“You’re not hurt, I hope, miss,” said her preserver, respectfully.

She looked up at his dark, fierce face, and laughed saucily.

“I’m awful frightened,” she said, naively; “whoever would have thought that Poncho would have been so scared by a lot of cows?”

“Thank God, you kept your seat,” the other said, earnestly. He was a tall, savage-looking young fellow, mounted on a powerful roan horse, and clad in the rough dress of a hunter, with a long rifle slung over his shoulders. “I guess you are the daughter of John Ferrier,” he remarked; “I saw you ride down from his house. When you see him, ask him if he remembers the Jefferson Hopes of St. Louis. If he’s the same Ferrier, my father and he were pretty thick.”

“Hadn’t you better come and ask yourself?” she asked, demurely.

The young fellow seemed pleased at the suggestion, and his dark eyes sparkled with pleasure. “I’ll do so,” he said; “we‘ve been in the mountains for two months, and are not over and above in visiting condition. He must take us as he finds us.”

“He has a good deal to thank you for, and so have I,” she answered; “he’s awful fond of me. If those cows had jumped on me me he’d have never got over it.”

“Neither would I,” said her companion.

“You! Well, I don’t see that it would make much matter to you, anyhow. You ain’t even a friend of ours.”

The young hunter’s dark face grew so gloomy over this remark that Lucy Ferrier laughed aloud.

“There, I didn’t mean that,” she said; “of course, you are a friend now. You must come and see us. Now I must push along, or father won’t trust me with his business any more. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” he answered, raising his broad sombrero, and bending over her little hand. She wheeled her mustang round, gave it a cut with her riding-whip, and darted away down the broad road in a rolling cloud of dust.

Young Jefferson Hope rode on with his companions, gloomy and taciturn. He and they had been among the Nevada Mountains prospecting for silver, and were returning to Salt Lake City in the hope of raising capital enough to work some lodes which they had discovered. He had been as keen as any of them upon the business until this sudden incident had drawn his thoughts into another channel. The sight of the fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes, had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. When she had vanished from his sight, he realized that a crisis had come in his life, and that neither silver speculations nor any other questions could ever be of such importance to him as this new and all-absorbing one. The love which had sprung up in his heart was not the sudden, changeable fancy of a boy, but rather the wild, fierce passion of a man of strong will and imperious temper. He had been accustomed to succeed in all that he undertook. He swore in his heart that he would not fail in this if human effort and human perseverance could render him successful.

On the other side of the wide crossing, by the road–side, was a heap of pale–grey stones for mending the roads, and a cart standing, and a middle–aged man with whiskers round his face was leaning on his shovel, talking to a young man in gaiters, who stood by the horse’s head. Both men were facing the crossing.

They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in the near distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon. Both wore light, gay summer dresses, Ursula had an orange–coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow, Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose, the figures of the two women seemed to glitter in progress over the wide bay of the railway crossing, white and orange and yellow and rose glittering in motion across a hot world silted with coal–dust.

The two men stood quite still in the heat, watching. The elder was a short, hard–faced energetic man of middle age, the younger a labourer of twenty–three or so. They stood in silence watching the advance of the sisters. They watched whilst the girls drew near, and whilst they passed, and whilst they receded down the dusty road, that had dwellings on one side, and dusty young corn on the other.

Then the elder man, with the whiskers round his face, said in a prurient manner to the young man:

‘What price that, eh? She’ll do, won’t she?’

‘Which?’ asked the young man, eagerly, with laugh.

‘Her with the red stockings. What d’you say? I’d give my week’s wages for five minutes; what!—just for five minutes.’

Again the young man laughed.

‘Your missis ‘ud have summat to say to you,’ he replied.

Gudrun had turned round and looked at the two men. They were to her sinister creatures, standing watching after her, by the heap of pale grey slag. She loathed the man with whiskers round his face.

‘You’re first class, you are,’ the man said to her, and to the distance.

‘Do you think it would be worth a week’s wages?’ said the younger man, musing.

‘Do I? I’d put ‘em bloody–well down this second—’

The younger man looked after Gudrun and Ursula objectively, as if he wished to calculate what there might be, that was worth his week’s wages. He shook his head with fatal misgiving.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth that to me.’

‘Isn’t?’ said the old man. ‘By God, if it isn’t to me!’

And he went on shovelling his stones.

The girls descended between the houses with slate roofs and blackish brick walls. The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses. On the roads silted with black dust, the rich light fell more warmly, more heavily, over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast, from the glowing close of day.

‘It has a foul kind of beauty, this place,’ said Gudrun, evidently suffering from fascination. ‘Can’t you feel in some way, a thick, hot attraction in it? I can. And it quite stupifies me.’