nephew, Charlie Sands, and to stick to it. "Unless it's Naysmith," he
said. "He knows me." From that to calling us Aunt Tish, Aunt Aggie and
Aunt Lizzie was very easy. At four o'clock we stopped playing, with Mr.
Muldoon easily the winner, and Aggie made fudge for everybody.

Late in the afternoon Tish called me aside. She said she did not want
Mr. Muldoon to feel that he was a burden, but that we were almost out of
provisions. We had expected to buy eggs, milk and bread at farmhouses,
and instead we had been shut up in the cave. She thought there was a
farm up the glen, having heard a cow-bell, and she wanted me to go and
find out.

"Go yourself!" I said somewhat rudely. "If you want to be shot down in
your tracks by outlaws, well and good. I don't."

Aggie, called aside, refused as firmly as I had. Tish stood and looked
at us both with her lip curling.

"Very well," she said coldly; "I shall go. But if I get my neuralgia
again from wading through the creek bottom don't blame me!"

She put on her overshoes and, taking a tin bucket for milk and her
trusty rifle, she started while Mr. Muldoon was showing Aggie a new game
of solitaire. I went to the cave mouth with her and listened to the
crackling of twigs as she slid down into the valley. She came into view
at the bottom much sooner than I had expected, having, as I learned
later, slipped on a loose stone and rolled fully half the way down.

The next two hours seemed endless. Mr. Muldoon, tiring of solitaire, had
rolled himself up in a corner and was peacefully sleeping, with his
injured foot on Aggie's hop pillow. Aggie and I sat on guard, one on
each side of the cave mouth, and stared down at the valley, which was
darkening rapidly.

Tish had been gone two hours and a half and no sign of her, when Aggie
began to cry softly.

"She'll never come back!" she whimpered. "The outlaws have got her and
killed her. Oh, Tish, Tish!"

"Why would they kill her?" I demanded. "Because she's trying to buy milk
and eggs?"

"B-because she knows too much," Aggie wailed. "We've found their lair,
that's why--don't tell me this isn't an outlaw's cave. It's just b-built
for it. They'll do away with her and then they'll come after us."

Aggie never carries a secret weight in her bosom. She always opens up
her heart to the nearest listener. This probably relieves Aggie, but it
does not make her a cheerful companion. Eight o'clock and darkness came,
and still no Tish. I went into