Confidence and dismay seemed to struggle together in the face of the girl, but the former rose uppermost, for she clung fast to hope.

“There!  Oh, why can they not stop talking?  That is something now,” she said.

“No,” said Townshead.  “Only the wind in the firs.”

The girl leaned forward a little, drawing in her breath as she stared down the valley.  The voices drowned the sound she fancied she had heard, and the colour came and went in her face when she caught one of them.  “The thing’s no better than robbery.  Why isn’t Harry Alton or his partner here?”

Nellie Townshead had asked herself the same question over and over again that day when rancher and axemen in somewhat embarrassed fashion tendered her their sympathy.  What she expected from him she did not quite know, but she had a curious confidence in Alton, and at least as much in his comrade, and felt that even if the scheme her father had alluded to was not feasible there would be something they could do.  Then she drew back from the window and sat down, with a little shiver as the harsh voice of the auctioneer rose from the clearing.  She caught disjointed words and sentences.

“Don’t need tell you what the place is worth.  You have seen the boundaries.  Richest soil in the Dominion.  Grow anything.  Now if I was a rancher.  Well, I’m waiting for your offer.”

He apparently waited some little time, and then a laugh that expressed bitterness in place of merriment followed the voice of one of the men from the cities.

“Put two hundred dollars on to it,” said somebody, and there was another laugh, which the girl, recognizing the voice, understood; for it was known that the bidder had probably not ten dollars in his possession and was in debt at the store.  The fact that this man whom she had scarcely spoken to should endeavour to help her while her friends at Somasco did nothing also brought a little flash of anger to her eyes.  Then she told herself that there was time yet, and they would come.

The voices rose again more rapidly.  “Fifty more.  Another to me.  Oh, what’s the use of fooling.  One hundred better.  Twenty again to me.”

Miss Townshead glanced at her father.  “They’ll stop presently,” said he.  “The place stands at a third of its value, but it would cripple most of them to pay for it if they got it now.  The man from Vancouver who goes up by twenties will get it at half of what it cost me, and I don’t think you need watch for rancher Alton.”

Still Nellie Townshead did not quite give up hope.  The bidding was only beginning, and there was time yet.  She had been taught to look beneath the surface in Western Canada, and had cherished a curious respect for rancher Alton.  The girl was young still, and he stood for her as a romantic ideal of the new manhood that was to grow to greatness in the wildest province of the Dominion, while now and then