“But,” said the girl, “if the man offered more than Hallam or his nominee would outbid, he would have to take the ranch.”

Townshead nodded agreement.  “That,” he said, “is the difficulty.  Still, though I do not think there is any one who would do so much for us, I presume you would not have asked the question unless you had something in your mind.”

The girl, who did not answer for a moment, stooped and stirred the stove.  “No,” she said very slowly.  “I sent word to Mr. Alton.”

“Alton?” said Townshead, and sat silent a while.  “Well, although I do not altogether approve of him, I fancy that if there is anybody in this district able to help us that is the man.  There remains the question is he willing?”

Nellie Townshead still busied herself at the stove.  “I think he is,” she said.

Townshead straightened himself a trifle in his chair.  “Then, I am curious to know why he should be,” he said.

“I do not know,” said the girl, who rose and took up the supper dishes.  “Still, I feel sure that he is.”

Townshead turned towards her.  “You fancied so a moment or two ago, and now you are sure,” he said.  “There must be some meaning to this.”

His daughter looked round and laughed a little, holding the tray at a perilous slope.  “He made me promise to let him know,” she said.

Her father shook his head.  “A young man of Mr. Alton’s description does not do anything of the kind without a motive,” he said.  “Now I wonder if there are minerals upon the ranch.”

The colour crept into his daughter’s cheeks again.  “They would in any case belong to the Crown,” she said.  “Can you not believe that the man who packed our provisions in through flooded fords and snow would do anything out of generosity?”

She turned away and left him, and Townshead puckered his face dubiously.  “I should find it very difficult, and the care of a daughter is a heavy responsibility,” he said.  Miss Townshead did not return for some little while, but stood above the cedar washing-board scarcely seeing the dishes that once or twice almost slipped from her hand.  There was, her father had told her, one man who could help them in the only way in which assistance could be accepted, and she felt sure he would.  If rancher Alton failed to keep his word she felt it would be very difficult to believe in the honour of his sex again.

CHAPTER XI

CONFIDENCE MISPLACED

There was sliding mist in the Somasco valley, and the pines were dripping when Alton and Miss Deringham stood upon a slippery ledge above the river.  Just there it came down frothing into a deep, black pool, swung round it white-streaked, and swept on with a hoarse murmur into the gloom of the bush again.  A wall of fissured rock overhung the pool on the farther side, and a fallen pine wetted with the spray stretched across the outflow and rested on one jagged pinnacle.  A wet wind which drove the vapours before it called up wild music from the cedars that loomed through them on the side of the hill.