e was a horror-stricken yell.

"He's fell down the hole! Are you hurt bad, Ike?"

The answer was a muffled curse, and both guards hurried to the shaft.
With a prayer on her lips Mary crept from her shelter, then crouched
and ran for the trail. She saw them leaning over the shaft and heard
them bandying oaths and then she had gained the path.

"What's that?" cried one as she knocked a stone from the wall, and as
it clattered she went dashing down the trail. She fell and lay
breathless, listening dully for their footsteps, then rose up and went
limping on. She paused for strength far down the path, where it swings
along the wall, and her heart beat loud in her breast. They were still
on the cliff-tops, still cursing and quarrelling and poisoning the
clean silence with their words--but she had located first!

The day was breaking when, lost and wandering, she found her machine on
the plain, but as it took the smooth road and went gliding towards
Geronimo she smiled with a great sense of power. It was not alone that
she controlled that throbbing engine, which made the car pulsate and
thrill; she had a handle that would make two men she knew bow down and
ask her for peace--Rimrock Jones and Whitney Stoddard. She appeared
the next morning at the Recorder's office with a copy of her notice for
record. Her torn clothes were concealed beneath a full cloak and her
hands within automobile gloves; but the clerk, even in the rush of New
Year recording, glanced curiously at a bruise across her forehead.
Then he filed her claim with a hundred others and she slipped out and
drove away.

When Mary Fortune returned to Gunsight she found the whole town in an
uproar. Men were running to and fro and a great crowd of people was
gathered in front of the hotel. If she had feared for a moment that
the scar above her eye, which she had covered so artfully with her
hair, might be noticed by Jepson and others, that fear was instantly
allayed. There was bigger news afoot--Ike Bray had come to town and
given notice that he had jumped the Old Juan claim. He was backed up
now against a plate-glass window of the Tecolote Mining Company's
office and Jepson was making a speech. As she drove up closer she
could see Hassayamp Hicks and as the crowd shouted he broke in on
Jepson's disavowal.

"That ain't the question, suh!" he shouted fiercely, "we want to know
_who paid him_! And as a personal friend of Mr. Jones, the best man in
this