.

"Of course," said Helen, lightly, as if she had not caught his meaning.
But she turned her eyes away, while her heart thumped disgracefully and
all her body was aglow. "Will Tom and Bo go?"

"It was Tom who got me to ask you," replied Dale. "John an' Hal can look
after the men while we're gone."

"Oh--so Tom put it in your head? I guess--maybe--I won't go."

"It is always in my mind, Nell," he said, with his slow seriousness.
"I'm goin' to work all my life for you. But I'll want to an' need to go
back to the woods often.... An' if you ever stoop to marry me--an' make
me the richest of men--you'll have to marry me up there where I fell in
love with you."

"Ah! Did Las Vegas Tom Carmichael say that, too?" inquired Helen,
softly.

"Nell, do you want to know what Las Vegas said?"

"By all means."

"He said this--an' not an hour ago. 'Milt, old hoss, let me give you a
hunch. I'm a man of family now--an' I've been a devil with the wimmen
in my day. I can see through 'em. Don't marry Nell Rayner in or near the
house where I killed Beasley. She'd remember. An' don't let her remember
thet day. Go off into the woods. Paradise Park! Bo an' me will go with
you."

Helen gave him her hand, while they walked the horses homeward in the
long sunset shadows. In the fullness of that happy hour she had time for
a grateful wonder at the keen penetration of the cowboy Carmichael. Dale
had saved her life, but it was Las Vegas who had saved her happiness.

Not many days later, when again the afternoon shadows were slanting low,
Helen rode out upon the promontory where the dim trail zigzagged far
above Paradise Park.

Roy was singing as he drove the pack-burros down the slope; Bo and Las
Vegas were trying to ride the trail two abreast, so they could hold
hands; Dale had dismounted to stand beside Helen's horse, as she gazed
down the shaggy black slopes to the beautiful wild park with its gray
meadows and shining ribbons of brooks.

It was July, and there were no golden-red glorious flames and blazes of
color such as lingered in Helen's memory. Black spruce slopes and green
pines and white streaks of aspens and lacy waterfall of foam and dark
outcroppings of rock--these colors and forms greeted her gaze with all
the old enchantment. Wildness, beauty, and loneliness were there, the
same as ever, immutable, like the spirit of those heights.

Helen would fain have lingered longer, but the others called, and Ranger
impatiently