was smiling over a big cigar.
The girl clenched her hands as she watched him, and then turning her
head looked down the valley.

"I fancy I hear hoofs. He told me he would come," she said, but
Townshead, who sat apathetically in the old leather chair, shook his
head.

"He has, of course, forgotten if he did," he said.

"No," said the girl with a trace of harshness in her voice. "Mr. Alton
never forgets a promise. That must be the drumming of hoofs. Can you
hear nothing?"

"The river," said Townshead despondently. "He will be too late
directly. They are putting up the ranch."

Confidence and dismay seemed to struggle together in the face of the
girl, but the former rose uppermost, for she clung fast to hope.

"There! Oh, why can they not stop talking? That is something now,"
she said.

"No," said Townshead. "Only the wind in the firs."

The girl leaned forward a little, drawing in her breath as she stared
down the valley. The voices drowned the sound she fancied she had
heard, and the colour came and went in her face when she caught one of
them. "The thing's no better than robbery. Why isn't Harry Alton or
his partner here?"

Nellie Townshead had asked herself the same question over and over
again that day when rancher and axemen in somewhat embarrassed fashion
tendered her their sympathy. What she expected from him she did not
quite know, but she had a curious confidence in Alton, and at least as
much in his comrade, and felt that even if the scheme her father had
alluded to was not feasible there would be something they could do.
Then she drew back from the window and sat down, with a little shiver
as the harsh voice of the auctioneer rose from the clearing. She
caught disjointed words and sentences.

"Don't need tell you what the place is worth. You have seen the
boundaries. Richest soil in the Dominion. Grow anything. Now if I
was a rancher. Well, I'm waiting for your offer."

He apparently waited some little time, and then a laugh that expressed
bitterness in place of merriment followed the voice of one of the men
from the cities.

"Put two hundred dollars on to it," said somebody, and there was
another laugh, which the girl, recognizing the voice, understood; for
it was known that the bidder had probably not ten dollars in his
possession and was in debt at the store. The fact that this man whom
she had scarcely spoken to should endeavour to help her while her
friends at Somasco