t her glasses,
raised higher sweeping back and forth, had found the river, and
travelling on picked up the Bar L-M buildings and corrals!-- Next time
she would bring the larger glasses, and leave them here, hidden in the
cave.

For a long time she gazed across the river, her heart beating quickly
with the hope that she might see, somewhere in the wide view, the man
who was in her heart. Finally, with a sigh, she lowered her glasses,
letting them follow Echo Creek speeding down the long slope of her
father's valley. And, doing so, it happened that there came into the
disc of her vision a man whom she knew she had never seen before. For
a few minutes she watched him riding up the valley, idly amused at the
awkward manner of his progress. When his horse walked he clung
tenaciously to the saddle horn; when the animal trotted he gave her the
impression that at any step he was going to fall off. At last, when
she had lost sight of him among the trees, and her interest lagged, she
made her way down from the cliff, went back to Gypsy and turned her
horse's head toward home.

The man whom she had watched clinging to his horse's back so
desperately was not only a new-comer to the Sierra and a stranger, but
a poor sort of person to be alone where there is a dearth of paved
sidewalks and streets with names and numbers. He had lost himself many
times since leaving El Toyon the day before, and now, with the main
valley road as plain before him as a man could wish a road to be, he
forsook it and came on blindly along a second road that the Echo Creek
wagons had travelled last week for wood. And Wanda, riding down to the
creek, met him when he had reached a state of perspiring despair.

"Say!" he called shrilly when, barely in earshot, he caught his first
view of her. "Say, wait a minute, won't you?"

Wanda, smiling a little at the evident distress which gave her her
first impression of the man, came on to meet him. She stopped Gypsy
with a swift, gentle touch upon the reins, while he yanked his sweating
horse about by pulling manfully at both reins held one in each hand.

"Say," was his next word of greeting, "ain't this the doggondest,
peskiest wild man's land you ever shot a glimmer of your eye at? Gee,
ain't it fierce, lady?"

Wanda's smile brightened in spite of her. He shook his head and pursed
his underlip and mopped his reeking face.

"I'm just in a cold sweat all over," he confided ruefully. "What with
th