from the heat. But in the Geronimo jail with its dead, fetid air,
Rimrock Jones learned to envy the snakes. Out on the stark desert,
where the men laid the track, the hot steel burned everything it
touched; but the air was clean and in the nights, when he suffocated,
they lay cool and looked up at the stars. They did a man's work and
drew their pay; he lay in the heat and waited.

Then the first cool days came and the Tecolote Mining Company resumed
its work in feverish haste. An overplus of freight was jammed in the
yards; the construction gangs laid track day and night; and from the
end of the line, which crept forward each day, the freight wagons
hauled supplies to the mine. There was a world of work, back and forth
on the road; and in Tecolote and Gunsight as well. A magnificent
hotel, with the offices of the Company, was springing up across the
street from the Gunsight; at the mine there were warehouses and a
company store and quarters for the men on the flats where Rimrock had
once pitched his tent. But the man who built them was Abercrombie
Jepson--the master hand was slack.

It had killed a man and for that offense Rimrock Jones must wait on the
law. There was no bail for him, for he had made a threat and then
killed his man as he fled. And he would not deny it, nor listen to any
lawyer; so he lay there till the circuit court convened. All through
the slow inferno of that endless summer he had cursed the law's delay;
but it held him, regardless, until the calm-eyed judge returned for the
fall term of court. The jail was full to the last noisome cell-room
and, caught with the rest, was Rimrock.

Yet if Rimrock had suffered there had been compensation--Mary Fortune
had written him every day. He knew everything that Jepson was doing;
and he knew a little more about her. But only a little; there was
something about her that balked him a thousand times. She eluded him,
she escaped him, she ignored his hot words; she was his friend, and yet
only so far. She did not approve of what he was doing, and she had
taken him at his word. He had asked her, once, not to interfere in his
case; and from that day she kept her hands off.

The day of the trial came and Hassayamp Hicks, with L. W. and a host of
friends, went to Geronimo to cheer Rimrock by their presence. The
papers came back full of the account of the case, but Mary Fortune did
not appear in court. Even when the great day came when Rimrock was t