a kiss, this evening?'

"'If you want one.'

"'There's only one thing I want worse.'

"'What is that, Joe?'

"My arm was around her waist now, and the sunbonnet was shoved back from
the face. I took a couple of cream-puffs where they were ripe, and
answered:

"That message to come and have that talk about matrimony.'

"Here a man's voice was heard calling: 'Rachel! Rachel!' and throwing
her arms around my neck, she gave me one more kiss, snatched up her pail
and answered:

"'Yes; I'm coming.'

"Then to me, hurriedly:

"'Good-by, dear; wait patiently, you shall hear from me.'

"I went back and put the dangerous dust on the stump and returned to the
bunk-car. The next morning when I turned out, the outlines of the wagon
were dimly discernible away on a hill in the road; it had been gone an
hour.

"I walked down past my stump--the gold was gone.

"Well, John, I settled down to work and to wait for that precious letter
that would summon me to the side of Rachel Rokesby, wherever she was;
but it never came. Uncle Sam never delivered a line to me from her from
that day to this."

Joe kicked the burning sticks in our fire closer together, lit his pipe
and then proceeded:

"I was hopeful for a month or two; then got impatient, and finally got
angry, but it ended in despair. A year passed away before I commenced to
_hunt_, instead of waiting to be hunted; but after another year I gave
it up, and came to the belief that Rachel was dead or married to
another. But the very minute that such a treasonable thought flashed
through my mind, my heart held up the image of her pure face and rebuked
me.

"I was discharged finally, for forgetting orders--I was thinking of
something else--then I commenced to pull myself together and determined
to control myself. I held the job in Arizona almost a year, but the mill
company busted; then I drifted down on to the Mexican National, when it
was building, and got a job. A few months later, it came to my ears that
one of our engineers, Billy Gardiner, was in one of their damnable
prisons, for running over a Greaser, and I organized a relief
expedition. I called on Gardiner, and talked over his trouble fully; he
was in a loathsome dobie hole, full of vermin, and dark. As I sat
talking to him, I noticed an old man, chained to the wall in a little
entry on the other side of the room. His beard was grizzly white, long
and tangled. He was hollow-cheeked and wild-eyed, and looked at m