regon as a blooming bride to the
Sawback range.

From that date onward Tom toiled at the goldfields as if he had been a
galley-slave, and scraped together every speck and nugget of gold he
could find, and hoarded it up as if he had been a very miser, and,
strange to say, Betty did not discourage him.

One day he entered his tent with a large canvas bag in his hand quite
full.

"It's all here at last," he said, holding it up. "I've had it weighed,
and I'm going to square up."

"Go, dear Tom, and God speed you," said the Rose, giving him a kiss that
could not have been purchased by all the gold in Oregon.

Tom went off, and soon returned with the empty bag.

"It was hard work, Betty, to get them to take it, but they agreed when I
threatened to heave it all into the lake if they didn't! Then--I
ventured," said Tom, looking down with something like a blush--"it does
seem presumptuous in me, but I couldn't help it--I preached to them! I
told them of my having been twice bought; of the gold that never
perishes; and of the debt I owe, which I could never repay, like theirs,
with interest, because it is incalculable. And now, dear Betty, we
begin the world afresh from to-day."

"Yes, and with clear consciences," returned Betty. "I like to
re-commence life thus."

"But with empty pockets," added Tom, with a peculiar twist of his mouth.

"No, not quite empty," rejoined the young wife, drawing a very
business-looking envelope from her pocket and handing it to her husband.
"Read that, Tom."

Need we say that Tom read it with mingled amusement and amazement; that
he laughed at it, and did not believe it; that he became grave, and
inquired into it; and that finally, when Paul Bevan detailed the whole
affair, he was forced to believe it?

"An estate in the West Indies," he murmured to himself in a condition of
semi-bewilderment, "yielding over fifteen hundred a year!"

"A tidy little fortin," remarked Paddy Flinders, who overheard him. "I
hope, sor, ye won't forgit yer owld frinds in Oregon when ye go over to
take possession."

"I won't my boy--you may depend on that."

And he did not!

But Edwin Buxley did not live to enjoy his share of the fortune. Soon
after the wedding he began to sink rapidly, and finally died while
gazing earnestly in his sister's face, with the word "mother" trembling
faintly on his lips. He was laid under a lordly tree not far from the
Indian village in the Sawback range.

It was