; and it's so much more beautiful than
one could hope or guess. Don't you think there must be something in
God and Heaven and all that? Love is so much more beautiful than a
fellow could possibly think?"

"Don't you think they'll be wondering about us?" asked Eleanor.

"Pooh, no! Matthews told me to come on here and find you! He's just
back there a little way."

"Did he plan this?"

"Course! How do you suppose I knew where to find you? You see now why
I must not see you, if we are to keep our resolutions?"

"Yes, I see! Let us go back."

It was on the lake side of the logs that Wayland paused.

"I don't _think_ they could see through those logs?" he said.

Eleanor burst into a peal of laughter and ascended the fallen trunks as
if they had been stairs.

They came on the other two sitting squat in the middle of the trail;
and if the windfall had been opaque, one of the two wore an expression
on his face as if he had guessed. He was tossing a handful of little
pebbles up from his palm and catching them on the backs of his knuckles.

"We didn't make much o' the woods an' birds," he remarked with a
twisted smile, "but man alive, we can play jacks!"

Don't smile, self superior reader! It takes some little time to
manufacture a snow slide out of snow flakes; and it may be the law that
it also takes some little time to manufacture a soul out of slime.

Passing the Cabin, they again encountered a downy-lipped youth in gray
flannels accompanied by a fat gentleman with tortoise-shell eyes and a
tallow smile; but the jaunty dimples of the fat man, the supercilious
lift of the gray flannel's eyebrow--froze mid-way at sight of Meestress
Leezie O'Finnigan, who bowed to Bat with the gravity of a mother
superior.

"It ain't the truth I'm tellin' y'": Lizzie was loquaciously going over
the story for the twentieth time, "It ain't the truth I'm tellin' y',
y' onderstand; it's ownly what I've heerd."

The Ranger dropped out of the group at the Cabin.

Bat stood bellicosely scowling at the three figures receding down the
Ridge Trail.

"What in Hell is that old parson doing with that Shanty Town kid? He'd
better keep his oar out of this."

"It's a free country," said Wayland dryly. "Can I do anything for you?"

"We came up to notify you that the mine will be examined to-morrow,"
announced the downy lips.

CHAPTER XXIV

I AM UNCLE SAM

"So they would examine the mine to-morrow? So they had sprung th