It was a week later and Beatrice, with a landscape of blue mountains and green forest showing beyond her through the open door, was standing on the threshold in her riding clothes.

“I have finished my share of the housework and I am off for a ride,” she said to Nancy.

Her sister smiled broadly over her dusting.

“I would never have thought,” she declared, “that you could curry a horse and split the kindling before breakfast and that I could scrub floors and wash dishes every day and that we both of us would like it. There must be something strange in this mountain air.”

They had begun to feel as settled as though they had been at their housekeeping in the cabin for months. The cottage itself was a different place, an entrancingly pleasant and comfortable one. Hester Herrick, with whom they were now great friends, was always bringing them things—some big black andirons for the great fireplace, a collection of soft pine pillows, and the thick bearskin rug that lay before the hearth.

“Roddy said you were to have it. He shot the bear himself last winter,” she said when the girls protested that this last gift was too great a one.

Sam also had brought a bashfully presented offering, the pelt of a mountain lion which now served as Aunt Anna’s bedside rug. Nancy had put up white blue-bordered curtains at the little square windows and had set on the wide sills pots of red berries, boxes of ferns, and bowls of bright-faced pansies.

With the fresh wind fluttering the curtains and the sunshine lying in patches on the white scrubbed floor, the little cabin was as gay and homelike a place as heart could desire.

Christina, in spite of Thorvik’s interdiction, still came every day. This morning she arrived earlier than usual, with their marketing in a big basket and the mail; for it was not, even yet, a good thing for the girls to go often to the village. She took some letters in to their Aunt Anna and remained for some time, since Aunt Anna appeared to be asking her questions.

“No,” the girls heard Christina say, through the door, “there is no one of your name hereabouts. But Olaf and I have only lived in this valley ten years, so it might have been before.”

Beatrice looked up, startled. What had her aunt been asking and why should there be any one of their name living in this far-off place? She remembered her former wonder concerning that brother of whom they never heard anything at home. But Christina came out and closed the door, the bright morning was calling, and Beatrice forgot her curiosity in looking forward to her ride.

“Don’t you want to go, Nancy?” she said as she went through the kitchen.

“No,” returned Nancy briskly, “I don’t care for riding as you do, and this morning I would not go for anything. Christina is going to teach me how to make bread.” The exploration of strange forests and dizzy mountainsides was nothing to Nancy, compared with the excitement of cooking something new.

To saddle Buck was now a less difficult affair than at first, for his mistress had learned to fling the object of his hatred upon him and then stand back, giving adroit jerks at the cinch between his kicks and plunges. When he had got his fill of bucking he would turn his white face to her as if to say, “That is all for to-day; now let’s be off.”

Her expedition was doomed to delay, however, for, as she was leading her pony around the corner of the house, she came upon a visitor, a total stranger, standing on the doorstep. He was apparently annoyed at finding no doorbell and having his knock go unheard. He shuffled his feet, coughed, and rapped smartly on the door again and again, as though he were a person of such importance that he could not afford to be kept waiting. Beatrice realized suddenly how used she had become to Ely’s conventional costume of flannel shirt and high boots, since this dapper newcomer, with his pointed shoes and tight, high-waisted coat looked not only uncomfortable, but absurd.

“Good morning, Miss Deems. Beautiful day, is it not?” began the stranger easily. “Mills is my name, Dabney Mills of the Brownsville, Montana ‘Evening Star.’ My paper has sent me here, or rather I volunteered to come, to investigate this unfortunate affair going on in Broken Bow Valley.”

“Oh, you mean the strike?” Beatrice asked, rather bewildered and not knowing at all why the overdressed Mr. Mills should have sought out their remote cabin.

He made a movement as though to go in, but, since Beatrice seemed not at all inclined to open the door, he sat down on the step with smooth assurance, laid his hat on the stone, and took out a note-book.

“The affair is more like a lockout than a strike, but not exactly that, either,” he continued with that irresistible fluency of speech adopted by people who talk a great deal to unwilling listeners. “As I understand it, the situation is this. The Broken Bow Irrigation Co. undertakes to construct the necessary dams, ditches, and sluice-gates to water this dry valley, a big project in which a certain John Herrick, resident of these parts, has large interests.”

“I did not know about John Herrick’s share in it,” Beatrice said. She was beginning already to catch the Western habit of dropping the title “mister” except in direct address. Since she was unwilling that the stranger should come in, for fear he would disturb and annoy Aunt Anna, and since he made no move to go away, she finally sat down herself upon the step.

“The money for this affair,” Mills went on, “was raised in part, as is usual, by the owners of the land which is to be irrigated, but the greater amount was to be subscribed by capitalists outside the valley, John Herrick pledging himself to see that the necessary sum was forthcoming. So far, so good.” He tapped the note-book with a stubby forefinger and went on with significant emphasis. “Since there is no bank in Ely, there are often large sums in currency brought to pay the men and deposited in the Irrigation Company’s safe. It is known that, just before this outbreak, the finances of the company were in good condition and that there was no talk of funds giving out before the work was completed. Yet when the men held a meeting to debate whether they should go on or should strike for increased wages—they had already had one increase but Thorvik insisted it was not enough,—they were served with a notice that the capital was exhausted and that construction was shut down. That is what all the trouble is about.”

He looked at Beatrice very wisely, but she said nothing. She was aware of Nancy standing in the door and looking at Dabney Mills’ back in round-eyed astonishment. She called her sister out finally, and introduced the newcomer stiffly, and motioned Nancy to sit beside her.

“Yes, sir, the money was gone!” The polished manner of Mills’ narrative dropped suddenly into the colloquial, as though the effort had been too much for him. “The men mobbed the office building demanding to know what had happened, and the officers of the unions were allowed to examine the books and even to look into the safe, but it was plain to them all that the company couldn’t turn up a red cent. Been stolen, so people begin to say, but no one knows who did it. Now the men are lounging around town, idle, quarreling, looking for trouble. Not a wheel can turn until the money is found.”

Nancy looked at him with inquisitive interest.

“And did you come to Ely to find it?” she asked.

“Well—why, if you put it that way, I guess I did,” he answered, reddening a little, but seeming flattered, on the whole, by the bluntness of her question. “I told the editor of my paper that it would make a big story if any one could find out just who made way with that money. He didn’t think a cub reporter could do much, but I offered to come up here on my own responsibility and get to the bottom of the whole affair. It will be a smashing big hit for me if I make good.”

He opened his note-book and fluttered over the leaves.

“Of course the sheriff is working on the job, but these country officials are no sleuths. It will take a smarter man than he is to get anywhere. I’m on my way up to interview John Herrick; he’s the big man of the company and he ought to be able to give me something. But in case he won’t talk I thought I would stop and learn what I could from his neighbors, I understand you know Miss Herrick well. Now anything you can tell me will be useful. What do you know of John Herrick or his habits or his business?”

He waited with pencil poised.

“We don’t know anything, and we wouldn’t tell you if we did,” cried Nancy indignantly.

“It isn’t hard usually to find out about people from their neighbors,” Dabney Mills declared, quite unabashed. “You are staying with your aunt, I understand. Perhaps if I went in and spoke to her——”

“You will do nothing of the sort.” Beatrice had found the voice of which astonishment and anger had robbed her. “My aunt is not to be disturbed, and there is not the least use in asking us any more questions.”

“Oh, well, of course, if you are going to take it like that——!” Dabney Mills rose and pocketed his note-book. He seemed quite unoffended and not convinced even yet that his quest was fruitless. “I’ll drop in again in a day or two.”

Beatrice walked with great dignity into the house, followed by Nancy, who could not help turning to look after the reporter as he trudged away through the pines, the cock of his hat and the swagger of his shoulders showing that he did not acknowledge defeat.

“I do hope Aunt Anna wasn’t disturbed,” said Beatrice as she tiptoed into the inner room to discover her aunt propped up in the invalid chair and rocked by a gale of laughter.

“You did very well, my dears,” Aunt Anna said. “Even his back is bristling with indignation as he marches away. I could not help overhearing with the door open, and you were both well equal to the situation. What a strange, impertinent man, or boy rather, for he is scarcely grown up. I wonder that any reputable newspaper employs him!”

“He said he was doing this on his own responsibility and was going to sell the news to a paper later,” explained Beatrice. “He thinks he is going to make some startling discovery.”

“I believe,” asserted Nancy wagging her head sagely, “that when he was young and his character was forming, his mother let him read too many detective stories and they didn’t agree with him. He thinks he is Sherlock Holmes and Craig Kennedy and all the others rolled into one. That is what is the matter with him.”

“You take a charitable view, Nancy,” returned her aunt, “and I rather think your diagnosis is right. But insistent, foolish people of his kind can often do a great deal of harm without intending it.”

Beatrice returned finally to the impatient Buck and rode down the path toward the gate. It was her intention to explore some of the upper trails of the mountainside to-day, for she had no desire to ride in the direction of the village. Once only had she been forced to go to town and she had felt very uneasy under the sullen unfriendly stares of the idle foreigners lounging about the doorways or sitting in rows at the edge of the board sidewalks.

She was to be delayed once more, however, by another visitor, one even more unwelcome than the first. She had dismounted to give a final jerk to the cinch of the girth and was about to swing into the saddle again to ride through the gate when she saw Thorvik come striding across the lowered bars. His face was red with the heat of his steep climb and the veins stood out on his forehead below his bristling tow-colored hair. Such a face she had never seen before, distorted with anger and flushed with evil hate. He pulled a letter from his pocket as he came near and held it up. Thinking that it was for her she stretched out her hand to take it, but he snatched it back beyond her reach.

“You are to look, not to have it,” he said in a voice thick with rage.

She saw it was addressed in a plain, schoolboy hand to “Mrs. Christina Jensen, Ely, Montana.”

“Why,” she cried, “it must be from——”

“From that Olaf,” snarled Thorvik, “and why should he be writing, if not because he has had an answer to his letter of long ago. I told her there should be no answer. Who wrote for her?”

“I did,” returned Beatrice steadily, although her hot temper was beginning to rise within her.

She made a move to remount her horse, but the man stepped forward and seized the bridle. Buck, nervous and startled, wheeled and reared, but could not jerk free from the iron grip on his bit. Thorvik moved up the path and put himself between Beatrice and the house. Terror as well as anger was beginning to take possession of her, but she faced him without flinching.

“You wrote it—after I forbid?” His voice shook with fury. “Then this is what I do with the answer.” He slipped the rein over his arm and with his great hard hands tore the letter into shreds that went whirling and scattering in the wind all across the side of the hill.

“Had Christina read it?” cried Beatrice in dismay.

“No, Christina cannot read, nor I. She is crying at home. I told her I would bring the letter to you and tear it up before your face, to show you how much use is it to meddle with the business of other people.”

“And she will never know what he said?” Beatrice exclaimed. “You took it from her before she could hear? You coward—you——”

“Steady, my dear.”

A man’s quiet voice sounded at her elbow, and she turned suddenly to see John Herrick.

“Anger won’t get you anywhere with people of this fellow’s kind,” he said gently. “If you wish to order a man off your grounds, you must do it quietly.”

So, standing firm on the path, fortified by the knowledge that John Herrick was beside her, Beatrice had the strange delight of directing an impertinent intruder to drop her horse’s rein and leave her premises, and of seeing him obey. For Thorvik went. He blustered, stammered, then finally relinquished Buck’s bridle and marched away to the gate. He stopped before he passed through to hurl a defiance over his shoulder, but he hastened on immediately after.

“His threats grow louder the further away he goes,” commented John Herrick.

“I—I am glad you came,” observed Beatrice a little shakily. The incident had been an unpleasant one, nor could she guess what the result would have been had not help appeared from such an unexpected quarter.

“I am glad also,” he returned gravely. “A strange creature who called himself a reporter stopped me at my door as I was starting for the village. He asked me a great many impudent questions, but he happened to mention that he had seen Thorvik going in through your gate. At that, I rode off at once, leaving him with his mouth and his note-book both still open. Here comes our journalistic friend now. He seems to find this morning sun a trifle uncomfortable.”

Very hot and wilted did Dabney Mills look as he came trudging down the path, his handkerchief stuck into his over-tall but exceedingly limp white collar. Yet his inquiring spirit still seemed undismayed. He stopped where John Herrick’s nervous black pony was tied, peered over the fence, and poised his pencil once more above a page.

“Won’t you just tell me——” he began.

“I have told you already,” said John Herrick, “that I have nothing to say. When the men get rid of their leader and come to me willing to work again, we will inquire into this matter of the company’s finances. But while they are not in our employ, the company’s money is none of their business. Until Thorvik leaves Ely and the laborers stop talking of strikes, things shall stand exactly as they are.”

His tone was so final that even Dabney Mills realized that this was the end of the interview and walked on unwillingly in the direction Thorvik had gone. John Herrick caught Buck, gave the rein to Beatrice, and went to untie his own horse, but hesitated a moment before mounting. His manner assumed suddenly a stiff shyness quite unlike his cordiality of a moment before.

“There is one thing more,” he began. “I have been away for some days, but I now understand from Hester that your aunt, who is with you, has been ill. Is that true?”

“Yes,” assented Beatrice. She was puzzled by his change of manner, but she still felt that his kindness invited confidence, and she told him fully of the state of Aunt Anna’s health and how concerned they were about her.

“I wanted to suggest,” John Herrick went on slowly, “that there is a doctor who lives on the other side of Gray Cloud Mountain, a man who does not practise now, but who has been a famous specialist for just such illness. He could help your aunt, I know. He would come to see her if I asked him, for he has always been a good friend to me. Would you care to consult him?”

“Oh, indeed I would. How kind of you, how wonderfully good to have thought of it!” exclaimed Beatrice. She had seen the regular doctor of Broken Bow Valley and had not felt that he could help them very greatly.

“Oh, it is nothing,” John Herrick returned, apparently somewhat disturbed by the eagerness of her gratitude. “It is just friendly interest in a neighbor.” He went on speaking in a tone of rather careful indifference. “Dr. Minturn and his wife are very fond of my Hester, and she often rides over to visit them. It takes a whole day to go there and another to come back, but I believe she would like to take the ride with you. She was saying something yesterday about going soon to see them. I would fetch the doctor myself, but I cannot leave Ely to-day. As he does not often ride to town for his mail and there is no telephone line, he is rather difficult to reach. If you wish to wait for a day or two, I will gladly go to fetch him.”

“Oh, no,” replied Beatrice. “I will go to-day if Hester is willing. I feel as though I could not wait. And how can I ever thank you for—for everything?”

There was a curious wistfulness in the look that John Herrick bent upon her, and a great kindness also.

“You have taken up rather a large task,” he said slowly; “taken it for the most part upon your own shoulders. I want you to know that, as far as it is in my power, I am going to help you make a success of it.”

His shyness had dropped as suddenly as it had come upon him and there was nothing but the warmest friendliness in his smile as he swung into the saddle.

By a touch upon the bridle, Beatrice turned Buck’s head toward the house, then paused and looked back at John Herrick. She saw that he had not moved but was sitting his horse staring after her. Upon sudden impulse she wheeled her pony and rode up to him.

“You are taking a great deal of trouble for—for strangers,” she said, looking him very steadily in the eyes. “I don’t think I can ever make you understand how grateful I am.”

“It is you who do not understand,” he returned gravely, “I——”

“It is you who do not understand,” he returned gravely

Whether his impatient black horse would no longer wait or whether he broke off what he was saying by a jerk of the rein, Beatrice could not tell. His pony plunged, turned, and went galloping away down the road, leaving her and Buck to set their faces once more toward the cabin.

It did not take her many minutes to explain matters to Nancy and Aunt Anna, to gather up what she would need for the journey, and to bid them an excited good-by.

“Of course it is all right for me to go,” she assured her aunt in reply to some faint protest. “Hester goes often and she will be there to show me the way.”

She was away down the path as fast as Buck’s nimble feet would take her. When she rode up to the door of the next house, Hester was not immediately visible, but she appeared presently from the kitchen. With a troubled face she listened to the plan of their going across the mountain together.

“I wish I could go,” she said, “but old Julia has one of her attacks of rheumatism and I know I should not leave her. Won’t you wait a few days until I can go or Roddy can ride over for us?”

Beatrice, impatient and disappointed, sat silent in her saddle, thinking deeply. She looked down into the long, sun-flooded valley, then up at the sharp slopes above and the white, winding trail, calling her to the adventure.

“Why shouldn’t I go alone?” she asked boldly. “Where you can go, surely Buck and I can go also.”

Hester looked doubtful.

“The way is clear enough,” she said, “and not very hard going, but you have never ridden over it.”

Beatrice would listen to no objections. By the weight of her two years’ seniority and her natural determination, she speedily overcame all of Hester’s misgivings. She made her friend give her full directions, which she felt would be easy to follow.

“I am to keep to the line of the stream as far as its head waters and then go up through a cleft between two rocks at the very top of the pass,” she repeated. “You say the trail is fairly plain all the way? Certainly I can follow it.”

“One of the men said something about some rocks that had fallen at the very head of the stream, and you may have to go around them,” Hester said. “Otherwise it is all plain. Be careful on the slopes of loose stone and don’t leave the trail.”

“I will be careful,” returned Beatrice. “O Hester, what a ride it is going to be!”

There was not a mile of the way that disappointed her. Up and up they went, through forest, across clearings, fording the noisy shallows of the stream that was their guide, scrambling across the faces of rocky slopes where Buck picked his way as warily as a cat. She ate her lunch beside the stream, drank of the ice-cold water and rode on.

“We must be nearly to the pass,” she thought at last, and stopped to look back. Broken Bow Valley had shrunk to a mere creek-bed, one among many watercourses winding beneath. The heavy, dark forest seemed to cling, like a blanket, to the lower slopes of the mountains, as though it had slipped away from the smooth rocky shoulders of the heights above. Gray Cloud Pass was not a very high one, but to her inexperienced eyes, the depths below her were almost enough to make her dizzy. A cold wind blew down from the ice-fields so that she huddled herself into the grateful warmth of her sheepskin coat.

Higher still they mounted until they came, as Hester had foretold, to an impassable mass of rock that had fallen across the trail. The détour was difficult, up a barren slope covered with stunted bushes, and out on a naked spur whence she could look away at peak beyond peak, some bleak and dark, some shining with never-melting snow. Such tiny specks of creatures as she and Buck were, crawling like flies over the rocky hillside!

“Don’t leave the trail.” So Hester had warned, but there could be no harm in climbing a little higher, since she could see so plainly where her pathway began again and wound crookedly to the narrow passage between two huge boulders where she and Buck must go through. Above her, caught in a cleft in the great shoulder of the mountain, was a still, dark lake, its waters held in this cup of the rocks and fed by the melting snows of the ice-fields far above. She felt that she must see it closer and urged her pony forward.

It was as still as a polished mirror, deep-blue and fringed by a dark circle of pines. While she stood, staring fascinated at the gleaming surface, a deer came down to drink, swam leisurely across the far end of the lake, and disappeared into the forest. The motion seemed to break her dream, for she turned quickly in the saddle and looked down. She had climbed above the very summit of the pass, for she could see where the trail dipped downhill again, disappearing in a mass of trees. It even seemed that she could discern a cottage below and a wide, open slope of hillside. She could also see, however, that the sun was perilously near the line of the mountain tops and that the day was coming to an end.

“We must hurry,” she thought quickly. “I believe this is the best way down.”

Buck moved forward, hesitated, felt for his footing, and hesitated again. An ominous sound came to her ears, the rattling of sliding stones. The horse slipped, went forward several yards apparently with no will of his own, then stopped and turned his white face to look around at her. She dismounted to lead him, but felt the loose shale give way under her feet. Frantically she caught at the pommel of Buck’s saddle, but in a moment they were both slipping together while the rattle of the stones increased into a roar.

“Buck,” she cried aloud, “what have I done!”

The whole mountain seemed to be moving under her feet; she knew dimly that the saddle horn was snatched from her grasp, just before she plunged forward into darkness.