----"

"Searle! Thirty thousand bucks!" said Glen. "He hasn't got thirty
thousand cents! The man who drove me up last night knows the bank
cashier, Mr. Rickart, like a brother--and Rickart told him Searle is a
four-flusher--hasn't a bean--and looks like a mighty good imitation of
a crook. Searle! You put up thirty--stung, Beth, stung, good and
plenty!"

Beth's hand was on her cheek, pressing it to whiteness.

"Oh, I've been afraid that something was wrong--that something
terrible---- Why, Glen, that would be _forgery_--obtaining money under
false pretences! He may have done anything--_anything_ to get the
'Laughing Water' claim! He may have done something--said
something--written something to make Van--Mr. Van Buren think that
I---- Oh, Glen, I don't know what to do!"

Her brother looked at her keenly.

"You're in trouble, Sis," he hazarded. "Is 'Van' the candy boy with
you?"

She blushed suddenly. The contrast from her paleness was striking.

"He's the one who is in trouble," she answered. "And he may think that
I--he does think something. He has lost his mine--a very valuable
property. Searle and some Mr. McCoppet have taken it away from Mr. Van
Buren and all those poor old men--after all their work, their
waiting--everything! You've got to help me to see what we can do!"

"McCoppet's a gambler--a short-card, tumble weed," said Glen. "You've
got to put me next. Tell me the whole novelette, beginning at chapter
one."

"As fast as I can," she answered, and she did. She related everything,
even the manner in which she and Searle had first become engaged--a
business at which she marveled now--and of how and when she had
encountered Van, the results of the meeting, the subsequent events, and
the heart-breaking outcome of the trip that Van had made to carry her
letter to Starlight.

In her letter, her love had been confessed. She glossed that item over
now as a spot too sensitive for exposure. She merely admitted that
between herself and Van had existed a friendship such as comes but once
in many a woman's life--a friendship recently destroyed, she feared, by
some horrible machinations of Bostwick.

"You can see," she concluded, "that Mr. Van Buren must think me guilty
of almost anything. He doubtless knows my money, that I thought was
helping you, went to meet the expense of taking away his property. He
probably thinks I sent him to you to get him out of the way, while
Searle and the ot