outcast’s lazy philosophy.  He crept back again to his bed in the hollow and slept.  In that profound silence and shadow, shut out from human association and sympathy by the ghostly fog, what torturing visions conjured up by remorse and fear should have pursued him?  What spirit passed before him, or slowly shaped itself out of the infinite blackness of the wood?  None.  As he slipped gently into that blackness he remembered with a slight regret, some biscuits that were dropped from the coach by a careless luncheon-consuming passenger.  That pang over, he slept as sweetly, as profoundly, as divinely, as a child.

CHAPTER II.

He awoke with the aroma of the woods still steeping his senses.  His first instinct was that of all young animals:  he seized a few of the young, tender green leaves of the yerba buena vine that crept over his mossy pillow and ate them, being rewarded by a half berry-like flavor that seemed to soothe the cravings of his appetite.  The languor of sleep being still upon him, he lazily watched the quivering of a sunbeam that was caught in the canopying boughs above.  Then he dozed again.  Hovering between sleeping and waking, he became conscious of a slight movement among the dead leaves on the bank beside the hollow in which he lay.  The movement appeared to be intelligent, and directed toward his revolver, which glittered on the bank.  Amused at this evident return of his larcenious friend of the previous day, he lay perfectly still.  The movement and rustle continued, and it now seemed long and undulating.  Lance’s eyes suddenly became set; he was intensely, keenly awake.  It was not a snake, but the hand of a human arm, half hidden in the moss, groping for the weapon.  In that flash of perception he saw that it was small, bare, and deeply freckled.  In an instant he grasped it firmly, and rose to his feet, dragging to his own level as he did so, the struggling figure of a young girl.

“Leave me go!” she said, more ashamed than frightened.

Lance looked at her.  She was scarcely more than fifteen, slight and lithe, with a boyish flatness of breast and back.  Her flushed face and bare throat were absolutely peppered with minute brown freckles, like grains of spent gunpowder.  Her eyes, which were large and gray, presented the singular spectacle of being also freckled,—­at least they were shot through in pupil and cornea with tiny spots like powdered allspice.  Her hair was even more remarkable in its tawny deer-skin color, full of lighter shades, and bleached to the faintest of blondes on the crown of her head, as if by the action of the sun.  She had evidently outgrown her dress, which was made for a smaller child, and the too brief skirt disclosed a bare, freckled, and sandy desert of shapely limb, for which the darned stockings were equally too scant.  Lance let his grasp slip from her thin wrist to her hand, and then with a good-humored gesture tossed it lightly back to her.