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The camp was well-nigh deserted, that morning. Poindexter had gone to Santa Elena to consult his employer, and most of the workmen had preferred the convivial joys of the Mexican saloon at San Gabriel to the stillness of the canon. Sterling had written a few letters after breakfast, and then, taking his rifle from the rack, sauntered along the little path that led from the camp to the tunnel. The Chinese cook was dexterously slipping the feathers from a clammy fowl at the door of the kitchen tent.

“Hello, John,” the young man called cheerfully. “What for you cook chicken? I go catchee venison for dinner.”

The Chinaman smiled indulgently. Evidently the deer hunts of the past had not been brilliantly successful.

“I fly one lit’ chicken,” he said composedly. “He no velly big. By ‘m by you bling labbit, I fly him too.”

“Rabbit!” laughed back the hunter contemptuously, breaking his rifle and peering into the breech to see that it was loaded. “I’ll not waste a cartridge on a rabbit, John.”

He lapsed from pigeon English with an ease that betokened a newcomer. The Chinaman looked after him pensively.

“Mist’ Stellin’ heap velly nice man,” he said, with gentle condescension; “all same he no sabe shoot. By ‘m by he come home, he heap likee my little flied looster.”

He held his “little rooster” rigidly erect by its elongated legs, and patiently picked the pin-feathers from its back. He had finished this process, and, suspending it by one wing in an attitude of patient suffering, was singeing it with a blazing paper, when Melissa appeared.

“What you want, gell?” he demanded autocratically, noticing that she carried no pail.

“Where is the young man,–the tall one?” asked Melissa.

“Young man? Mist’ Stellin’? He take ‘im gun an’ go catchee labbit.”

He waved his torch in the direction of the path, and then dropped it on the ground and stamped it out with his queerly shod foot.

Melissa hesitated a moment. She could not risk the precious handkerchief in the hands of the cook. No one else was visible. Two or three workmen were sleeping in the large tent under the wild grapevine. She could hear them breathing in loud nasal discord. It was better to go on up the canon, she persuaded herself with transparent logic.

“It’s purty hard walkin’ when you’ve got your shoes on,” she said, justifying her course by its difficulties, with the touch of Puritanism that makes the whole theological world kin, “but if I give it to him myself I’ll know he’s got it.”

She glanced in at the door of the engineer’s tent, as she passed. The banjo was there, a point of dazzling light to her eyes, but otherwise the disorder was far from elegant; resulting chiefly from that reckless prodigality in head and foot gear which seems to be a phase of masculine culture.

“I don’t see what they want of so many hats and shoes,” commented Melissa. “I sh’d think they could go barefooted sometimes, to rest their feet; an’ I didn’t know folks’ heads ever got tired.” The thought recalled her own disappointment in the matter of millinery. She put her hand up to the broken rim of her hat. “I’ve a notion to take it off when I ketch up to him,” she soliloquized. “I would if my hair wasn’t so awful red.”

Old Withrow had preceded his daughter, stumbling along the flume path, muttering sullenly. All his groundless elation had suddenly turned to equally groundless wrath. Having allied himself in a stupid, servile way with Forrester, he clung to the alliance and its feeble reflected glory with all the tenacity of ignorance. There were not many connected links of cause and effect in the old man’s muddled brain, but the value of water, for irrigating purposes only, had a firm lodgment there, along with the advantages to be derived from friendliness with the owner of a winery. There stirred in him a groveling desire to exonerate Forrester.