She stopped as crimson with shame and indignation as if the viewless singer had risen before her.

     “I knew when to bet, and get up and get—­”

“Hush!  D—­n it all.  Don’t you hear?”

There was the sound of hurried whispers, a “No” and “Yes,” and then a dead silence.

Christie crept nearer to the edge of the slope in the shadow of a buckeye.  In the clearer view she could distinguish a staggering figure in the trail below who had evidently been stopped by two other expostulating shadows that were approaching from the shelter of a tree.

“Sho!—­didn’t know!”

The staggering figure endeavored to straighten itself, and then slouched away in the direction of the settlement.  The two mysterious shadows retreated again to the tree, and were lost in its deeper shadow.  Christie darted back to the cabin, and softly reentered her room.

“I thought I heard a noise that woke me, and I missed you,” said Jessie, rubbing her eyes.  “Did you see anything?”

“No,” said Christie, beginning to undress.

“You weren’t frightened, dear?”

“Not in the least,” said Christie, with a strange little laugh.  “Go to sleep.”

CHAPTER III

The five impulsive millionaires of Devil’s Ford fulfilled not a few of their most extravagant promises.  In less than six weeks Mr. Carr and his daughters were installed in a new house, built near the site of the double cabin, which was again transferred to the settlement, in order to give greater seclusion to the fair guests.  It was a long, roomy, one-storied villa, with a not unpicturesque combination of deep veranda and trellis work, which relieved the flat monotony of the interior and the barrenness of the freshly-cleared ground.  An upright piano, brought from Sacramento, occupied the corner of the parlor.  A suite of gorgeous furniture, whose pronounced and extravagant glories the young girls instinctively hid under home-made linen covers, had also been spoils from afar.  Elsewhere the house was filled with ornaments and decorations that in their incongruity forcibly recalled the gilded plate-glass mirrors of the bedroom in the old cabin.  In the hasty furnishing of this Aladdin’s palace, the slaves of the ring had evidently seized upon anything that would add to its glory, without reference always to fitness.

“I wish it didn’t look so cussedly like a robber’s cave,” said George Kearney, when they were taking a quiet preliminary survey of the unclassified treasures, before the Carrs took possession.

“Or a gambling hell,” said his brother reflectively.

“It’s about the same thing, I reckon,” said Dick Mattingly, who was supposed, in his fiery youth, to have encountered the similarity.