One afternoon, Sheriff Flood had called to know if her father had come back and what “he intended to do about it.”  Incidentally, he mentioned that the Forest Ranger had gone through the Pass that led to the Desert:  there had been a snow slide; but he “guessed” the Ranger was “too cute a mountain man to be caught.”  That night, she shivered as she sat in the steamer chair; and she drew Wayland’s coat around her; but it was not to delirious thoughts.  When she fell asleep, she saw him lying on his face in the Desert; and she called him, and called him, and never could reach him, and awakened herself with her own calling.  Wayland’s professional friend, who was a psychologist, explained both incidents as auto suggestion from the coat awakened by the uneasiness of the unconscious fears; an explanation that explains by saying x is y.

At all events, she never again used the coat; and having nothing to conceal, didn’t conceal it, which is the most damning evidence you can offer to a tortuous mind.  She hung the coat in the apartment off the big living room.  Then, the despatch came out about the two bodies found in the Desert.  The same mail brought a letter from her father asking her to meet him at Smelter City; and there at the Ranch House gate stood Mr. Bat Brydges, handy man of the Valley, quizzing the ranch hands, quizzing the German cook, quizzing Calamity at the very foot of rustic slab steps that ran up from the basement.

“What is he after, Calamity?”

The half breed woman had dashed up the back stairs to Eleanor’s room.

“He want t’ know if Waylan—­Ranga fellah—­has ever stay here, dis house—­he ever go back Cabin House—­tepee on hill—­night dey keel leetle boy?”

Even then, Eleanor did not realize the drift of the handy man’s activities.  She thought perhaps, he, too, might be anxious about Wayland.

“What did you tell him, Calamity?”

“I tell heem,” Calamity dropped her soft patois to a guttural, “I tell heem, y’ go Hell!”

“Ca-lam-ity?” rebuked Eleanor.

But what was it in the gentleman’s jaunty air, in the smile of the sleepy tortoise-shell eyes, in the play of a self-conscious dimple round the fat double chin?  Eleanor had not passed from her own apartment to the big living room before a repulsion that she could not define swept over her in a physical shudder; and Mr. Bat Brydges’ report to the Senator of that interview had been fairly accurate.  She did not know that she had not greeted him with the common courtesy due a caller, that she had stood looking past him to the open door, that she had left him standing first on one leg then on the other till Bat had been forced to terminate the interview; and she had not the faintest conception of what her own feeling of repulsion meant.  He had scarcely gone before she wished she had asked him about those two bodies found in the Desert.  As a matter of fact, she called up the “Smelter City Independent.”  The editor could give her no details.  He asked her very particularly who was inquiring; and having nothing to conceal, she did not conceal it.  He allayed her fears in almost the words that the Senator had used to lay Bat’s suspicions, if the bodies had been those of Government men, the Ranger’s Badge would have been found and the news flashed all over America.