He's my father--I know him--and I'll tell you right now he
never cheated a man in his life."

"Well, he did!" she flared back, her eyes dark with anger, "and I'll
bet--I'll bet if my father was here he'd--he'd prove it to your face!"

She ended in a sob and as he saw the tears starting the son of Honest
John relented.

"Aw, Virginia," he pleaded, "what's the use of always fighting? He's
gone now, so let's be friends. I was just going by when I saw you on the
gallery, and I thought--well, let's you and I be friends."

"What? After old Honest John robbed Papa of the Paymaster, and then
hounded him to his death on the desert?"

"He did nothing of the kind--he never robbed anybody! And as for
hounding your father to his death, the Old Man never even knew about it.
He was down on the ranch, and when they told him the news----"

"Yes, that's you," she railed, stifling back her sobs, "you can always
prove an alibi. But you'd better drift, Mr. Holman; because if mother
knows you're here----"

"Well, what?" he demanded, truculently.

"She'll fill you full of buckshot."

"Pah!" he scoffed and snapped his fingers in the air, after which he
lapsed into silence.

"Well, she will," she asserted, after waiting for him to speak, but
Wiley only grunted.

"Wait till I get that dinner," he said at last and slumped down into a
chair. He muttered to himself, gazing dubiously towards the kitchen, and
turned impatiently to look at some specimens in a case against the wall.
They were the usual chunks of high-grade gold ore, but he examined one
piece with great care.

"Where'd you get this?" he asked, holding up a piece of white rock, and
she sighed and brushed away her tears.

"Over on the dump," she answered wearily. "That's all Paymaster ore.
Don't you think you'd better go?"

"Never ran away yet," he answered briefly and balanced the rock in his
hand. "Pretty heavy," he observed, "I'll bet it would assay. Have you
got very much on the dump?"

"What--_that_?" she cried, snatching the specimen away from him and
bursting into a nervous laugh. "That assay? Well, you are a
greenie--it's nothing but barren white quartz!"

"Oh, it is, eh?" he rejoined and gazed at her hectoringly. "You seem to
know a whole lot about mineral."

"Yes, I do," she boasted. "Death Valley Charley teaches me. I've learned
how to pan, and everything. But that rock there--that's the barren
quartz that the Paymaster ran into when the values went out o