man of few words, and his silence spoke for him--Wunpost scuffled his feet and withdrew. "Well I'm going," he announced to Billy as he threw on his packs; "this is getting too rough for me. So I crabbed the whole play, eh, and fetched that cloudburst down Woodpecker? And it washed out your father's road! It's a wonder Divine Providence didn't ketch _me_ up the canyon, and wipe me off the footstool, too!" "Perhaps He spared you," suggested Billy, whose eyes were big with awe, "so you could repent and be forgiven of your sins."