camp
and everything in it belongs to you for as long as you can persuade
yourself to stay."

Gardiner accepted the invitation in its largest sense, and the afternoon
of the same day found him prowling studiously in the outlet canyon with
hammer and specimen-bag; a curious figure of complete abstraction in
brown duck and service leggings, overshadowed by an enormous cork-lined
helmet-hat that had been faded and stained by the sun and rains of three
continents. Ballard passed the word among his workmen. The absent-minded
stranger under the cork hat was the guest of the camp, who was to be
permitted to go and come as he chose, whose questions were to be
answered without reserve, and whose peculiarities, if he had any, were
to pass unremarked.

With the completion of the dam so near at hand, neither of the two young
men who were responsible for the great undertaking had much time to
spare for extraneous things. But Gardiner asked little of his secondary
hosts; and presently the thin, angular figure prowling and tapping at
the rocks became a familiar sight in the busy construction camp. It was
Lamoine, the camp jester, who started the story that the figure in brown
canvas was a mascot, imported specially by the "boss" to hold the
"hoodoo" in check until the work should be done; and thereafter the
Boston professor might have chipped his specimens from the facing stones
on the dam without let or hindrance.

The masons were setting the coping course on the great wall on a day
when Gardiner's studious enthusiasm carried him beyond the dinner-hour
at Castle 'Cadia and made him an evening guest in the engineer's adobe;
and in the after-supper talk it transpired that the assistant in geology
had merely snatched a meagre fortnight out of his work in the summer
school, and would be leaving for home in another day or two.

Both of the young men protested their disappointment. They had been too
busy to see anything of their guest in a comradely way, and they had
been looking forward to the lull in the activities which would follow
the opening celebration and promising themselves a more hospitable
entertainment of the man who had been both Mentor and elder brother to
them in the Boston years.

"You are not regretting it half as keenly as I am," the guest assured
them. "Apart from losing the chance to thresh it out with you two, I
have never been on more fascinatingly interesting geological ground. I
could spend an entire summer a