ow it was gone and in place of the lava cap there was a mantle of
gleaming snow. He looked down at the town and, on every graceless house,
there had been bestowed a crown of white; all the tin cans were buried,
the burned spots were covered over, and Keno was almost beautiful. A
family of children were out in the street, trying to coast in their new
Christmas wagons, and Wiley smiled to himself.

He had brought back those children; he had brought the town to life and
tenanted its vacant houses; and now, best of all, he had brought the
spirit of Christmas, for he had sent a peace-offering to Virginia. She
had spurned it once in the heat of passion, and called him a coward and
a crook; but that package of stock would recall to her mind a time when
she had known him for a friend. It would bring up old memories of their
boy-and-girl love, which she knew he had never forgotten, and if there
was anything to forgive she would know that he remembered it when he
sent this offering by Charley.

He was a crazy old rat, but he had his uses; and he had promised to give
her the stock, without fail. It was to come, of course, from Charley
himself, in atonement for selling it for nothing; but Virginia would
know, even if she missed his flowered Christmas card, that the stock was
a present from him. It had a value now far above the price he had paid
for it when Charley had thrust it upon him and the dividend alone from
the royalties on his lease would be twelve hundred dollars and more. And
then her pro rata share, when he paid his fifty thousand dollars, would
add another six hundred; and she knew that, for the asking, she could
have half of what he had--or all, if she would take him, too.

Wiley looked down on the house that sheltered Virginia and smiled to
think of her there. She was waiting on miners, but the time would come
when someone would be waiting on her. In the back of his brain a bold
plan had been forming to feed fat his grudge against Blount and restore
the Huffs to their own--and it needed but a word from her to put the
plan into action. He held from Blount two separate and distinct papers;
one a bond and lease on the mine, the other an option on his personal
stock. But to grant the bond and lease--with its option for fifty
thousand--Blount had been compelled to vote the Widow's stock; and if
that stock was not his and had been illegally voted, then of course the
bond and lease would be void.

Yet even so he, Wiley Ho