about your tin box. Nobody seems to know where it is. Everybody
remembers having seen it in your hands. I suppose we left it on the
ground when we brought you to the house, but I can't find anybody that
removed it. Perhaps some of my people have seen it. I'll send and ask
them."

He smiled disconsolately.

"I may as well say good-bye to it."

"If you mean that my boys are thieves," she retorted hotly.

"I didn't say that, ma'am; but mebbe I did imply they wouldn't return
that particular box, when they found what was in it. I shouldn't blame
them if they didn't."

"I should. Very much. This merely shows you don't understand us at all,
Mr. Gordon."

"I wish I had that box. It ce'tainly disarranges my plans to have it
gone," he said irritably.

"I assure you I didn't take it."

"I don't lay it to you, though it would ce'tainly be to your advantage
to take it," he laughed, already mollified.

"Will you please explain that?"

"All my claims of title to this land grant are in that box, Miss
Valdes," he remarked placidly, as if it were a matter of no consequence.

She went white at his words.

"And it is lost--probably in the hands of my people. We must get it
back."

"But you're on the other side of the fence," he reminded her gaily.

With dignity she turned on him.

"Do you think I want to beat you that way? Do you think I am a
highwayman, or that I shall let my people be?"

"You make them draw the line between murder and robbery," he suggested
pleasantly.

"I couldn't stop them from attacking you, but I can see they don't keep
your papers--all the more, that it is to their interest and mine to keep
them."

She said it with such fine girlish pride, her head thrown a little back,
her eyes gleaming, scorn of his implied distrust in her very carriage.
For long he joyfully carried the memory of it.

Surely, she was the rarest creature it had ever been his fortune to
meet. Small wonder the gallant Spaniard Don Manuel loved her. Small
wonder her people fed on her laughter, and were despondent at her
frowns.

Dick Gordon was awake a good deal that night, for the pain and the fever
were still with him; but the hours were short to him, full of joy and
also of gloom. Shifting pictures of her filled the darkness. His
imagination saw her in many moods, in many manners. And when from time
to time he dropped into light sleep, it was to carry her into his
dreams.

CHAPTER XXIV

DICK GORDON APOLOGIZES