e man? Yet she knew as well as anything that he was going to make
her rich--and tomorrow he would bring back the mule. All she needed was
faith, and the patience to wait; and she took her scolding so meekly
that her mother repented it and allowed her to sleep in the tunnel.

The Jail Canyon Ranch lay in a pocket among the hills, so shut in by
high ridges and overhanging rimrock that it seemed like the bottom of a
well; but where the point swung in that encircled the tiny farm a tunnel
bored its way through the hill. It was the extension of a mine which in
earlier days had gophered along the hillside after gold, but now that it
was closed down and abandoned to the rats Wilhelmina had taken the
tunnel for her own. It ran through the knife-blade ridge as straight as
a die, and a trail led up to its mouth; and from the other side, where
it broke out into the sun, there was a view of the outer world. Sitting
within its cool portal she could look off across the Sink, to Blackwater
and the Argus Range beyond; and by stepping outside she could see the
whole valley, from South Pass to the Death Valley Trail.

It was from this tunnel that she had watched when Dusty Rhodes went
past, a moving fleck of color plumed with dust; and when the sun sank
low she had seen the form that followed, like a man yet not like a man.
She had seen it rise and fall, disappear and loom up again; until at
last in the twilight she had challenged it with a fire and the answer
had led her to--him. She had found him--lost on the desert and about to
die, big and strong yet dependent upon her aid--and when she had allowed
her long curls to escape he had stood silent in the presence of her
womanhood. She wanted to run back and sleep in her tunnel, where the air
was always moving and cool; and then in the morning, when she looked to
the north, she might see the first dust of his return. She might see his
tall form, and the white sides of Tellurium as he took the shortest way
home, and then she could run back and drag her mother to the portal and
prove that her knight had been misjudged. For her mother had predicted
that the prospector would not return, and that his mine was only a
blind; but she, who had seen him and felt the clasp of his hand, she
knew that he would never rob _her_. So she fled to her dream-house,
where there was nothing to check her fancies, and slept in the
tunnel-mouth till dawn.

The day came first in the west, galloping along the Argus