call her away from the ranch-house at this
time. But at night she slept almost within touch of the sick man's bed.

He did not get better. The physician declared that he was not in
immediate danger, although the fever would have to run its course. The
pain that racked his body was hard to bear; and although he was a stoic
in such matters, Frances would see his jaws clench and the muscles knot
in his cheeks; and she often wiped the drops of agony from his forehead
while striving to hide the tears that came into her own eyes.

He demanded to know how long he was "going to be laid by the heels"; and
when he learned that the doctor could not promise him a swift return to
health, Captain Rugley began to worry.

It was of his old partner he thought most. That the affairs of the ranch
would go on all right in the hands of his young daughter and Silent Sam,
he seemed to have no doubt. But the letter from the chaplain of the
Bylittle Soldiers' Home was forever troubling him. Between his spells of
agony, or when his mind was really clear, he talked to Frances of little
but Jonas Lonergan and the treasure chest.

"He is troubling his mind about something, and it is not good for him,"
the doctor, who came every third day (and had a two hundred-mile jaunt
by train and buckboard), told Frances. "Can't you calm his mind, Miss
Frances?"

She told the medical man as much about her father's ancient friend as
she thought was wise. "He desires to have him brought here," she
explained, "so that they can go over, face to face and eye to eye, their
old battles and adventures."

"Good! Bring the man--have him brought," said the physician.

"But he is an old soldier," said Frances. She read aloud that part of
the Reverend Decimus Tooley's letter relating to the state of Mr.
Lonergan's health.

"Don't know what we can do about it, then," said the doctor, who was a
native of the Southwest himself. "Your father and the old fellow seem to
be 'honing' for each other. Too bad they can't meet. It would do your
father good. I don't like his mind's being troubled."

That night Frances was really frightened. Her father began muttering in
his sleep. Then he talked aloud, and sat up in bed excitedly, his face
flushed, and his tongue becoming clearer, although his speech was not
lucid.

He was going over in his distraught mind the adventures he had had with
Lon when they two had foiled the bandits and recovered possession of the
Senor's treasur