But in a few moments she was summoned.  Captain Lance Wetherby, Assistant Chief of Police of San Francisco, Deputy Sheriff and ex-U.  S. scout, had requested to see Miss Foster a few moments alone.  Lanty knew what it meant,—­her secret had been discovered; but she was not the girl to shirk the responsibility!  She lifted her little brown head proudly, and with the same resolute step with which she had left the house the night before, descended the stairs and entered the sitting-room.  At first she saw nothing.  Then a remembered voice struck her ear; she started, looked up, and gasping, fell back against the door.  It was the stranger who had given her the dagger, the stranger she had met in the run!—­the horse-thief himself!  No! no! she saw it all now—­she had cut loose the wrong man!

He looked at her with a smile of sadness—­as he drew from his breast-pocket that dreadful dagger, the very sight of which Lanty now loathed!  “This is the second time, Miss Foster,” he said gently, “that I have taken this knife from Murietta, the Mexican bandit:  once when I disarmed him three weeks ago, and he escaped, and last night, when he had again escaped and I recaptured him.  After I lost it that night I understood from you that you had found it and were keeping it for me.”  He paused a moment and went on:  “I don’t ask you what happened last night.  I don’t condemn you for it; I can believe what a girl of your courage and sympathy might rightly do if her pity were excited; I only ask—­why did you give him back that knife I trusted you with?”

“Why?  Why did I?” burst out Lanty in a daring gush of truth, scorn, and temper.  “Because I thought you were that horse-thief.  There!”

He drew back astonished, and then suddenly came that laugh that Lanty remembered and now hailed with joy.  “I believe you, by Jove!” he gasped.  “That first night I wore the disguise in which I have tracked him and mingled with his gang.  Yes!  I see it all now—­and more.  I see that to you I owe his recapture!”

“To me!” echoed the bewildered girl; “how?”

“Why, instead of making for his cave he lingered here in the confines of the ranch!  He thought you were in love with him, because you freed him and gave him his knife, and stayed to see you!”

But Lanty had her apron to her eyes, whose first tears were filling their velvet depths.  And her voice was broken as she said,—­

“Then he—­cared—­a—­good deal more for me—­than some people!”

But there is every reason to believe that Lanty was wrong!  At least later events that are part of the history of Foster’s Rancho and the Foster family pointed distinctly to the contrary.

AN ALI BABA OF THE SIERRAS