But Briggs, who was nearest the wood, here suddenly uttered an exclamation,—­“B’gosh!” and fell back, open-mouthed, upon his companions.  They too, in another moment, broke into a feeble laugh, and lapsed against each other in sheepish silence.  For a very pretty girl, handsomely dressed, swept out of the wood and advanced towards them.

Even at any time she would have been an enchanting vision to these men, but in the glow of exercise and sparkle of anger she was bewildering.  Her wonderful hair, the color of freshly hewn redwood, had escaped from her hat in her passage through the underbrush, and even as she swept down upon them in her majesty she was jabbing a hairpin into it with a dexterous feminine hand.

The three partners turned quite the color of her hair; Jackson Wells alone remained white and rigid.  She came on, her very short upper lip showing her white teeth with her panting breath.

Rice was first to speak.  “I beg—­your pardon, Miss—­I thought it was Brown—­you know,” he stammered.

But she only turned a blighting brown eye on the culprit, curled her short lip till it almost vanished in her scornful nostrils, drew her skirt aside with a jerk, and continued her way straight to Jackson Wells, where she halted.

“We did not know you were—­here alone,” he said apologetically.

“Thought I was afraid to come alone, didn’t you?  Well, you see, I’m not.  There!” She made another dive at her hat and hair, and brought the hat down wickedly over her eyebrows.  “Gimme my plants.”

Jackson had been astonished.  He would have scarcely recognized in this willful beauty the red-haired girl whom he had boyishly hated, and with whom he had often quarreled.  But there was a recollection—­and with that recollection came an instinct of habit.  He looked her squarely in the face, and, to the horror of his partners, said, “Say please!”

They had expected to see him fall, smitten with the hairpin!  But she only stopped, and then in bitter irony said, “Please, Mr. Jackson Wells.”

“I haven’t dug them up yet—­and it would serve you just right if I made you get them for yourself.  But perhaps my friends here might help you—­if you were civil.”

The three partners seized spades and hoes and rushed forward eagerly.  “Only show us what you want,” they said in one voice.  The young girl stared at them, and at Jackson.  Then with swift determination she turned her back scornfully upon him, and with a dazzling smile which reduced the three men to absolute idiocy, said to the others, “I’ll show you,” and marched away to the cabin.

“Ye mustn’t mind Jacksey,” said Rice, sycophantically edging to her side, “he’s so cut up with losin’ your father that he loved like a son, he isn’t himself, and don’t seem to know whether to ante up or pass out.  And as for yourself, Miss—­why—­What was it he was sayin’ only just as the young lady came?” he added, turning abruptly to Wyngate.