“Buy one of these Choice Lots,”

she read, with charming, slightly mocking exaggeration.

“Buy to-day.

“To-morrow will see this Property the Heart of a City.

“Buy before the Prices Soar.

“Talk with Henderson Bailey.

“This surely is Hesperides Vale,” she added.

The amusement went out of Tisdale’s face.  “Yes, madam, and your journey’s end.  Probably the next post-box will announce the name of your friends.”

She did not answer directly.  She looked beyond the heads of the team to the top of the valley, where two brown slopes parted like drawn curtains and opened a blue vista of canyon closed by a lofty snow-peak.  The sun had more than fulfilled its morning promise of heat, but a soft breeze began to pull from that white summit down the watercourse.

“I did not tell you I had friends in Hesperides Vale,” she said at last.  Her eyes continued to search the far blue canyon, but her color heightened at his quick glance of surprise, and she went on with a kind of breathlessness.

“I—­I have a confession to make.  I—­But hasn’t it occurred to you, Mr. Tisdale, that I might be interested in this land you are on your way to see?”

His glance changed.  It settled into his clear, calculating look of appraisal.  Under it her color flamed; she, turned her face farther away.  “No,” he answered slowly, “No, that had not occurred to me.”

“I should have told you at the beginning, but I thought, at first, you knew.  Afterward—­but I am going to explain now,” and she turned resolutely, smiling a little to brave that look.  “Mr. Morganstein had promised, when he planned the trip to Portland, that he would run over from Ellensburg to look the property up.  He believed it might be feasible to plat it into five-acre tracts to put on the market.  Of course we knew nothing of the difficulties of the road; we had heard it was an old stage route, and we expected to motor through and return the same day.  So, when the accident happened to the car in Snoqualmie Pass, and the others were taking the Milwaukee train home, I decided, on the impulse of the moment, to finish this side trip to Wenatchee and return to Seattle by the Great Northern.  I admit seeing you on the eastbound influenced me.  We—­Mrs. Feversham—­guessed you were on your way to see this land, and when the porter was uncertain of the stage from Ellensburg, but that you were leaving the trail below Kittitas, I thought you had found a newer, quicker way.  So—­I followed you.”

Tisdale’s brows relaxed.  He laughed a little softly, trying to ease her evident distress.  “I am glad you did, Miss Armitage.  I am mighty glad you did.  But I see,” he went on slowly, his face clouding again, “I see Mrs. Weatherbee had been talking to you about that tract.  It’s strange I hadn’t thought of that possibility.  I’ll wager she even tried to sell the land off a map, in Seattle.  I wonder, though, when this Weatherbee trip was arranged to look the property over, that she didn’t come, too.  But no doubt that seemed too eager.”