standing, but her disappearance was perfect and
complete. He made a circuit of the group of trees within whose radius
she had last appeared, but there was neither trace of her, nor a
suggestion of her mode of escape. He called aloud to her; the vacant
Woods let his helpless voice die in their unresponsive depths. He gazed
into the air and down at the bark-strewn carpet at his feet. Like most
of his vocation, he was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his
fashion. Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of intelligence
the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak endeavor, he
accepted its logical result with characteristic grimness, threw his hat
upon the ground, put his hands in his pockets, and said--

"Well, I'm d--d!"

CHAPTER III.

Out of compliment to Miss Nellie Wynn, Yuba Bill, on reaching Indian
Spring, had made a slight detour to enable him to ostentatiously set
down his fair passenger before the door of the Burnhams. When it had
closed on the admiring eyes of the passengers and the coach had rattled
away, Miss Nellie, without any undue haste or apparent change in
her usual quiet demeanor, managed, however, to dispatch her business
promptly, and, leaving an impression that she would call again before
her return to Excelsior, parted from her friends and slipped away
through a side street to the General Furnishing Store of Indian Spring.
In passing this emporium, Miss Nellie's quick eye had discovered a cheap
brown linen duster hanging in its window. To purchase it, and put it
over her delicate cambric dress, albeit with a shivering sense that she
looked like a badly folded brown-paper parcel, did not take long. As she
left the shop it was with mixed emotions of chagrin and security that
she noticed that her passage through the settlement no longer turned
the heads of its male inhabitants. She reached the outskirts of Indian
Spring and the high-road at about the time Mr. Brace had begun his
fruitless patrol of the main street. Far in the distance a faint
olive-green table mountain seemed to rise abruptly from the plain.
It was the Carquinez Woods. Gathering her spotless skirts beneath her
extemporized brown domino, she set out briskly towards them.

But her progress was scarcely free or exhilarating. She was not
accustomed to walking in a country where "buggy-riding" was considered
the only genteel young-lady-like mode of progression, and its regular
provision the expected co