You ain’t even a friend of ours.”

 

The young hunter’s dark face grew so gloomy over this remark that Lucy Ferrier

laughed aloud.

 

“There, I didn’t mean that,” she said; “of course, you are a friend now. You

must come and see us. Now I must push along, or father won’t trust me with his

business any more. Good-bye!”

 

“Good-bye,” he answered, raising his broad sombrero, and bending over her little

hand. She wheeled her mustang round, gave it a cut with her riding-whip, and

darted away down the broad road in a rolling cloud of dust.

 

Young Jefferson Hope rode on with his companions, gloomy and taciturn.

 

He and they had been among the Nevada Mountains prospecting for silver, and were

returning to Salt Lake City in the hope of raising capital enough to work some

lodes which they had discovered. He had been as keen as any of them upon the

business until this sudden incident had drawn his thoughts into another channel.

The sight of the fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes,

had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. When she had

vanished from his sight, he realized that a crisis had come in his life, and

that neither silver speculations nor any other questions could ever be of such

importance to him as this new and all-absorbing one. The love which had sprung

up in his heart was not the sudden, changeable fancy of a boy, but rather the