Trimmer was placated.  “All right,” he said, and cunningly resolved, upon the spot, to keep his latest secret on the ice.

Lawrence had already disappeared to hasten arrangements for getting out upon his work.

Bostwick had waited half an hour in the utmost impatience.  With a hundred things to increase his restlessness of mind and body, he had finally gone to the postoffice and there discovered a letter from Glenmore Kent.

It was short, and now no longer fresh.  It had been composed just after the young man’s accident, and after relating how he had received a not inconsiderable injury, requested Searle to come to Starlight at once, if possible, and not to divulge any needless facts to Beth.

“I’m broke, and this knock puts me down and out,” the letter concluded.  “Come down, like a good old chap, and cheer me up.”

Bostwick destroyed the letter promptly, lest it fall by some accident into other hands than his own.  Not without a slight feeling of guilt, the man shut out all thought, for the present, of deserting Goldite and the plot.  That Beth would learn nothing from himself as to Glen’s condition was a certainty.  He was glad of this wisdom in the boy—­this show of courage whereby he had wished his sister spared.

But the more he thought upon Beth’s attitude towards himself, and the mystifying confessions old Billy Stitts had made, concerning the errands he was running for the girl, the more Bostwick fretted and warmed with exasperation, suspicion, and jealousy.  He returned to McCoppet’s.  The door to the den was still barred.  Impatiently he started again for Mrs. Dick’s.  He was not in the least certain as to what he meant to do or say, but felt obliged to do something.

Meantime, Beth had written to her brother.  Bostwick’s evasions and lies had aroused more than merely a vague alarm in her breast.  She had begun to feel, perhaps partially by intuition, that something was altogether wrong.  Searle’s anxiety to assure her she need not write to Glen—­that he was coming to Goldite—­had provided the one required element to excite a new trend in her thought.  She knew that Glen would not come soon to town.  She knew she must get him word.  She had thought of one way only to insure herself and Glen against deceit—­ask Van to go in person with her letter, and bring her Glen’s reply.

Had she felt the affair to be in the slightest degree unimportant she might have hesitated to think of making this request, but the more she dwelt upon it the more essential it seemed to become.  Her brothers very life might be dependent upon this promptness of action.  A very large sum of money was certainly involved in some sort of business of which, she felt, both she and Glen were in ignorance.  Bostwick had certainly not seen Glen at all.  His deceptions might mean anything!—­the gravest of dangers to them all!

It had taken her the briefest time only to resolve upon her course—­and then old Billy came upon the scene, as if in answer to a question she had asked—­how to get her request and the letter to Glen across the hills to Van, at the “Laughing Water” claim?