y, very awful!" came in a low, mock-awed voice. "But--" then
the laugh came again--"maybe if you 're good and--well, maybe I 'll
tell you after a while."

"Honest?"

"Of course I 'm honest! Is n't that the skip?"

Fairchild walked to the shaft. But the skip was not in sight. A long
ten minutes they waited, while the great steel carrier made the trip to
the surface with Harry and Sheriff Bardwell, then came lumbering down
again. Fairchild stepped in and lifted Anita to his side.

The journey was made in darkness,--darkness which Fairchild longed to
turn to his advantage, darkness which seemed to call to him to throw
his arms about the girl at his side, to crush her to him, to seek out
with an instinct that needed no guiding light the laughing, pretty lips
which had caused him many a day of happiness, many a day of worried
wonderment. He strove to talk away the desire--but the grinding of the
wheels in the narrow shaft denied that. His fingers twitched, his arms
trembled as he sought to hold back the muscles, then, yielding to the
impulse, he started--

"Da-a-a-g-gone it!"

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

But Fairchild was n't telling the truth. They had reached the light
just at the wrong, wrong moment. Out of the skip he lifted her, then
inquired the way to the sheriff's office of this, a new county. The
direction was given, and they went there. They told their story. The
big-shouldered, heavily mustached man at the desk grinned cheerily.

"That there's the best news I 've heard in forty moons," he announced.
"I always did hate that fellow. You say Bardwell and your partner went
out on the Ohadi road to head the young 'un off?"

"Yes. They had about a fifteen-minute start on us. Do you think--?"

"We 'll wait here. They 're hefty and strong. They can handle him
alone."

But an hour passed without word from the two Searchers. Two more went
by. The sheriff rose from his chair, stamped about the room, and
looked out at the night, a driving, aimless thing in the clutch of a
blizzard.

"Hope they ain't lost," came at last.

"Had n't we better--?"

But a noise from without cut off the conversation. Stamping feet
sounded on the steps, the knob turned, and Sheriff Bardwell,
snow-white, entered, shaking himself like a great dog, as he sought to
rid himself of the effects of the blizzard.

"Hello, Mason," came curtly.

"Hello, Bardwell, what 'd you find?"

The sheriff of Clear Creek