It was just here that the broncos shied—­inward, toward the hill.  Ford gathered the slack reins, and Miss Adair looked up and gave a little shriek.  Noiselessly, and so close upon the buckboard that he might have touched either of its occupants with his rawhide quirt, rode the Mexican.  When they discovered him he was leaning forward, his half-closed eyes mere slits with pin-points of black fire to mark them, and his repulsive face a stolid mask.  Ford’s hand went instinctively to the whip:  it was the only available weapon.  But the Mexican merely touched his flapping sombrero and rode on at the shuffling fox-trot.

“That man, again!” shivered Alicia, when the portent of evil had passed out of sight around the next curve in the grade.

But Ford’s concern was deeper than her passing thrill of repulsion.

“Did you notice his horse’s hoofs as he went by?” he asked soberly.

“No,” she said.

“I did.  He dismounted somewhere behind us and covered them with sacking.”

“What for?” she asked, shivering again with the nameless dread.

“You recall what I was saying when the broncos shied:  his object was to creep up behind us and listen.  He has done it more than once since we left the end-of-track, and this time—­”

“Yes?”

“This time he heard what he wanted to hear.”

Beyond the curve which had hidden the Mexican, the wagon-road left the grade, descending abruptly upon the town.  Ford looked back from the turn and saw that the other two vehicles were not yet in sight.

“Shall we wait for your aunt and the others?” he asked.

Her smile was a sufficient reward for the bit of tactful forethought.

“I’m sure we have left the conventions far enough behind not to be unduly terrified by them.  I am not afraid to go in unchaperoned.  Besides, I heard Uncle Sidney telling Doctor Van Bruce that our rooms at the hotel had been engaged for us.”

Ford drove carefully down the steep side street which was the approach to the hotel.  An excited throng blocked the sidewalk, and the lobby seemed to be a miniature stock exchange.  Single-eyed, Ford fought a passage through the crowd with Alicia on his arm, heeding nothing until he had seen her safely above stairs and in the sitting-room of the president’s reservation, with a cheerful fire in the big sheet-iron stove for her comforting.  Then he went down and elbowed his way through the clamorous lobby to the clerk’s desk.

“Suppose you take a minute or two off and tell me what this town has gone crazy about, Hildreth,” he said, with a backward nod toward the lobby pandemonium.

“Why, Great Scott!  Mr. Ford—­have you got this far into it without finding out?” was the astounded rejoinder.  “It’s a gold strike on Cow Mountain—­the biggest since Cripple Creek!  We’ve doubled our population since seven o’clock this morning; and by this time to-morrow....  Say, Mr. Ford; for heaven’s sake, get your railroad in here!  We’ll all go hungry within another twenty-four hours—­can’t get supplies for love or money!”