on dark, stormy nights he
wandered about like a specter watching the shadows for Stiff Neck
George. He was out there somewhere, Wiley knew it as instinctively as
he knew that Virginia hated him, and yet he never appeared. He never
made threats nor showed himself in the open but, somewhere, he was out
there in the darkness; and sooner or later he would strike.

The days dragged on slowly, with cold, March winds and sandstorms
boiling in over Shadow Mountain; and then driving rain followed by
bright, sunny weather and struggling flowers in the swales. It was
spring, in a way, but not the spring of yester-year, with its songs and
laughter and high hopes. Wiley felt the old call to be up and away, but
his racer remained in its shed. He paced about restlessly, waiting for
something to happen, observing the slightest signs--and then he found
her tracks in the dust. Virginia had come up the trail in the night and
had gone down past the mill. He knew her tracks well and, among the
broad brogans of the miners, they stood out like the footprints of a
fairy. Wiley's heart leapt up in his breast--and then it stood still.
Had she come as an enemy or a friend?

He followed her trail to where it had been trampled out by the
watchman in making his regular rounds; and then, below the mill, he
picked it up again as it went on down the path. Not once had she
hesitated or turned from the beaten trail, but she had gone down after
the graveyard shift. That went on at eleven and her tracks were
superimposed on the hob-nailed boot-marks of the miners. When they had
come off shift they had trampled them out again, except for a print
here and there; and by the color of the dust Wiley shrewdly judged
that she had visited him between twelve and one. Between the
wind-blown footprints of the night-shift and the fresh red of the day
shift as they had mounted the trail at seven, her high-arched steps
had been made about midnight, for the dust had been whitened by the
air. Wiley followed them silently, trampling them out as he went, and
that night as the graveyard shift came on he slipped out and hid by
the trail. What kind of a watchman was this, who let a woman come and
go and never even saw her tracks in the dust? He could watch for
Virginia; and meanwhile, incidentally, he could keep tab on this
sleepy-headed guard.

The _chuh_, _chuh_ of the engine echoed loud in the canyon as
the hoist brought up the first cars, and then the rumble of the tra