e finished.

"But that's neither here nor there," Hiram pointed out. "I'm penniless
compared with you. I couldn't marry a girl who had money while I have
nothing to offer her. I'm too much of a man for that. Why, everything
that I have I owe to you--even the education I am so slowly acquiring."

"Oh, I won't listen to such talk, Hiram! Most of my money is invested
in Tweet's project, anyway. We'll let him handle it, and you and I
will continue to study and improve ourselves. Then when Tweet begins
to pay us dividends we'll travel, and----"

"On your money! Not in a thousand years!"

"You're bull-headed about a trifle, Hiram," she accused.

"Jo," he said after a thoughtful pause, "don't wear that blue silk
dress and those diamonds and have your hair fixed that way any more.
It--it makes me feel hollowlike."

They had almost forgotten the man in the pines, there was so much else
to think about now. Jo was almost ready to confess that she had
imagined the entire incident--that she had heard only a prowling animal
and had seen the shadow of a shrub. Hiram, on his part, was too
triumphant over the thought that he, only a few months from the
backwoods of Mendocino County, had captured the heart of this splendid
girl, whom men praised and admired and swore by throughout all the
desert region.

Still the man was stubborn. In him was a knight-errantry which forbade
him to marry a girl and profit by the rewards of her pluck, energy, and
business courage. If he could not make money to offer her, he must do
something big for her, must win for her some conflict that threatened
her fortunes, must make himself worthy of her by some great service.

Hiram still kept his boyish dreams of the adventure girl who had
beckoned him from the forests to deeds of emprise. He had found his
adventure girl, but he would not consider that he had won her yet. He
little knew that night that his opportunity was close at hand, and that
the shadow which the coming event had cast before it had lurked there
in the lakeside pines.

CHAPTER XXV

JO LOSES HER SUPPORT

Eight days later Jerkline Jo leaned on the ledge of the office window
in Huber's store at Ragtown and handed him the various papers which
accompanied a consignment of freight from Julia.

"There's no hay, Jo," he cried, looking up in perplexity and worriment.

"The Mulligan Supply Company was short of hay when we left," Jo
explained. "They hoped to have a tra