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THE JOYOUS TROUBLE MAKER

other matter. It might be just his misshapen idea of a further "joke." Was he seeking, as he would have expressed it, "to throw a scare into her, also for the good of her soul"? Or did he mean what he said and did he know what he was talking about?

When, still puzzling over the matter, she went again to her outer door she saw Steele down in the valley riding a bay, white stockinged horse toward the upper end of the valley. That way lay the Little Giant and the new mining town of Camp Corliss beyond … that way, also, lay the Goblet country.

With sudden inspiration the girl turned back into her office, took from its case in her table drawer a pair of field glasses, and with them in her hand hastened through the house, coming out at the back into a little flower garden just under a line of low granite cliffs. She hurried through the flowers, came to a steep path cut long ago into the rocky wall and mounting swiftly mounted after a breathless moment to the old lookout. Here, at the top of the slight precipice, was a level space some twenty paces across where were benches and a rustic table under an open pavilion like that in front of which Steele had sat earlier in the day. From here one might have a fuller, wider sweep of valley land and broken mountain. What was more to the present purpose, from here the girl could pick up with her glasses the spote where the Goblet trail branched off to the right from the Little Giant road.

Steele had disappeared, but in a moment rode again into view passing beyond a grove of river poplars. She focussed her glasses upon him. Before she marked