“Don’t be bitter, Karl.”

“I’m not bitter, Honora.  I’m rebuked.  I’m literal.  I’m instructed.  I have brought you down here to talk the situation over with me.  I can get men in plenty to advise me, but I want to know what you think about a number of things.  Moreover, I want you to tell me what you imagine Miss Barrington would think about them.”

“Why don’t you write and ask her?” asked Honora.  She herself was hurt at not having heard from Kate.

“I gave her notice that I wasn’t going to write any more,” said Karl sharply.  “I couldn’t have her counting on me when I wasn’t sure that I was a man to be counted on.”

“Oh,” cried Honora, enlightened.  “That’s the trouble, is it?  But still, I should think she’d write to me.  I told her of all you and I were going through together—­” she broke off suddenly.  Her words presented to her for the first time some hint of the idea she might have conveyed to Kate.  She smiled upon her cousin beautifully, while he stared at her, puzzled at her unexpected radiance.

“Kate loves him,” she decided, looking at the man beside her with fresh appreciation of his power.  She was the more conscious of it that she saw him now in his hour of defeat and perceived his hope and ingenuity, his courage and determination gathering together slowly but steadily for a fresh effort.

“Dear old Kate,” she mused.  “Karl rebuffed her in his misery, and I misled her.  If she hadn’t cared she’d have written anyway.  As it is—­”

But Karl was talking.

“Now there’s the matter of the company store,” he was saying.  “What would Miss Barrington think about the ethical objections to that?”

Honora turned her attention to the matter in hand, and when, late that afternoon, the two rode their jaded horses home, a new campaign had been planned.  Within a week Wander left for Denver.  Honora heard nothing from him for a fortnight.  Then a wire came.  He was returning to Wander with five hundred men.

“They’re hoboes—­pick-ups,” he told Honora that night as the two sat together at supper.  “Long-stake and short-stake men—­down-and-outs—­vagrants—­drunkards, God knows what.  I advertised for them.  ‘Previous character not called into question,’ was what I said.  ’Must open up my mines.  Come and work as long as you feel like it.’  I haven’t promised them anything and they haven’t promised me anything, except that I give them wages for work.  A few of them have women with them, but not more than one in twenty.  I don’t know what kind of a mess the town of Wander will be now, but at any rate, it’s sticking to its old programme of ‘open shop.’  Any one who wants to take these fellows away from me is quite welcome to do it.  No affection shall exist between them and me.  There are no obligations on either side.  But they seem a hearty, good-natured lot, and they said they liked my grit.”

Something that was wild and reckless in all of the Wanders flashed in Honora’s usually quiet eyes.