She had no intention of confessing how much she had overheard, but she was tremendously interested—­almost fearful for the man’s safety, she hardly dared ask herself why.  She approached her subject artfully.

“Do you know them, then?”

“Well, yes, the leader—­slightly,” he answered.  “I sent him up for murder, stealing cattle, and robbing sluices.  He was too annoying to have around.”

“Oh!  Then won’t he feel ugly, resentful?” she inquired earnestly.  “Won’t he try to hunt you up—­and pay you back?”

Van regarded her calmly.

“He told me to expect my pay—­if ever he escaped—­and he’s doubtless got his check-book along.”

“His check-book?”

“Colt—­forty-four,” Van drawled by way of explanation.

She turned a trifle pale.

“He’d shoot you on sight?”

“If he sighted me first.”

Her breath came hard.  She realized that the quiet-seeming horseman at her side would kill a fellow-being—­this convict, at least—­as readily as he might destroy a snake.

“How long ago did you put him in jail?” she inquired.

“Four years ago this summer.”

“Have you always lived here—­out West?”

“I’ve lived every day I’ve been here,” he answered evasively.  “Do I look like a native?”

She laughed.  “Oh, I don’t know.  We came here straight from New York, a week ago, Elsa and I. Mr. Bostwick joined us two days later.  I really know nothing of the country at all.”

“New York,” he said, and relapsed into silent meditation.  How far away seemed old New Amsterdam!  How long seemed the brief six years since he had started forth with his youthful health, his strength, determination, boyish dreams, and small inheritance to build up a fortune in the West!  What a mixture of sunshine and failure it had been!  What glittering hopes had lured him hither and yon in the mountains, where each great gateway of adventure had charged its heavy toll!

He had lost practically all of his money; he had gained his all of manhood.  He had suffered privation and hardship; he had known the vast comfort of friends—­true friends, as certain as the very heart in his breast to serve him to the end.

Like a panoramic dream he beheld a swift procession of mine-and-cattle scenes troop past for swift review.  He lived again whole months of nights spent out alone beneath the sky, with the snow and the wind hurled down upon him from a merciless firmament of bleakness.  Once more he stumbled blindly forward in the desert—­he and Gettysburg—­perishing for water, giving up their liquid souls to the horribly naked and insatiate sun.  Again he toiled in the shaft of a mine till his back felt like a crackly thing of glass with each aching fissure going deeper.

Once more the gold goddess beckoned with her smile, and fortune was there, almost in reach—­the fortune that he and his partners had sought so doggedly, so patiently—­the fortune for which they had starved and delved and suffered—­only to see it vanish in the air as the sunshine will vanish from a peak.