ore still
sacked and waiting on the dump, and now my road is gone."

He bowed his head and gave way to tears, for he had lost ten years' work
in a day, and then Mrs. Campbell forgot. She had remained silent before,
not wishing to seem unkind, but now she spoke from her heart.

"It's a visitation!" she wailed; "the Lord has punished us for our sins.
We should never have used the road."

"And why not?" demanded Campbell, rousing up from his brooding, and he
saw Wunpost turning guiltily away. "Ah, I knew it!" he burst out; "I
misdoubted it all the time, but you thought you could keep it from me.
But when I came down from Panamint, to see where the waterspout had
struck, and found it tearing in from Woodpecker Canyon, I said: 'It is
the hand of God!' We had not come by our road quite honestly."

"No," sobbed Mrs. Campbell, "and I hate to say it, but I'm glad the road
is destroyed. What you built we came by honestly, but the rest was
obtained by fraud, and now it has all been destroyed. You have worked
long and hard, Cole, and I'm sorry this had to happen; but God is not
mocked, we know that. I tried to keep it from you, and to keep myself
from knowing; but he told me himself that he salted the mine on purpose,
so that Eells would build us a road!"

"Aha!" nodded Campbell, and looked out from under his eyebrows at the
man who had befriended him by fraud. But he was a man of few words, and
his silence spoke for him--Wunpost scuffled his feet and withdrew.

"Well I'm going," he announced to Billy as he threw on his packs; "this
is getting too rough for me. So I crabbed the whole play, eh, and
fetched that cloudburst down Woodpecker? And it washed out your father's
road! It's a wonder Divine Providence didn't ketch _me_ up the
canyon, and wipe me off the footstool, too!"

"Perhaps He spared you," suggested Billy, whose eyes were big with awe,
"so you could repent and be forgiven of your sins."

"I bet ye!" scoffed Wunpost; "but you can't tell _me_ that God
Almighty was steering that waterspout. It just hit in Woodpecker Canyon,
same as one hit Hanaupah last week and another one washed out down
below. They're falling every day, but I'm going up into them hills, and
do you reckon one will drop on me? Don't you think it--God Almighty has
got more important business than following me around through the hills.
I'm going to take my little dog, so I'll be sure to have Good Luck; and
if I don't come back you'll know somebody h