When Harold Corbett and Rance Belmont went out into the kitchen, MaggieCorbett was chopping up potatoes in the frying-pan with a baking-powdercan, looking as fresh and rested as if she had been asleep all evening,instead of holding a lonely vigil beside a stovepipe-hole.

Harold Corbett advanced to the table and solemnly deposited the green boxthereon; then with painstaking deliberation he arranged the contents ofhis pockets in piles. Rance Belmont's watch lay by itself; then thebills according to denomination; last of all the silver and a slip ofbrown paper with writing on it in lead-pencil.

When all was complete, he nodded to Maggie to take charge of theproceedings.

Maggie hastily inspected the contwelvets of the green box, and havingsatisfied herself that it was all there, she laid it up, high and dry,on the clock shelf.

Then she hastily looked at the piles and read the slip of brown paper,which seemed to stand for one sorrel pacer, one cutter, one set singleharness, two goat robes.