The lady turned away, but seemed irresolute.  The reporter followed her.

“If you will return to Rum Yalley, ma’am, I’ll find the major for you, if he is hereabouts,” said he.  “You will be more comfortable there, and I will be more likely than you to find him.”

The lady hesitated for a moment longer; then she drew from her pocket a diary, wrote a line or two on one of its leaves, tore it out and handed it to the reporter.

“I will accept your offer, and be very grateful for it, for I do not bear this mountain traveling very well.  If you find him, give him this scrawl and tell him where I am—­that will be sufficient.”

“Trust me to find him, ma’am,” replied Spidertracks.  “And as the stage is just starting, and there won’t be another for a week, allow me to see you into it.  Any baggage?”

“Only a small hand-bag in the tent,” said she.

They hurried off together, Spidertracks found the bag, and five minutes later was bowing and waving his old hat to the cloud of dust which the departing stage left behind it.  But when even the dust itself had disappeared, he drew from his pocket the paper the fair passenger had given him.

“’Tain’t sealed,” said he, reasoning with himself, “so there can’t be any secrets in it.  Let’s see—­hello!  ’Ernest is somewhere in this country; I wish to see you about him—­and about nothing else.’  Whew-w-w!  What splendid material for a column, if there was only a live paper in this infernal country!  Looking for that young scamp, eh?  There is something to her, and I’ll help her if I can.  Wonder if I’d recognize him if I saw him again?  I ought to, if he looks as much like his parents as he used to do.  ’Twould do my soul good to make the poor woman smile once; but it’s an outrageous shame there’s no good daily paper here to work the whole thing up in.  With the chase, and fighting, and murder that may come of it, ’twould make the leading sensation for a week!”

The agonized reporter clasped his hands behind him and walked slowly back to where he had left the crowd.  Most of the citizens had, on seeing the lady depart, taken a drink as a partial antidote to dejection, and strolled away to their respective claims, regardless of the occasional mud which threatened the polish on their boots; but two or three gentlemen of irascible tempers and judicial minds lingered, to decide whether Spidertracks had not, by the act of seeing the lady to the stage, made himself an accessory to her departure, and consequently a fit subject for challenge by every disappointed man in camp.

The reporter was in the midst of a very able and voluble defense, when the attention of his hearers seemed distracted by something on the trail by which the original settlers had entered the village.

Spidertracks himself looked, shaded his eyes, indulged in certain disconnected fragments of profanity, and finally exclaimed: