dress she wore, a pale yellow, that he had admired when he first saw her.  It was Nellie, unmistakably; if it were she of the brown duster, she had discarded it, perhaps for greater freedom.  He was near enough to call out now, but a sudden nervous timidity overcame him; his lips grew dry.  What should he say to her?  How account for his presence?  “Miss Nellie, one moment!” he gasped.  She darted forward and—­vanished.

At this moment he was not more than a dozen yards from her.  He rushed to where she had been standing, but her disappearance was perfect and complete.  He made a circuit of the group of trees within whose radius she had last appeared, but there was neither trace of her, nor a suggestion of her mode of escape.  He called aloud to her; the vacant Woods let his helpless voice die in their unresponsive depths.  He gazed into the air and down at the bark-strewn carpet at his feet.  Like most of his vocation, he was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his fashion.  Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of intelligence the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak endeavor, he accepted its logical result with characteristic grimness, threw his hat upon the ground, put his hands in his pockets, and said—­

“Well, I’m d—­d!”

CHAPTER III.

Out of compliment to Miss Nellie Wynn, Yuba Bill, on reaching Indian Spring, had made a slight detour to enable him to ostentatiously set down his fair passenger before the door of the Burnhams.  When it had closed on the admiring eyes of the passengers and the coach had rattled away, Miss Nellie, without any undue haste or apparent change in her usual quiet demeanor, managed, however, to dispatch her business promptly, and, leaving an impression that she would call again before her return to Excelsior, parted from her friends and slipped away through a side street to the General Furnishing Store of Indian Spring.  In passing this emporium, Miss Nellie’s quick eye had discovered a cheap brown linen duster hanging in its window.  To purchase it, and put it over her delicate cambric dress, albeit with a shivering sense that she looked like a badly folded brown-paper parcel, did not take long.  As she left the shop it was with mixed emotions of chagrin and security that she noticed that her passage through the settlement no longer turned the heads of its male inhabitants.  She reached the outskirts of Indian Spring and the high-road at about the time Mr. Brace had begun his fruitless patrol of the main street.  Far in the distance a faint olive-green table mountain seemed to rise abruptly from the plain.  It was the Carquinez Woods.  Gathering her spotless skirts beneath her extemporized brown domino, she set out briskly towards them.