ent of late, and though the girl sometimes wondered what she found
to please her in the company and conversation of the bush rancher, the
fact that she usually went with him when he crossed the lake remained.

"I have seen that trail of smoke up there before. Where does it come
from?" she said languidly, pointing to a distant film of vapour that
drifted in a faint blue wreath along the slope of a hill.

"That," said Alton, "is the Tyee mine."

"I have heard of it. They find silver there?"

"Yes," said Alton dryly. "They find a little."

"There is silver in those mountains, then?" said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded. "Lots of it. Still, it costs a good deal to get out,
and then it doesn't pay for the mining occasionally. That's the
trouble with the Tyee."

"Still, it must pay somebody, or they would not go on," said Miss
Deringham.

Alton laughed a little. "Oh, yes," he said dryly. "It pays a man
called Hallam and some others of his kind who got up the company.
Still, sometime and somehow, I think he will be sorry he stole poor
folks' money."

"You," said Miss Deringham, smiling, "are an optimist, then?"

Alton gravely glanced about him, and the girl fancied she understood
him as she followed his gaze from snowpeak down the great pine-shrouded
hillside to the river frothing in the valley. "I don't know, but one
feels there's something beyond all that," he said. "It didn't come
there by accident, and it has all its work to do. Sun and frost and
sliding snow grinding up the hillside very sure and slow, and the river
sweeping what it gets from them way down the valley to spread new
wheatfields out into the sea."

"But," said Miss Deringham, smiling, "we are speaking of men, and I
don't quite see the connection."

"Well," said Alton, "they have their place in the great machine too,
and must work like the rest, and do something to make it more fruitful,
in return for the food the good earth gives them."

"A good many men don't seem to realize the obligation," said Miss
Deringham.

Alton nodded. "No, but I can't help thinking they'll be dealt with
somehow. They're just stealing from the others."

"You are a socialist, then?"

"No," said Alton, "I don't think I am. It seems to me that every man
is entitled to all the dollars he can get by working for them honestly,
and there's a place somewhere in this great world for him, if he has
the grit to get up and look for it as he was meant to do, but i