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The Everlasting Whisper

by Jackson Gregory · English · Gutenberg #10213 · 638,623 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Everlasting Whisper

Author: Jackson Gregory


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10213]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10213

Credits: Produced by Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVERLASTING WHISPER ***

THE EVERLASTING WHISPER

_A Tale of the California Wilderness_.

By JACKSON GREGORY




To Maxwell E. Perkins

With The Author'S Grateful Recognition Of His Countless Sympathetic
Criticisms And Suggestions




_Chapter I_


It was springtime in the California Sierra. Never were skies bluer,
never did the golden sun-flood steep the endless forest lands in richer
life-giving glory. Ridge after ridge the mountains swept on and fell
away upon one side until in the vague distances they sank to the
monotonous level of the Sacramento Valley; down there it was already
summer, and fields were hot and brown. Ridge after ridge the mountains
stretched on the other side, rising steadily, growing ever more august
and mighty and rocky; on their crests across the blue gorges the snow
was dazzling white and winter held stubbornly on at altitudes of seven
thousand feet. Thus winter, springtime, and ripe, fruit-dropping summer
coexisted, touching fingers across the seventy miles that lie between
the icy top of the Sierra and the burning lowlands.

Here, in a region lifted a mile into the rare atmosphere, was a ridge
all naked boulder and spire along its crest, its sides studded with pine
and incense cedar. The afternoon sunlight streaked the big bronze tree
trunks, making bright gay spots and patches of light, casting cool black
shadows across the open spaces where the brown dead needles lay in thick
carpets. It was early June, and thus far only had the springtime
advanced in its vernal progress upward through the timbered solitudes.
Some few small patches of snow still lingered on in spots sheltered from
the sun, but now they were ebbing away in thin trickles. Down in a
hollow at the base of the sunny slope was a round alpine lake no bigger
than a pond in a city park. It was of the same deep, perfect blue as the
sky, whose colour it seemed not to reflect but to absorb.

A tiny fragment of this same heavenly azure drifted downward among the
trees like a bit of sky falling. A second bit of blue that had skimmed
across the lake and was visible now only as it rose and winged across
the contrasting coloured meadow rimming the pool was like a bit of the
lake itself. Two bluebirds. They swerved before the meeting, their wings
fluttered, they lighted on branches of the same tree and shyly eyed each
other. Did a man need to have the still message of all the woods summed
up in final emphasis, this it was: spring is here.

The man himself, as the birds had done before him, had the appearance of
materializing spontaneously from some distilled essence of his
environment. A moment ago the spaces between the wide-set cedar-trees
were empty. Yet he had been there a long time. It was only because he
had moved that he attracted attention even of the sharp-eyed forest folk
who were returning to tree and thicket. As the bluebirds had been
viewless when merged into the backgrounds of their own colour, so he,
while sitting with his back against a tawny cedar, had been drawn into
the entity of the wilderness to which, obviously, he belonged. Here he
blended, harmonized, disappeared when he held motionless. The well-worn,
tall, laced boots were of brown leather, much scuffed, one in colour
with the soil dusting them. The khaki trousers gathered into the
boot-tops, the soft flannel shirt, were the brown of the tree trunks;
skin of hands and face and muscular throat were the bronze of ripe
pine-cones and burnished pine-needles. And, in a landscape spotted with
light and shadow, the head of black hair might have passed for a bit of
such pitch-black shadow as a tuft of thick foliage casts upon the
light-smitten ground.

Beyond this outward harmony there was something at once more intangible
and yet more vital and positive that made the man a piece with the
natural world about him. Perhaps it was that he had lived so many months
of so many years in the open that he had grown to be true brother of the
wild; that he had shed coat after coat of artificial veneer as he took
on the layers of tan; that in doing so he shed from his mind many of the
artificialities of the twentieth century and remembered ancient
instincts. His deep chest knew the tricks of proper breathing; he would
come to the top of a steep climb with unlaboured breath. He stood tall
and stalwart, filled with vigorous strength in repose like the straight
valiant cedars. His eyes were black and piercing, as keen as those of
the hawk which, circling in the deeper sky, had seen him when he moved;
he, too, had seen the hawk. All about him was a lustily masculine phase
of the world, giant trees dominating giant slopes, rugged boulders
upheaved, iron cliffs defying time and battling the years; he, like
them, was virile, his sex clothing him magnificently. He had not shaved
for three days and yet, instead of looking untidy, was but clothed in
the greater vitality. While his eyes sped swiftly hither and thither,
now busied with wide groupings, now catching small details, his face was
impassive. In keeping both with his own magnificent physique and the
rugged note of the forest, it was the face of a man who had defied and
battled.

Beyond the lake a peak upthrust its rocky front into the sky. It frowned
across the ridges, darkened by the shadows which its own irregularities
cast athwart its massive features. But the sun, slowly as it rolled,
sought out those shadows; they moved, crept to other hiding-places, and
the golden light coaxed a subdued, soft gentleness across the massive
boulders. This, too, the man saw.

He stood looking out across the ridges and so to the final bulwark
against the sky still white with last December. He sought landmarks and
measured distance, not in miles but in hours. Then he glanced briefly at
the sun. But now, before starting on again, he turned from the more
distant landscape and, remembering the immediate scene about him as he
had viewed it last, drowsing in the Indian summer of last October, he
noted everywhere the handiwork of young June. The eyes which had been
keen and alert filled suddenly with a shining brightness.

The springtime, eternally youthful coquette, had come with a great
outward display of timidity and shyness into the sternly solemn forest
land of the high Sierra. To the last fine detail and exquisite touch
was she, more here than elsewhere, softly, prettily, daintily feminine,
her light heart idly set on wooing from its calm and abstracted
aloofness this region of granite and lava, of rugged chasms and august
ancient trees. She filled the air with fragrances, lightly shaken; she
scattered bright fragile flowers to brighten the earth and clear
bird-notes to sparkle through the air. Hesitant always in the seeming,
she came with that shy step of hers to the feet of glooming precipices;
under crests where the snow clung on she played at indifference,
loitering with a new flower, knowing that little by little the thaw
would answer her veiled efforts, that in the end the monarch of all the
brooding mountain tops would discard the white mantle of aloofness and
thrill to her embrace; knowing, too, that with each successive conquest
made secure she would only laugh in that singing voice of hers and turn
her back and pass on. On and on, over ridges and ranges, and so around
the world.

The woods lay steeped in sunshine, enwrapped in characteristic quietude.
There was no wind to ruffle the man's hair, no sound of a falling cone
or of dead leaves crackling under a squirrel's foot. And yet the man had
the air now of one listening, hearkening to the silence itself. For
silence among the pines is not the dead void of desert lands, but a
great hush like the finger-to-lip command in a sleeper's room, or the
still message of a sea-shell held to the ear. The countless millions of
cedar and pine needles seemed as motionless as the very mountains
themselves, yet it was they who laid the gently audible command upon the
balmy afternoon and whispered the great hush. That whisper the man
heard, it seemed to him, less with his ears than with his soul.

He went back to the tree against which he had rested and picked up his
hat and a small canvas roll. And yet again, with his hat in his hand, he
stood motionless, his eyes lingering along the cliff tops across the
little lake, his attitude that of a man listening to an invitation which
he would like to accept but in the end meant to refuse. Already he had
marked out the way he planned to go, and still the nearer peaks with the
sunshine upon them called to him. One would have hazarded that they were
familiar from oft-repeated visits, and that among his plans to the
contrary a desire to climb them insisted. He glanced at the sun again,
shook his head, and took the first step slantingly downward along the
slope. But only once more to grow as still as the big trees about him.
Slowly he drew back into the shadows to watch and not be seen.

For abruptly two figures had appeared upon the rocky head of the
mountain across the lake. They had come up from the further side, and
when he saw them first stood clear-cut against the sky. They might have
been hunters since each carried a rifle. And yet the watcher's brows
gathered in a frown and his eyes glinted angrily.

The two figures separated, one going along the crest of the ridge, the
other climbing downward cautiously until he stood at the edge of the
cliffs. He craned his body to look down as though seeking a way to the
lake; he straightened and stared for a long time toward the snow tops of
the more distant altitudes. The sun lay in pools all about him, and
across the distance separating him and his companion from the man who
watched them so intently, his gestures could be followed readily. He
turned and must have said something to his companion, who leaped down
from a boulder and came to his side. The second man towered over him,
head and shoulder. This the eyes upon the other slope were quick to
note; they cleared briefly as though with a new understanding, only to
grow harder than before.

They talked together, and yet the only sound to carry across the lake
and meadow was the rush of air through innumerable tree-tops. The blue
water glinted softly under the westering sun; in the blue void of the
sky the hawk wheeled, silent and graceful and watchful. The smaller man
pointed, his arm outheld steadily. The other drew nearer, towering above
him. He, too, pointed or seemed about to point. They stood so close
together that the two figures merged. From a distance they looked like
one man now.

It was with startling abruptness that the two figures were torn apart,
each resolved again into an individual. One, the towering man, had drawn
suddenly back; the other was falling. And yet the silence was unbroken.
There was never a cry to echo through the gorges from a horror-clutched
throat. The falling man plunged straight down a dozen feet, struck
against a ragged rock, writhed free, fell again a few feet, and began to
roll. There had been the flash of the sun on the rifle in his hand; he
had clutched wildly at that as though it could save him. Now it flew
from his grasp as he rolled over and over, plunging down the steep flank
of the mountain.

The man who had watched from across the lake had not stirred. The big
man on the cliffs came back slowly to the brink and crouched there,
looking down, motionless so long that it was hard for the eye to be sure
of him, to know if it were really a human being or a poised boulder
squatting there. There came no call from below; the hawk wheeled and
wheeled, lost interest, drifting away. In the little hollow where the
lake glinted it was very still with the soft perfection of the first
spring days.

The man on the cliff stood up, holding his rifle. He had done with
looking down; now he pivoted slowly, looking off in all other
directions. Presently he began climbing back up the few feet to the
knife-like crest from which he had descended not five minutes ago. He
paused there for hardly more than an instant and then went on, down the
further side, out of sight.

The man who had seen all this from his own slope caught up his canvas
roll again and hurried down toward the lake. For the first time he spoke
aloud, saying:

"Swen Brodie. There's not another man in the mountains brute enough for
that."

He hastened on, taking the shortest way, making nothing of the steepest
slopes. He was going straight toward the nearer end of the lake, which
he must skirt to come up the further mountain and to the man who had
fallen; and, by the way, straight toward the peak, still bright in the
sunlight, which he had wanted to revisit all along.




_Chapter II_


Much of the descent of the long slope was taken at a run, on ploughing
heels. He crossed the springy meadow at a jog-trot. But the climb to the
fallen man was another matter. The sun was appreciably lower, the
shadows already made dusky tangles among the trees, when the man
carrying the canvas roll came at last under the cliffs. From out these
shadows, before his keen eyes found the man they sought, he heard a
voice calling faintly:

"That you, Brodie?"

"No. Brodie's gone."

The voice, though very weak, sharpened perceptibly:

"You, who are you?"

"What difference does it make?--if you need help."

"Who said I wanted help? Not Brodie!"

"No. Not Brodie."

He dropped his roll and began working his way through the bushes.
Presently he came to a spot from which he could see a figure propped up
against a tree. There was a rifle across the man's knees, gripped in
both hands. And yet surely the rifle had been whirled out of his hands
in his fall. Then he was not hurt badly, after all, since he had managed
to work his way back up to it.

"Oh! It's you, is it, King?" The man against the tree did not seem
overjoyed; there was a sullen note in his voice.

King came on, breaking his way through the brush.

"Hello," he said, a little taken aback. "It's you, is it? I thought it
would be----" But he did not say who. He came on and stood over the man
on the ground, stooping for an instant to peer close into his face.
"Hurt much?" he asked.

The answer was a long time coming. The face was bloodlessly grey. From
it a pair of close-set, shallow brown eyes looked shiftily. A tongue ran
back and forth between the colourless lips.

"It's my leg," he said. "I don't know if it's broke. And I'm sort of
bunged up." He looked up sharply. "Oh, I'll be all right," he grunted,
"and don't you fool yourself."

"Did Brodie----?"

The man began to tremble; the hands on his gun shook so that the weapon
veered and wavered uncertainly.

"Yes, rot his soul." He began to curse, at first softly, then with a
strained voice rising into a storm of windy incoherence. Suddenly he
broke off, eyeing King with suspicion upon the surface of his shallow
eyes. "What are you after?"

"I didn't know how badly you were hurt. I came to see if I could lend
you a hand."

"You know I don't mean that. What are you after, here in the mountains?"
His voice was surly with truculence.

King grew angry and burst out bluntly:

"The devil take you, Andy Parker. I wanted to help you. If you don't
take my interference kindly, I'll be on my way."

He turned to be off. Why the man was not already dead from that fall he
did not know. But if the fellow was able to shift for himself, it suited
King well enough. He had business of his own and no desire to step to
one side or another to deal with Swen Brodie or Andy Parker, or with any
man who trailed his luck with such as these. But now Parker called to
him, and in an altered voice, a whine running through the words.

"Hold on, King. I'm hung up here for the night, anyhow. And I ain't got
a bite of grub, and already I'm burning up with thirst. Get me a drink,
will you?"

Without answer, King went to his canvas roll, and Parker, thinking
himself deserted, began to plead noisily. On his knees King opened his
roll, got out a cup, and began to search for water. Above him there were
patches of snow; he found where a trickle of clear cold water ran in a
narrow rivulet, and presently returned to the injured man with a
brimming cup. Parker drank thirstily, demanded more, and sank back with
a long sigh.

"The thing's unlucky, you know, King," he said queerly.

"Is it?" said King coolly. It was like him not to pretend that he did
not know to what Andy Parker's thoughts had flown.

Parker nodded, pursing his lips, and kept on nodding like a broken
automatic toy. At the end he jerked his head up and muttered:

"There's been the devil's luck on it for more'n sixty years and maybe a
thousand years before that! Oh, _you_ know! Look how it went with those
old-timers. The last one of the Seven got it. Look how it happens with
old man Loony Honeycutt, clucking and chuckling and stepping up and down
in his shadow all the time; gone nuts from just _smelling_ of it! Look
what happens to me, all stove up here." He paused and then spat out
venomously: "Oh, it'll get Swen Brodie and it'll get you, too, Mark
King. You'll see."

"Another drink before I go?" demanded King.

Parker put his fingers to his scalp and examined them for traces of
blood.

"I got a terrible headache," he said. "Aching and singing and sort of
dizzy."

King went for more water, this time filling his one cook-pot. When he
returned Parker was trying to stand. He had drawn himself up, holding to
the tree with both shaking hands, putting his weight gingerly on one
leg. Suddenly his weak hands gave way, he swayed and fell. King,
standing over him, thought at first he was dead, so white and still was
he. But Parker had only fainted.

The sun sank lower; the shadows down about the lake shores thickened
and began to run, more and more swiftly, up the surrounding slopes. The
tall peaks caught the last of the fading light, and like so many
watch-towers blazed across the wilderness. Upward, about their bases,
surged the flooding shadows like a dark tide rising swiftly; the light
on the tallest spire winked and went out; and all of a sudden the rush
of air through the pine tops strengthened and a growing murmur like the
voice of a distant surf made it seem that one could hear the flood of
the night sweeping through gorge and cañon and inundating the world.
And, despite all that Mark King could do, the sunset glow had gone and
the first big star was shining before Andy Parker stirred.

His first call was for water. Then he complained of a terrible pain in
his vitals, a pain that stabbed him through from chest to abdomen.
Thereafter he was never coherent again, though for the most part he
babbled like a noisy brook. He spoke of Swen Brodie and old Loony
Honeycutt and Gus Ingle all in one breath, and King knew that Gus Ingle
was sixty years dead; he dwelt hectically on the "luck of the unlucky
Seven." And when, far on in the night, he at length grew silent and King
went to peer into his face by the light of his camp-fire, Andy Parker
was dead.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mark King made the grave in the dawn. In his roll, the handle slipped
out so that it might lie snug against the steel head, was a short
miner's pick. A little below where Parker lay in his last wide-eyed
vigil under the stars, King found a fairly level space free of rock and
carpeted in young grass. Here with a pine-tree to mark head and foot, he
worked at the shallow grave. He put his own blanket down, laid the quiet
figure gently upon it, bringing the ends over to cover him. He marked
the spot with a pile of rocks; he blazed the two trees. It was all that
he could do; far more than Andy Parker would have done for him or for
any other man.

The sun was rising when, he made his way to the top of the ridge and
came to stand where he had seen Parker and Swen Brodie side by side. He
clambered on until he came to the very crest over which Swen Brodie had
disappeared. Just where had Brodie gone? He wondered. The answer came
before the question could have been put into words. Though it was full
day across the heights where King stood, it would be an hour and longer
before the sun got down into the cañons and meadows. He saw the flare of
a camp-fire shining bright through the dark of a low-lying flat two
miles or more from his vantage-point. Brodie would be cooking his
breakfast now.

After that King did not again climb up where his body would stand out
against the sky which was filling so brightly with the new morning. He
moved along the ridge steadily and swiftly like a man with a definite
objective who did not care to be spied on. In twenty minutes, after many
a hazardous passage along a steep bare surface, he came to a spot where
the knife edge of the ridge was broken down and blunted into a fairly
level space a hundred yards across. Here was an accumulation of soil
worn down from the granite above, and here, an odd, isolated tuft of
scrawny verdure, grew a small grove of trees, stunted pine and
scraggling brush.

Toward the far end of this upland flat was the disintegrating ruin of a
cabin. The walls had disappeared long ago, save for two or three rotting
logs, but a small rectangle of slightly raised ground indicated how they
had extended. Even the rock chimney had fallen away, but something of
the fireplace, black with burning, stood where labouring hands had
placed it more than half a century before.

Here he made his own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack,
dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his
presence. For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something
less than human not to turn his chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the
spot where he had abandoned his fallen companion.

King's first interest was centred on the ground underfoot. He went back
and forth and about the ruin of the cabin several times seeking any
sign that would tell him if Brodie and Andy Parker had been here before
him. But there were no tracks in the softer soil, no trodden-down grass.
It was very likely that no foot had come here since King's own last
October. A look of satisfaction shone for an instant in his eyes. Then,
done with this keen examination, they went with curious eagerness to the
more distant landscape. He passed through the storm-broken trees and to
the far rim of the flat, where he stood a long time staring frowningly
at one after another of the spires and ridges lifted against the sky,
probing into the mystery of the night still slumbering in the ravines.
Now his look had to do, in intent concentration, with a slope not five
hundred yards off; now with a blue-and-white summit toward which a man
might toil all day and all night before reaching.

He might have been the figure of the "Explorer," grim and hard and
determined; silent and solitary in a land of silence and solitude,
brooding over a region where "the trails run out and stop." Something
urged, something called, and his blood responded. About him rose the
voice of the endless leagues of pines in a hushed utterance which might
have been the whisper:

  "Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
  Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

He made sure that he had left no sign of his visit here, not so much as
a fallen crust of bread, caught up his pack and found the familiar way
down the cliffs, striking off toward the higher mountains and the high
pass through which he would travel to-night.




_Chapter III_


To have followed the pace which he set that day would have broken the
heart of any but a seasoned mountaineer. No man in these mountains could
have so much as kept him in sight, saving alone Swen Brodie, and he was
left far back yonder, miles on the other, lower, side of the ridge. By
mid-forenoon King had outstripped the springtime and was among snow
patches which grew in frequency and extent; at noon he built his little
fire on a snow crust. He crossed a raging tributary of the American,
travelling upward along the rock-bound, spray-wet gorge a full mile
before he came to the possible precarious ford. At six o'clock he made a
second fire in a bleak windy pass, surrounded by a glimmering ghostly
waste. Trees were stiff with frost; the wind whistled and jeered through
them and about sharp crags, filling the crisp air with eerie,
shuddersome music. He set his coffee to boil while meditating that down
in the Sacramento Valley, which one could glimpse from here by day, it
was stifling hot, like midsummer. He rested by his fire with his canvas
drawn up about his shoulders, smoked his pipe, remade his pack, and went
on. He counted on the moon presently and a bed at a slightly lower
altitude among the trees; to-night Andy Parker was sleeping in his army
blanket.

He crunched along over the snow crust which rarely failed him, and
though the daylight passed swiftly, the dead-white surface seemed to
hold an absorbed radiance and shed it softly. By the time he got down to
the timber-line again the moon was up. He left the country of Five Lakes
well to his left, ignoring the invitation of the trail beyond down the
tall walls of Squaw Creek cañon. He went straight down the long pitch of
the mountain, heading tenaciously toward the tiny lakelet which, so far
as he knew, had been nameless until his old friend Ben Gaynor had built
a summer home there two years ago and had christened the pond among the
trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the appellation little enough,
telling himself with thorough-going unreason that there was a silly name
to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether out of place to tie on
to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done a better job in naming
it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think of a score of
designations more to the point. For though he had never so much as set
his eyes on either Gloria or her mother, he had his own opinion of both
of them. Nor did he in the least realize that that opinion was based
rather less on actual knowledge than moulded by his own peculiar form of
jealousy, that jealousy which one time-tried friend feels when the other
allows love of women to occupy a higher place than friendship.

He made his camp at eight o'clock in a sheltered spot among the firs. He
built a fire, made a mat of boughs, wrapped himself up in his canvas,
and went promptly to sleep. He awoke cold, got his blood running by
stamping about, put on fresh fuel and went to sleep again, his feet
toward the blaze. Half a dozen times he was up during the night; before
dawn he had his coffee boiling; before the sun was up he was well on his
way again, driving the cramped chill out of him by walking vigorously.
And at nine o'clock that morning he stood on the bench of a timbered
slope whence, looking downward through the trees, he got his first
glimpse of Lake Gloria and of the rambling log house which Ben Gaynor
had been prevailed on to build here in the wild, a dozen miles from the
Lake Tahoe road.

He noted, as he came nearer, swinging along down the slope and seeing
the little valley with its green meadow and azure lake, how Ben had had
a log dam thrown across the pond's lower end, backing up the water and
making it widen out; he saw a couple of graceful canoes resting
tranquilly on their own reflections; a pretty bathing-house already
green with lusty hop-vines. Ben Gaynor had been spending money, a good
deal of money. And no one knew better than Mark King that Ben had been
close-hauled these latter years. He shrugged, telling himself to pull up
short, and not find fault with his friend, or what his friend did, or
with those whom his friend loved.

An hour later he came to the grove of sugar-pines back of the house.
Here he paused a moment, though he was all eagerness for his meeting
with Gaynor. He had seen a number of persons coming out of the house, a
dozen or more, pouring out brightly, as gay as butterflies, men and
women. Their laughter floated out to him through the still sunny
morning, the deeper notes of men, a cluster of rippling notes from a
girl. He wanted to see Gaynor, not a lot of Gaynor's San Francisco
guests. No, not Gaynor's; rather the friends of Gaynor's womenfolk. It
was King's hope that they were going down toward the lake; thus he would
avoid meeting them. He'd come in at the back, have his talk with Ben,
and be on his way without the bore of shaking a lot of flabby hands and
listening to a lot of gushing exclamations.

He stood very still where he was, unseen as he leaned against a
light-and-shadow-dappled pine. A girl broke away from the knot of
summer-clad figures, ran a few steps down the path toward the lake,
poised gracefully, executed a stagy little pose with head back and arms
outflung as though in an ecstasy of delight that the world was so fair.
She was a bright spot of colour with her pink dress and white shoes and
stockings, and lacy parasol and brown hair, and for a little his eyes
went after her quite as they would have followed the flight of a
brilliant bird. Then, as in sheer youth, as one who during a night of
refreshing sleep has been steeped body and soul in the elixir that is
youth's own, she yielded her young body up to an extravagant dance,
whirling away as light as thistledown across the meadow. Hands clapped
after her; voices, men's voices, filled her ears with a clamour of
praise as extravagant as her own dancing; the guests went trooping gaily
after her. King seized his chance and went swiftly toward the house. As
he went he noted that the girl alone was watching him; she was facing
him, while the others had turned their backs upon the house. She had
abandoned her dance and was standing very still, obviously interested
in the rough-clad, booted figure which had seemed so abruptly to
materialize from the forest land.

Ben Gaynor had seen him through a window and met him at the door. Their
hands met in the way of old friendship, gripping hard. Further, Ben beat
the dust out of his shoulders with a hard-falling open palm as he led
the way inside.

"My wife has been saying for years that you're a myth," said Gaynor, the
gleam in his eyes as youthful as it had ever been; "that you are no more
flesh and blood than the unicorn or the dodo bird. To-day I'll show her.
They were up half the night dancing and fussing around; she will be down
in two shakes, though."

"In the meantime we can talk," said King. "I've got something to tell
you, Ben."

Gaynor led the way through a room where were piano and victrola and from
the floor of which the rugs were still rolled; through a dining-room and
into what was at once a small library and Gaynor's study; King noted
that even a telephone had found its way hither. A chair pulled forward,
a box of cigars offered, and the two friends took stock in each other's
eyes of what the last year had done for each.

"You look more fit than ever, Mark--and younger."

King wanted to say the same thing of his friend, but the words did not
come. Gaynor was by far the older man, King's senior by a score of
years, and obviously had begun to feel the burden of the latter greying
days. Or of cares flocking along with them; they generally come
together. His were seriously accepted responsibilities, where Mark
gathered unto himself fresh hopes and eager joys; the responsibilities
which come in the wake of wife and daughter; a home to be maintained in
the city, the necessity to adapt himself, even if stiffly, to unfamiliar
conditions. This big log house itself, it seemed to King, was carried on
the back of old Ben.

They had been friends together since King could remember, since Ben had
big-brothered him, carried him on his back, taught him to swim and
shoot. Then one year while King was off at school his friend took unto
himself a wife. This with no permission from Mark King; not even after a
conference with him; in fact, to his utter bewilderment. King did not so
much as know of the event until Gaynor, after a month of honeymooning,
remembered to drop him a brief note. The bald fact jarred; King was hurt
and grew angry and resentful with all of that unreason of a boy. He went
off to Alaska without a word to Gaynor.

With the passage of time the friends had again grown intimate, had been
partners in more than one deal, and the youthful relationship had been
cemented by the years. But it had happened, seemingly purely through
chance, although King knew better, that he had never met Gaynor's wife
or daughter. When Gloria was little, Mrs. Gaynor had been impressed by
the desirability of a city environment, had urged the larger schools,
music teachers, proper young companions, and a host of somewhat vague
advantages. Hence a large part of the year Gaynor kept bachelor's
quarters in his own little lumber town in the mountains where his
business interests held him and where his wife and daughter came during
a few weeks in the summer to visit him. At such periods King always
managed to be away. This year the wife and daughter, drawn by the new
summer home, had come early in the season, and King's business was
urgent. Besides, he had told himself a dozen times, there really existed
no sane reason in the world why he should avoid Ben Gaynor's family as
though they were leprous.

... What King said in answer to his friend's approval was by way of a
bantering:

"Miracles do happen! Here's Ben Gaynor playing he's a bird of paradise.
Or emulating Beau Brummel. Which is it, Ben? And whence the fine idea?"

Gaynor, with a strange sort of smile, King thought, half sheepish and
the other half tender, cast a downward glance along the encasement of
the outer man. Silk shirt, a very pure white; bright tie, very new;
white flannels, very spick and span; silken hose and low white ties.
This garb for Ben Gaynor the lumberman, who felt not entirely at his
ease, hence the sheepish grin; a fond father decked out by his daughter
as King well guessed; hence that gleam of tenderness.

"Gloria's doings," he chuckled. "Sent ahead from San Francisco with
explicit commands. I guess I'd wear a monkey-jacket if she said so,
Mark." But none the less his eyes, as they appraised the rough garb of
his guest, were envious. "I can breathe better, just the same, in boots
like yours," he concluded. He stretched his long arms high above his
head. "I wish I could get out into the woods for a spell with you,
Mark."

And he did not know, did not in the least suspect, that he was failing
the minutest iota in his loyalty to Gloria and her mother. He was
thinking only of their guests, whom he could not quite consider his own.

"The very thing," said King eagerly. "That's just what I want."

But Gaynor shook his head and his thin, aristocratic face was briefly
overcast, and for an instant shadows crept into his eyes.

"No can do, Mark," he said quietly. "Not this time. I've got both hands
full and then some."

King leaned forward in his chair, his hand gripping Gaynor's knee.

"Ben, it's there. I've always known it, always been willing to bet my
last dollar. Now I'd gamble my life on it."

Gaynor's mouth tightened and his eyes flashed.

"Between you and me, Mark," he said in a voice which dropped
confidentially, "I'd like mighty well to have my share right now. I've
gone in pretty deep here of late, a little over my head, it begins to
look. I've branched out where I would have better played my own game and
been content with things as they were going. I----" But he broke off
suddenly; he was close to the edge of disloyalty now. "What makes you so
sure?" he asked.

"I came up this time from Georgetown. You remember the old trail, up by
Gerle's, Red Cliff and Hell Hole, leaving French Meadows and Heaven's
Gate and Mount Mildred 'way off to the left. I had it all pretty much
my own way until I came to Lookout Ridge. And who do you suppose I found
poking around there?"

"Not old Loony Honeycutt!" cried Gaynor. Then he laughed at himself for
allowing an association of ideas to lead to so absurd a thought. "Of
course not Honeycutt; I saw him last week, as you wanted me to, and he
is cabin-bound down in Coloma as usual. Can't drag his wicked old feet
out of his yard. Who, then, Mark?"

"Swen Brodie then. And Andy Parker."

Gaynor frowned, impressed as King had been before him.

"But," he objected as he pondered, "he might have been there for some
other reason. Brodie, I mean. Remember that the ancient and
time-honoured pastimes of the Kentucky mountains have come into vogue in
the West. Everybody knows, and that includes even the government agents
in San Francisco, that there is a lot of moonshine being made in
out-of-the-way places of the California mountains. There's a job for
Swen Brodie and his crowd. There's talk of it, Mark."

"Maybe," King admitted. "But Brodie was looking for something, and not
revenue men, at that. He and Parker were up on the cliffs not a
quarter-mile from the old cabin. They stood close together, right at the
edge. Parker fell. Brodie looked down, turned on his heel and went off,
smoking his stinking pipe, most likely. I buried Parker the next
morning."

"Poor devil," said Gaynor. Then his brows shot up and he demanded:

"You mean Brodie did for him? Shoved him over?"

"That's exactly what I mean. But I can't tie it to Brodie, not so that
he couldn't shake himself free of it. Parker didn't say so in so many
words; I saw the whole thing from the mountain across the lake, too far
to swear to anything like that. But this I can swear to: Brodie was in
there for the same thing we've been after for ten years. And what is
more, it's open and shut that he was of a mind to play whole-hog and
pushed Andy Parker over to simplify matters. In my mind, even though I
can't hope to ram that down a jury."

"How do you _know_ what Brodie and Parker were after?"

"Andy Parker. He was sullen and tight-mouthed for the most part until
delirium got him. Then he babbled by the hour. And all his talk was of
Gus Ingle and the devil's luck of the unlucky Seven, with every now and
then a word for Loony Honeycutt and Swen Brodie."

"If there is such a thing as devil's luck," said Gaynor with a sober
look to his face, "this thing seems plastered thick with it."

King grunted his derision.

"We'll take a chance, Ben," he said. "And, after all, one man's bane is
another man's bread, you know. Now I've told you my tale, let's have
yours. You saw Honeycutt; could you get anything out of him?"

"Only this, that you are dead right about his knowing or thinking that
he knows. He is feebler than he was last fall, a great deal feebler both
in body and mind. All day he sits on his steps in the sun and peers
through his bleary eyes across the mountains, and chuckles to himself
like an old hen. 'Oh, I know what you're after,' he cackles at me,
shrewd enough to hit the nail square, too, Mark. 'And,' he rambles on,
'you've come to the right man. But am I goin' to blab now, havin' kept a
shut mouth all these years?' And then he goes on, his rheumy-red eyes
blinking, to proclaim that he is feeling a whole lot stronger these
days, that he is getting his second wind, so to speak; that come
mid-spring he'll be as frisky as a colt, and that then he means to have
what is his own! And that is as close as he ever comes to saying
anything. About this one thing, I mean. He'll chatter like a magpie
about anything else, even his own youthful evil deeds. He seems to know
somehow that no longer has the law any interest in his old carcass, and
begins to brag a bit of the wild days up and down the forks of the
American and of his own share in it all; half lies and the other half
blood-dripping truth, I'd swear. It makes a man shiver to listen to the
old cut-throat."

"He can't live a thousand years," mused King. "He is eighty now, if he's
a day."

"Eighty-four by his own estimate. But when it's a question of that, he
sits there and sucks at his toothless old gums and giggles that it's the
first hundred years that are the hardest to get through with and he's
gettin' away with 'em."

"He knows something, Ben."

"So do we, or think we do. So does Brodie, it would seem. Does old
Honeycutt know any more than the rest of us?"

"We are all young men compared with Loony Honeycutt, all
Johnny-come-lately youngsters. Gus Ingle and his crowd, as near as we
can figure, came to grief in the winter of 1853. By old Honeycutt's own
count he would have been a wild young devil of seventeen then. And
remember he was one of the roaring crowd that made the country what it
was after '49. He knows where the old cabin was on Lookout; he swears he
knows who built it in that same winter of '53. And----"

"And," cut in Gaynor, "if you believe the murderous old rascal, he knows
with sly, intimate knowledge how and why the man in the lone cabin was
killed. All in that same winter of '53!"

King pricked up his ears.

"I didn't know that. What does he say?"

"He talks on most subjects pretty much at random. He knows that the
sheriff only laughs at him, since who would want to snatch the old
derelict away from his mountains after all these years and try to fix a
crime of more than half a century ago on him? But as the law laughs and
at least pretends to disbelieve, his pride is hurt. So he has grown into
the way of wild boasting. You ought to hear him talk about the affair at
Murderer's Bar! It makes a man shiver to stand there in the sunshine and
hear him. And, with the rest of his drivelling braggadocio, to hear him
tell it, hinting broadly it was a boy of seventeen who, carrying nothing
but an axe, did for the poor devil in the cabin."

"And I, for one, believe him! What is more, I am dead certain--call it
a hunch, if you like--that if he had had the use of his legs all these
years, he'd have gone straight as a string where we are trying to get."
He began to pace up and down, frowning. "Brodie has been hanging around
him lately, hasn't he?"

"Yes. Brodie and Steve Jarrold and Andy Parker and the rest of Brodie's
worthless crowd of illicit booze-runners. They hang out in the old
McQuarry shack, cheek by jowl with Honeycutt. I saw them, thick as
flies, while I was there last week. Brodie, it seems, has even been
cooking the old man's meals for him."

"There you are!" burst out King. "What more do you want? Imagine Swen
Brodie turning over his hand for anybody on earth if there isn't
something in it all for Swen Brodie. And I'll go bond he's giving
Honeycutt the best, most nourishing meals that have come his way since
his mother suckled him--Swen Brodie bound on keeping him alive until he
gets what he's after. When he'd kick old Honeycutt in the side and leave
him to die like a dog with a broken back."

"Well," demanded Gaynor, "what's to be done? With all his jabberings,
Honeycutt is sly and furtive and is obsessed with the idea that there is
one thing he won't tell."

"Will you go and see him one more time?"

"What's the good, Mark? If he does know, he gets lockjaw at the first
word. I've tried----"

"There's one thing we haven't tried. Old Honeycutt is as greedy a miser
as ever gloated over a pile of hoardings. We'll get a thousand
dollars--five thousand, if necessary--in hard gold coin, if we have to
rob the mint for it. You'll spread it on the table in his kitchen.
You'll let it chink and you'll let some of it drop and roll. If that
won't buy the knowledge we want----But it will!"

"I've known the time when five thousand wasn't as much money as it is
right now, Mark----"

"I've got it, if I scrape deep. And I'll dig down to the bottom."

"And if we draw a blank?"

But there was a step at the door, the knob was turning. Mark King
turned, utterly unconscious of the quick stiffening of his body as he
awaited the introduction to Ben's wife.




_Chapter IV_


At first, King was taken aback by Mrs. Ben's youthfulness. Or look of
youth, as he understood presently. He knew that she was within a few
years of Ben's age, and yet certainly she showed no signs of it to his
eyes, which, though keen enough, were, after a male fashion,
unsophisticated. She was a very pretty woman, _petite_, alert, and
decidedly winsome. He understood in a flash why Ben should have been
attracted to her; how she had held him to her own policies all these
years, largely because they were hers. She was dressed daintily; her
glossy brown hair was becomingly arranged about the bright, smiling
face. She chose to be very gracious to her husband's life-long friend,
giving him a small, plump hand in a welcoming grip, establishing him in
an instant, by some sleight of femininity which King did not plumb, as a
hearthside intimate most affectionately regarded. His first two
impressions of her, arriving almost but not quite simultaneously, were
of youthful prettiness and cleverness.

She slipped to a place on the arm of Gaynor's chair, her hand, whose
well-kept beauty caught and held King's eyes for a moment, toying with
her husband's greying hair.

"She loves old Ben," thought King. "That's right."

Mrs. Ben Gaynor was what is known as a born hostess very charming.
Hostess to her husband, of whom she saw somewhat less each year than of
a number of other friends. She had always the exactly proper meed of
intimacy to offer each guest in accordance with the position he had come
to occupy, or which she meant him to occupy, in her household. Akin to
her in instinct were those distinguished ladies of the colourful past
of whom romantic history has it that in the salons of their doting lords
and masters they gave direction, together with impetus or retardation,
to muddy political currents. Clever women.

Not that cleverness necessarily connotes heartlessness. She adored Ben;
you could see that in her quick dark eyes, which were always animated
with expression. If she was not more at his side, the matter was simply
explained; she adored their daughter Gloria no less, and probably
somewhat more, and Gloria needed her. Surely Gaynor's needs, those of a
grown man, were less than those of a young girl whose budding youth must
be perfected in flower. And if Mrs. Ben was indefatigable in keeping
herself young while Ben quietly accepted the gathering years, it was
with no thought of coquetting with other men, but only that she might
remain an older sister to her daughter, maintain the closer contact, and
see that Gloria made the most of life. Any small misstep which she
herself had made in life her daughter must be saved from making; all of
her unsatisfied yearnings must be fulfilled for Gloria. She constituted
herself cup-bearer, wine-taster and handmaiden for their daughter. If it
were necessary to engrave another fine line in old Ben's forehead in
order to add a softer tint to Gloria's rose petals, she was sincerely
sorry for Ben, but the desirable rose tints were selected with none the
less steady hand.

Ben Gaynor's eyes followed his wife pridefully when, at the end of
fifteen pleasant, sunny minutes, she left them, and then went swiftly to
his friend's face, seeking approbation. And he found it. King had risen
as she went out, holding himself with a hint of stiffness, as was his
unconscious way when infrequently in the presence of women; now he
turned to Ben with an odd smile.

"Pretty tardy date to congratulate you, old man," he said with a laugh.
"Don't believe I ever remembered it before, did I?"

Ben glowed and rubbed his long hands together in rich contentment.

"She's a wonder, Mark," he said heartily.

Mark nodded an emphatic approval. Words, which Ben perhaps looked for,
he did not add. Everything had been said in the one word "congratulate."

"Sprang from good old pioneer stock, too, Mark," said Gaynor. "Wouldn't
think now, to look at her, that she was born at Gold Run in a family as
rugged as yours and mine, would you? With precious few advantages until
she was a girl grown, look at what she has made of herself! While you
and I and the likes of us have been content to stay pretty much in the
rough, she hasn't. There's not a more accomplished, cultured little
woman this or the other side Boston, even if she did hail from Gold Run.
And as for Gloria, all her doing; why," and he chuckled, "she hasn't the
slightest idea, I suppose, that she ever had a grandfather who sweated
and went about in shirt-sleeves and chewed tobacco and swore!"

"Have to go all the way back to a grandfather?" laughed King.

"Look at me!" challenged Gaynor, thrusting into notice his immaculate
attire. He chuckled. "One must live down his disgraceful past for his
daughter, you know."

From without came a gust of shouts and laughter from the Gaynor guests
skylarking along the lake shore.

"Come," said Ben. "You'll have to meet the crowd, Mark. And I want you
to see my little girl; I've told her so many yarns about you that she's
dying of curiosity."

King, though he would have preferred to tramp ten miles over rough
trails, gleaning small joy from meeting strangers not of his sort who
would never be anything but strangers to him, accepted the inevitable
without demur and followed his host. He would shake hands, say a dozen
stupid words, and escape for a good long talk with Ben. Then, before the
lunch-hour, he would be off.

Gaynor led the way toward a side door, passing through a hallway and a
wide sun-room. Thus they came abreast of a wide stairway leading to the
second storey. Down the glistening treads, making her entrance like the
heroine in a play, just at the proper instant, in answer to her cue,
came Gloria.

"Gloria," called Gaynor.

"Papa," said Miss Gloria, "I wanted----Oh! You are not alone!"

Instinctively King frowned. "Now, why did she say that?" he asked within
himself. For she had seen him coming to the house. Straight-dealing
himself, circuitous ways, even in trifles, awoke his distrust.

"Come here, my dear," said Ben. "Mark, this is my little girl. Gloria,
you know all about this wild man. He is Mark King."

"Indeed, yes!" cried Gloria. She came smiling down the stairway, a
fluffy pink puffball floating fairy-wise. Her two hands were out,
ingenuously, pretty little pink-nailed hands which had done little in
this world beyond adorn charmingly the extremities of two soft round
arms. For an instant King felt the genial current within him frozen as
he stiffened to meet the girl he had watched in the extravagant dance
down to the lake.

Then, getting his first near view of her, his eyes widened. He had never
seen anything just like her; with that he began realizing dully that he
was straying into strange pastures. He took her two hands because there
was nothing else to do, feeling just a trifle awkward in the
unaccustomed act. He looked down into Gloria's face, which was lifted so
artlessly up to his. Hers were the softest, tenderest grey eyes he had
ever looked into. He had the uneasy fear that his hard rough hands were
rasping the fine soft skin of hers. Yet there was a warm pleasurable
thrill in the contact. Gloria was very much alive and warm-bodied and
beautiful. She was like those flowers which King knew so well, fragrant
dainty blossoms which lift their little faces from the highest of the
old mountains into the rarest of skies, growths seeming to partake of
some celestial perfection; hardy, though they clothed themselves in an
outward seeming of fragile delicacy. _Physically_--he emphasized the
word and barricaded himself behind it as though he were on the defence
against her!--she came nearer perfection than he had thought a girl
could come, and nowhere did he find a conflicting detail from the
tendril of sunny brown hair touching the curve of the sweet young face
to the little feet in their clicking high-heeled shoes. Thus from the
beginning he thought of her in superlatives. And thus did Gloria, like
the springtime coquetting with an aloof and silent wilderness, make her
bright entry into Mark King's life.

"I have been acting-up like a Comanche Indian outside," laughed Gloria.
It was she who withdrew her hands; King started inwardly, wondering how
long he had been holding them, how long he would have held them if she
had not been so serenely mistress of the moment. "My hair was all
tumbling down and I had to run upstairs to fight it back where it
belongs. Isn't a girl's hair a terrible affliction, Mr. King? One of
these days, when papa's back is turned, I'm going to cut it off short,
like a boy's."

An explanation of her presence in the house while her guests were still
in the yard; why explain so trifling a matter? A suggestion that she
retained that lustrous crown of hair just to please her papa, whereas
one who had not been told might have been mistaken in his belief that
this should be one of her greatest prides. Two little fibs for Miss
Gloria; yet, certainly, very small fibs which hurt no one.

Gloria's eyes, despite their soft tenderness, were every whit as quick
as Mark King's when they were, as now, intrigued. Of course both she and
King had heard countless references, one of the other, from Ben Gaynor,
but neither had been greatly interested. King had known that there was a
baby girl, long ago; that fact had been impressed on him with such rare
eloquence that it had created a mental picture which, until now, had
been vivid and like an indelible drawing; he had known, had he ever
paused for reflection, which he had not, that a baby would not stay such
during a period of eighteen years. She had heard a thousand tales of "my
good friend, Mark." Mark, thus, had been in her mind a man of her
father's age, and about such a young girl's romantic ideas do not flock.
But from the first glimpse of the booted figure among the trees she had
sensed other things. King would have blushed had he known how
picturesque he bulked in her eyes; how now, while she smiled at him so
ingenuously, she was doing his thorough-going masculinity full tribute;
how the ruggedness of him, the very scent of the resinous pines he bore
along with him, the clear manlike look of his eyes and the warm dusky
tan of face and hands--even the effect of the careless, worn boots and
the muscular throat showing through an open shirt-collar--put a
delicious little shiver of excitement into her.

Miss Gloria had a pretty way of commanding, half beseeching and yet
altogether tyrannical. King, having agreed to stay to luncheon, was in
the bathroom off Gaynor's room, shaving. Gloria had caught her father
and dragged him off into a corner. "Oh, papa, he is simply magnificent!
Why didn't you _tell_ me? Why, he isn't a bit old and----" And she made
him repaint for her the high lights of an episode of Mark King making a
name for himself and a fortune at the same time in the Klondike country.
She danced away, singing, to her abandoned friends, who were returning
to the house. "It's _the_ Mark King, my dears!" she told them
triumphantly, not unconscious of the depressing result of her
disclosures upon a couple of boys of the college age who adored openly
and with frequent lapses from glorious hope to bleak despair. "The man
who made history in the Klondike. The man who fought his way alone
across fifteen hundred miles of snow and ice and won--oh--I don't know
_what_ kind of a fight. Against all kinds of odds. The very Mark King!
He's papa's best friend, you know."

"Let him be your dad's friend, then," said the young fellow with the
pampered pompadour, his eyes showing a glint of sullen jealousy. "That's
no reason----"

"Why, Archie!" cried Gloria. "You are making yourself just horrid. You
don't want to make me sorry I ever invited you here, do you?" And a
brief half-hour ago Archie had flattered himself that Gloria's dancing
had been chiefly for him.

They were all of Gloria's "set" with one noteworthy exception. Him she
called "Mr. Gratton" while the others were Archie and Teddy and Georgia
and Evelyn and Connie. It was to this "Mr. Gratton" that she turned,
having made a piquant face at the dejected college youth.

"_You_ will like him immensely, I know," she said, while the ears of
poor Archie reddened even as he was being led away by the not very
pretty but extremely comforting Georgia. "He's a real man, every inch of
him." ["Every inch a King!" she thought quickly, unashamed of the pun.]
"A big man who does big things in a big way," she ran on, indicating
that she, too, after that brief meeting had been lured into
superlatives.

"Mr. Gratton," smiled urbanely. For his own part he might have been
called every inch a concrete expression of suavity. He was clad in the
conventional city-dweller's "outdoor rig." Shining puttees lying bravely
about the shape of his leg; brown outing breeches, creased, laced at
their abbreviated ends; shirt of the sport effect; a shrewd-eyed man of
thirty-five with ambitions, a chalky complexion, and a very weak mouth
with full red lips.

"Miss Gloria," he whispered as he managed to have her all to himself a
moment, "you'll make me jealous."

She was used to him saying stupid things. Yet she laughed and seemed
pleased. Gratton egotistically supposed her thought was of him; King
would have been amazed to know that she was already watching the house
for his coming. And he would have been no end amazed and bristling with
defence had he glimpsed the astonishing fact that Gloria already fully
and clearly meant to parade him before her summer friends as her latest
and most virile admirer. Gratton's heavy-lidded pale eyes trailed over
her speculatively.

That forenoon King shook hands with Archie, Teddy, Gratton, and the
rest, made his formal bows to Gloria's girl friends, and felt relief
when the inept banalities languished and he was free to draw apart.
Gratton, with slender finger to his shadowy moustache, bore down upon
him. King did not like this suave individual; he had the habit of
judging a man by first impressions and sticking stubbornly to his snap
judgment until circumstance showed him to be in error. He liked neither
the way Gratton walked nor talked; he had no love for the cut of his
eye; now he resented being approached when there was no call for it.
Never was there a more friendly man anywhere than Mark King when he
found a soul-brother; never a more aloof at times like this one.

"I have been tremendously interested," Gratton led off ingratiatingly,
"in the things I have heard of you, Mr. King. By George, men like you
live the real life."

The wild fancy came booming upon King to kick him over the verandah
railing.

"Think so?" he said coolly, wondering despite himself what "things"
Gratton had heard of him. And from whom? His spirit groaned within him
at the thought that old Ben Gaynor had been lured into paths along which
he should come to hobnob with men like Gratton. He was sorry that he had
promised to stay to lunch. His thoughts all of a sudden were restive,
flying off to Swen Brodie, to Loony Honeycutt, to what he must get done
without too much delay. Gratton startled him by speaking, bringing his
thoughts back from across the ridges to the sunny verandah overlooking
Lake Gloria.

Gratton was nobody's fool, save his own, and both marked and resented
King's attitude. His heavy lids had a fluttering way at times during
which his prominent eyes seemed to flicker.

"What's the chance with Gus Ingle's 'Secret' this year, Mr. King?" he
demanded silkily.

King wheeled on him.

"What do you know about it?" he said sharply. "And who has been talking
to you?"

Gratton laughed, looked wise and amused, and strolled away.

At luncheon Mrs. Gaynor placed her guests at table out on the porch,
conscious of her daughter's watchful eye. When all were seated, Mark
King found himself with Miss Gloria at his right and an unusually plain
and unattractive girl named Georgia on his left. Everybody talked, King
alone contenting himself with brevities. Over dessert he found himself
drifting into _tête-á-tête_ with Miss Gloria. They pushed back their
chairs; he found himself still drifting, this time physically and still
with Gloria as they two strolled out through the grove at the back of
the log house. There was a splendid pool there, boulder-surrounded; a
thoroughly romantic sort of spot in Gloria Gaynor's fancies, a most
charming background for springtime loitering. The gush and babble of the
bright water tumbling in, rushing out, filled the air singingly. Gloria
wanted to ask Mr. King about a certain little bird which she had seen
here, a little fellow who might have been the embodiment of the stream's
joy; she knew from her father that King was an intimate friend of wild
things and could tell her all about it. They sat in Gloria's favourite
nook, very silent, now and then with a whisper from Gloria, awaiting the
coming of the bird.




_Chapter V_


"But, my darling daughter," gasped Mrs. Gaynor, "you don't in the least
understand what you are about!"

"But, my darling mother," mimicked Miss Gloria, light of tone but with
all of the calm assurance of her years, "I do know exactly what I am
about! I always do. And anyway," with a Frenchy little shrug which she
had adopted and adapted last season, "I am going."

"But," exclaimed her mother, already routed, as was inevitable, and now
looking toward the essential considerations, "what in the world will
every one say? And think?"

In the tall mirror before her Gloria regarded her boots and
riding-breeches critically. Then her little hat and the blue flannel
short. Too mannish? Never, with Gloria in them, an expression in very
charming curves of triumphant girlhood.

"What in the world was Mark King thinking of?" demanded her mother.

"What do you suppose?" said Gloria tranquilly "He would have been very
rude if he hadn't been thinking of your little daughter. Besides, he had
very little to do with the matter."

"Gloria!"

"And, what is more, there was a moon. Remember that, mamma." She tied
the big scarlet silk handkerchief about her throat and turned to be
kissed. Mrs. Gaynor looked distressed; there were actually tears trying
to invade her troubled eyes, and her hands were nervous.

"But you will be gone all day!"

"Oh, mamma!" Gloria began to grow impatient. "What if I am? Mr. King is
a gentleman, isn't he? He isn't going to eat me, is he? Why do you make
such a fuss over it all? Do you want to spoil everything for me?"

"You know I don't! But----"

"We've had nothing but 'buts' since I told you. I should have left you a
note and slipped out." She bestowed upon the worried face a pecking
little kiss and tiptoed to the door.

"Wait, Gloria! What shall I tell every one? They're your _guests_, after
all----"

"Tell them I asked to be excused for the day. Beyond that you are rather
good at smoothing out things. I'll trust you."

"But--I mean _and_--and Mr. Gratton?"

"Oh, tell him to go to the devil!" cried Gloria. "It will do him no end
of good." And while Mrs. Gaynor stared after her she closed the door
softly and went tiptoeing downstairs and out into the brightening dawn,
where Mark King awaited her with the horses.

From behind a window-curtain Gloria's mother watched the girl tripping
away through the meadow to the stable, set back among the trees. King
was leading the saddled horses to meet her; Gloria gave him her
gauntleted hand in a greeting the degree of friendliness of which was
gauged by the clever eyes at the window; friendliness already arrived at
a stage of intimacy. King lifted Gloria into her saddle; Gloria's little
laugh had in it a flutter of excitement as her cavalier's strength took
her by delighted surprise and off her feet. They rode away through the
thinning shadows. Mrs. Gaynor, despite the earliness of the hour, went
straight to her husband, awoke him mercilessly, and told him everything.

"Oh," he said when she had done and he had turned over for another hour
or so of sleep, "that's all right. Mark told me about it last night."

"And you didn't say a word to me!"

"Forgot," said Ben. "But don't worry. Mark'll take care of her."

She left him to his innocent slumbers and began dressing. Already she
was busied with planning just what to say and how to say it; Gloria
knew, she thought with some complacency, that her mother could be
depended upon in any situation demanding the delicate touch. She would
be about, cool and smiling, when the first guest appeared; it would be
supposed that she and Gloria and Mr. King had been quite a merry trio as
the morning adventure was being arranged. That first guest stirring
would be Mr. Gratton on hand to pounce on Gloria and get her out of the
house for a run down to the lake, a dash in a canoe, or a brief stroll
across the meadow before the breakfast-gong. Instead of Gloria's terse
message for him, she had quite an elaborate and laughing tale to tell.
After all, Gloria usually did know what she was about, and if Mr.
Gratton meant all that he looked--Mrs. Gaynor had cast up a rough draft
of everything she would say that morning before she opened the door to
go downstairs. And for reasons very clear to her and which she had no
doubt would be viewed with equal clarity by Gloria after this "escapade"
of hers was done with, she meant to be very tactful indeed with Mr.
Gratton.

       *       *       *       *       *

Never had Mark King known pleasanter companionship than Gloria Gaynor
afforded this bright morning. They passed up the trail, over the first
ridge, dropped down into a tiny wild little valley, and had the world
all alone to themselves. Only now was the sun up, and there in the
mountains, blazing forth cheerily, it seemed to shine for them alone.
When they rode side by side Gloria chatted brightly, athrill with
animation, vivid with her rioting youth. When the narrow trail demanded
and she rode ahead, bright little snatches of lilting song or broken
exclamations floated back to the man whose eyes shone with his enjoyment
of her. On every hand this was all a bright new world to her; she had
never run wild in the hills as her mother had done through her girlhood;
she had never been particularly interested in all of this sprawling
ruggedness. Now she had a hundred eager questions; she saw the shining
splendour of the solitudes through King's eyes; she turned to him with
full confidence for the name of a flower, the habit of a bird, even
though the latter, unseen among the trees, had only announced himself by
a half-dozen enraptured notes.

Yesterday, surrendering her volatile self to a very natural and quite
innocent feminine instinct, Gloria had fully determined to parade Mark
King before her envious friends as very much her own property. It was
merely a bit of the game, the old, old game at which she, being richly
favoured by nature, was as skilful as a girl of eighteen or nineteen
could possibly be. In the eternal skirmish she was an enterprising young
savage with many scalps dangling from her triumphant belt. The petted
pompadour of poor Archie, the curly locks of Teddy, the stiff black
brush of Mr. Gratton were to have an added fellow in King's trophy. Then
she had caught a word between her father and his friend; had heard
Honeycutt mentioned and a ride to Coloma, and on the break of the
instant had determined with a young will which invariably went
unthwarted, that high adventure was beckoning her. A ride on horseback
through the mountains with a man who had stirred her more than a little,
who filled her romantic fancies with picturesque glamour, who was on a
quest of which she knew ten times more than he had any idea she knew.
And that quest itself! Pure golden glamour everywhere.

Hence, some few minutes afterward, in a cosy nook of the verandah while
the others danced, the moon and Gloria were serenely victorious. King,
once assured that the long ride was not too hard for her, saw no
slightest reason for objecting to her coming; he did not think of all of
that which would mean so much to Ben's wife--the conventions and what
would people say. Conventions do not thrive in such regions as the high
Sierra. Ben, to whom King mentioned the thing, looked at it quite as did
his friend. Gloria would be in good hands and ought to have a corking
good time; he wished he could get away to go along. So King telephoned
to San Francisco, arranged to have three thousand dollars--in cash--sent
immediately to him at Coloma, and to-day fancied himself strictly
attending to business with an undivided mind.

"I know now where the original Garden of Eden was!" Gloria, turning to
look back at him as he came on through a delightful flowery upland
meadow, sat her horse gracefully upon a slight hillock, herself and her
restless mount bathed in sunshine, her cheeks warm with the flush upon
them, her lips red with coursing life, her eyes dancing. "It's perfectly
lovely. It's pure heavenly!"

King nodded and smiled. He was not given to many words, grown taciturn
as are mountaineers inevitably, trained in long habit to approve in
silence of that which pleased him most. So, while Gloria's eager tongue
tripped along as busily as the brooks they forded, he was for the most
part silent. An extended arm to point out a big snow-plant, blood-red
against a little heap of snow, was as eloquent as the spoken word. Thus
he indicated much that might have passed unnoticed by Gloria, keenly
enjoying her lively admiration.

To-day he chose always the easier trails, since with the good horses
under them they had ample time to come to Loony Honeycutt's place well
before midday. Also they stopped frequently, King making an excuse of
showing her points of interest; the tiny valley where one could be sure
of a glimpse of a brown bear, the grazing-lands of mountain deer, the
pass into the cliff-bound hiding-place of the picturesque highwaymen of
an earlier day whence they drove stolen horses into Nevada, where they
secreted other horses stolen in Nevada and to be disposed of down in the
Sacramento Valley. There lasted until this very day the ruins of their
rock house, snuggled into the mountains under their lookout-point.

"It would be fun," said Gloria, the spell of the wilderness mysteries
upon her, her eyes half wistful and altogether serious, "to be lost out
here. Just to get far, far away from people and ever so close to the big
old mountains. Wouldn't it?" And a few minutes later she drew in her
horse and cried out softly: "Listen!" She herself was listening
breathlessly. "It sounds like the ocean ever so far off. Or--or like
shouting voices a million miles away. Or like the mountains themselves
whispering. It is hard to believe, isn't it? that it is just the wind in
the pines."

Another time, while, under the pretext of letting their horses blow,
King had suggested a short halt to give the girl a chance to rest, she
said with abruptness:

"What do you think of Mr. Gratton?"

Already she knew Mark King well enough to realize that he would either
refuse to answer or would speak his mind without beating about the bush.

"I don't like him," said King.

Gloria looked thoughtful.

"Neither do I," she said. "Not up here in the mountains. And down in San
Francisco I thought him rather splendid. What is more, if we were
whisked back to San Francisco this minute, I'd probably think him fine
again."

She appeared interested in the consideration, and when they rode on was
silent, obviously turning the matter over and over in mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

To-day were three mysteries tremblingly close to revealing themselves
one to another: the great green mystery of the woodlands; the mystery of
a man clothed in his masculinity as in an outer garment; the tender
mystery of a young girl athrill with romance, effervescent with youth,
her own thoughts half veiled from herself, her instincts alive and
urgent, and often all in confusion. How could a man like Mark King quite
understand a girl like Gloria? How could a girl like Gloria, with all of
her surety of her own decisions, understand a man like King? Each
glimpsed that day much of the other's true character, and yet all the
while the mainsprings were just out of sight, unguessed, undreamed of.

At Gloria's age, if one be a girl and very pretty and made much of by
adoring parents and a host of boys and men, the world is an extremely
nice place inhabited exclusively by individuals pressing forward to do
her reverence. She is beautiful, she is vivacious, filled with delight;
she is a sparkling fountainhead of joy. She is so superabundantly
supplied with eager happiness that she radiates happiness. If she thinks
a very great deal of herself, so for that matter does every other
individual in the world; it is merely that with all of her
sophistication she remains much more naive than she would ever believe;
she is a coquette because she is female; she is pleased with herself and
with the high excuse that every one else is pleased with her. Hence she
demands adoration as a right. If she rides on a street-car she fully
expects that the conductor will regard her admiringly and that the
motorman will turn his head after her. She doesn't expect to marry
either of these gentlemen; she does not particularly require their
flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy
or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term,
after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not
dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She
merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath
in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other
girls.... All of which is so clearly a pretty nearly universal condition
that it would seem that if Mark King had had his wits about him he must
have realized it. And yet had he glimpsed that which should have been so
obvious he would have been startled, somewhat shocked, and would have
grieved over his friend's empty-headed daughter, holding her
unmaidenly--when she was but dallying with dreams which mean so much to
all maidens.

But Gloria did not say to him: "Mark King, I am determined that you
shall adore me, pretty face, pretty figure, pretty ways and all." Nor
yet to herself did she put things so baldly. She did, however, yield
herself luxuriously to the springtime, the romance of the hour, the
appeal of her latest cavalier, and preen herself like a mating bird.
King saw, admired, and in his own fashion played his own part. It was
not clear to him that there had been a new pleasure in his own strength
when he had lifted her into her saddle, and yet her little breathless
laugh had rung musically in his ears. Had a man arisen to announce,
jibingly, that Mark King was "showing off" before a girl like a boy of
ten, though within bounds, he would have called the man a liar and
forthwith have kicked him out of the landscape ... They rode on, side by
side, each content with seeing only that which lay on the surface--both
of his companion and of himself. In a word, they were living life
naturally, without demanding of the great theatrical manager to know
exactly what parts they were to play in the human comedy. Externals
sufficed just now; the fragrant still forests, the pulse-stirring
sunshine, the warm, fruitful earth below and the blue sky above.

From the first he called her Gloria quite naturally; to her he was Mr.
King. But the "Mark" slipped out before they came into sight of the
roofs of picturesque Coloma.




_Chapter VI_


"You are sure you won't be gone more than an hour?" Gloria asked.

Never, it seemed to her, had she seen a lonelier-looking place than old
Coloma drowsing on the fringe of the wilderness. The street into which
they had ridden was deserted save for a couple of dogs making each
other's acquaintance suspiciously. Why was it more lonesome here than it
had been back there in the mountains? she wondered.

"Less than an hour," he assured her. "What business I have can be done
in fifteen minutes if it can be done at all. But, in the meantime, what
will you do?"

"Oh," said Gloria, "I'll just poke around. It will be fun to see what
kind of people live here."

He put the horses in the stable, watered and fed them himself, and came
back to her outside the front double doors. She had dropped down on a
box in the sun; he thought that there was a little droop to her
shoulders. And small wonder, he admitted, with a tardy sense of guilt.
All these hours in the saddle----

"Tired much?" he asked solicitously.

The shoulders straightened like a soldier's; she jumped up and whirled
smilingly.

"Not a bit tired," she told him brightly.

"That's good. But I could get a room for you at the hotel; you could lie
down and rest a couple of hours----"

Gloria would not hear to it; if she did want to lie down she'd go out
under one of the trees and rest there. She trudged along with him to the
post-office; she watched as Mark called for and got a registered parcel.
Further, she marked that the postmaster appeared curious about the
package so heavily insured until over Mark's shoulder he caught a
glimpse of her, and that thereafter, craning his neck as they went out,
he evidenced a greater interest in her than in a bundle insured for
three thousand dollars. She was smiling brightly when Mark King hurried
off to his meeting with old Loony Honeycutt.

Honeycutt's shanty, ancient, twisted, warped, and ugly like himself,
stood well apart from the flock of houses, as though, like himself even
in this, it were suspicious and meant to keep its own business to
itself. Only one other building had approached it in neighbourly
fashion, and this originally had been Honeycutt's barn. Now it had a
couple of crazy windows cut crookedly into its sides and a stovepipe
thrust up, also crookedly, through the shake roof, and was known as the
McQuarry place. Here one might count on finding Swen Brodie at such
times as he favoured Coloma with his hulking presence; here foregathered
his hangers-on. An idle crowd for the most part, save when the devil
found mischief for them to do, they might be expected to be represented
by one or two of their number loafing about headquarters, and King
realized that his visit to Loony Honeycutt was not likely to pass
unnoticed. What he had not counted on was finding Swen Brodie himself
before him in Honeycutt's shanty.

King, seeing no one, walked through the weeds to Honeycutt's door. The
door was closed, the windows down--dirty windows, every corner of every
pane with its dirty cobweb trap and skeletons of flies. As he lifted his
foot to the first of the three front steps he heard voices. Nor would
any man who had once listened to the deep, sullen bass of Swen Brodie
have forgotten or have failed now in quick recognition. Brodie's mouth,
when he spoke, dripped the vilest of vocabularies that had ever been
known in these mountains, very much as old Honeycutt's toothless mouth,
ever screwed up in rotary chewing and sucking movements, drooled tobacco
juice upon his unclean shirt. Brodie at moments when he desired to be
utterly inoffensive could not purge his utterance of oaths; he was one
of those men who could not remark that it was a fine morning without
first damning the thing, qualifying it with an epithet of vileness, and
turning it out of his big, loose mouth sullied with syllables which do
not get themselves into print.

What King heard, as though Brodie had held his speech for the moment and
hurled it like a challenge to the man he did not know had come, was,
when stripped of its cargo of verbal filth:

"You old fool, you're dying right now. It's for me or Mark King to get
it, and it ain't going to be King."

Honeycutt all the time was whining like a feeble spirit in pain, his
utterances like the final dwindlings of a mean-spirited dog. King had
never heard him whine like that; Honeycutt was more given to chucklings
and clackings of defiance and derision. Perhaps Brodie as the ultimate
argument had manhandled him. King threw open the door.

There stood old Honeycutt, tremblingly upheld upon his sawed-off
broom-handle. Beyond him, facing the door, was Swen Brodie, his immense
body towering over Honeycutt's spindling one, his bestial face hideous
in its contortions as at once he gloated and threatened. In Brodie's
hands, which were twice the size of an ordinary man's, was a little
wooden box, to which Honeycutt's rheumy eyes were glued with frantic
despair. Evidently the box had only now been taken from its hiding-place
under a loose board in the floor; the board lay tossed to one side, and
Brodie's legs straddled the opening.

Honeycutt did not know immediately that any one had entered; either his
old ears had not heard, or his excited mind was concentrated so
excludingly on Brodie that he had no thought of aught else. Brodie,
however, turned his small, restless eyes, that were like two shiny
bright-blue buttons, upon the intruder. His great mouth stood open
showing his teeth. On that lower, deformed, undershot jaw of Swen Brodie
were those monstrous teeth which were his pride, a misshapen double row
which he kept clean while his body went unwashed, and between which the
man could bend a nail.

Swen Brodie was the biggest man who had ever come to the mountains, men
said, unless that honour went to one of the Seven who more than a
half-century ago had perished with Gus Ingle. And even so Brodie kept
the honour in his own blood, boasting that Ingle's giant companion, the
worst of a bad lot, was his own father's father. The elder Brodie had
come from Iceland, had lived with a squaw, had sired the first "Swen"
Brodie. And this last scion of a house of outlawry and depravity, the
Blue Devil, as many called him, stood six or eight clear inches above
Mark King, who was well above six feet. Whatever pride was in him went
first to his teeth, next to his enormous stature; he denied that his
father had been so big a man; he flew into a towering rage at the
suggestion; he cursed his father's memory as a fabric of lies. His head
was all face, flattening off an inch above the hairless brows; his face
was all enormous, double-toothed mouth.

Slowly the big mouth closed. The shiny blue eyes narrowed and glinted;
the coarse face reddened. Brodie's throat corded, the Adam's apple moved
repeatedly up and down as he swallowed inarticulately. This old
Honeycutt saw. He jerked about and quick lights sprang up in his
despairing eyes. He began to sputter but Brodie's loud voice had come
back to him and drowned out the old man's shrillings. Brodie ripped out
a string of oaths, demanding:

"Who told _you_ to come in? You--you----"

"He was aiming to kill me," cried old Honeycutt, dragging and pulling at
King's sleeve. "He was for doin' for me--like that!"

He pointed to the floor. There lay a heavy iron poker bent double.

"He done it. Brodie done it. He was for doin' me----"

"You old fool, I'll do you yet," growled Brodie. "And you, King, what
are you after?"

Always truculent, to-day Brodie was plainly spoiling for trouble. King
had stepped in at a moment when Brodie was in no mood to brook any
interruption or interference.

"I came for a word with Honeycutt, not with you," King flashed back at
him. "And from the look of things Honeycutt is thanking his stars that I
did come."

"If you mean anything by that," shouted Brodie threateningly, "put a
name to it."

"If it's a fight you want," said King sharply, "I'm ready to take you
on, any time, and without a lot of palaver."

Old Honeycutt began sidling off toward the back door, neither of his two
visitors noticing him now as their eyes clashed.

"What I come for I'm going to have," announced Brodie. "It's mine,
anyhow, more than any other man's; I could prove it by law if I gave the
snap of a finger for what the law deals out, hit or miss. Was there a
King with Gus Ingle's crowd? Or a Honeycutt? No, but there was a Brodie!
And I'm his heir, by thunder. It's mine more'n any man's."

King laughed at him.

"Since when have you been studying law, Brodie? Since you got back this
last trip, figuring you might have a word with the sheriff?"

"Sheriff? What do you mean, sheriff?"

"I happened to see you and Andy Parker standing together on the cliffs.
I saw Andy go overboard. What is more, I had a talk with him before I
buried him."

Again Brodie's big mouth dropped open; his little blue eyes rounded, and
he put one hand at his throat nervously.

"Andy's a liar; always a liar," he said thickly. But he seemed annoyed.
Then his face cleared, and he too laughed, derision in his tone.
"Anyway, he's dead and can't lie no more, and your word against mine
ain't more'n an even break. So if your nosing sheriff gets gay with me
I'll twist his cursed neck for him."

"Suit yourself. I've told you already I came for a talk with Honeycutt
and not with you."

"Then you'll wait until I'm done with him," roared Brodie, all of his
first baffled rage sweeping back through his blood. "And now you'll
clear out!"

King stooped forward just a little, gathering himself and ready as he
saw Brodie crouch for a spring. It was just then that both remembered
old Honeycutt. For the old man, tottering in the opening of the rear
door, was muttering in a wicked sort of glee:

"Up with them hands of your'n, Swen Brodie. High up an' right quick, or
I'll blow your ugly head off'n your shoulders!"

In his trembling hands was a double-barrelled shotgun, sawed off and
doubtless loaded to the muzzle with buckshot. Though the thing wavered
considerably, its end was not six feet from Brodie's head, and both
hammers were back, while the ancient nervous fingers were playing as
with palsy about the triggers. King expected the discharge each second.

Brodie whirled and drew back, his face turning grey.

"Put it down, you old fool; put it down!" he cried raspingly. "I'll go."

The old man cackled in his delight.

"I'll put nothin' down," he announced triumphantly. "You set down that
box."

Hastily Brodie put it on the table. He drew further away, backing toward
the front door.

"Git!" cried old Honeycutt.

They could hear the air rushing back into Brodie's lungs as he came to
the door and his fear left him.

"I'll be back, Honeycutt, don't you fear," he growled savagely. "As for
you, King, you and me ain't done. I'll get you where there's no old fool
to butt in, and I'll break every bone in your body."

"I'll be ready, Brodie," said King. He watched the great hulking figure
as it went out; two hundred and fifty pounds of brawn there, every ounce
of it packed with power and the cunning of brutish battle. If he ever
fought Swen Brodie, just man to man, with only the weapons nature gave
them, what would the end be?

But Brodie was gone, his shadow withdrawn from the doorstep, and he had
his business with Honeycutt. He left the door wide open so that no one
might come suddenly upon them and turned to the old man.

"Put your gun down, Honeycutt," he said quietly. "I want to talk with
you."

"I got the big stiff on the run!" mumbled the old man. "He cain't come
an' bulldoze me. Not me, he cain't. No, nor if Swen Brodie cain't git
the best of me, no other man can," he added meaningly, glaring at King.

"There's that box on the table," said King. "Maybe you'll want to put it
away before he makes you another visit."

Honeycutt hastily set his gun down, leaning it against the wall with
both hammers still back, and shambled to the table. He caught the box up
and hugged it to his thin old breast, breathing hard.

"If there's money in it----" said King, knowing well that the old miser
had money secreted somewhere.

"Who said there was money? Who said so?"

He went to his tumbled bunk in a corner, sat down on it, thrusting the
box out of sight under the untidy heap of dirty bedding.

"I ain't talkin'," he said. He glanced at his gun. "You _git_, too."

King felt that he could not have selected a more inopportune moment for
his visit, and already began to fear that he would have no success
to-day. But it began to look as though it were a question of now or
never; Brodie would return despite the shotgun, and Brodie might now be
looked to for rough-shod methods. So, in face of the bristling
hostility, he was set in his determination to see the thing through to
one end or another. To catch an interest which he knew was always
readily awakened, he said:

"Brodie and Parker were on Lookout Ridge day before yesterday. Brodie
shoved Parker over. _At Lookout Ridge_, Honeycutt." He stressed the
words significantly while keenly watching for the gleam of interest in
the faded eyes. It came; Honeycutt jerked his head up.

"I wish I'd of shot him," he wailed. "I wish to God I'd of blowed his
ugly head off."

"It might have saved trouble," admitted King coolly. "Also, it might
have been the job to hang you, Honeycutt. Better leave well enough
alone. But listen to me: Brodie told you, and he meant it, that it was
going to be Brodie or King who got away with this deal."

"He lied! Like you lie!" Here was Honeycutt probed in his tenderest
spot. "It'll be me! Me, I tell you. I'm the only man that knows, I'm the
only man that's got the right--"

"Brodie spoke of right. No one has a right more than any other man. It's
treasure-trove, Honeycutt; it's the man's who can find it and bring it
in."

"That'll be me. You'll see. Think I'm old, do you?" He spoke jeeringly
and clenched a pair of palsied fists. "I'm feelin' right peart this
spring; by summer I'll be strong as a young feller again."

"By summer will be too late. Don't I tell you that already Brodie has
gone as far as Lookout Ridge? That means he's getting hot on the trail
of it, doesn't it? As hot as I am."

"Then what are you comin' pesterin' me for? If you know where it is?"

"I don't know." Honeycutt cackled and rubbed his hands at the admission.
"But I'm going to find out. So, probably, is Brodie. Now, look here,
Honeycutt; I haven't come to browbeat you as Brodie did. I am for making
you a straight business proposition. If you know anything, I stand ready
to buy your knowledge. In cold, hard cash."

"No man ain't got the money--not enough--not any Morgan or
Rock'feller----"

King began opening the parcel he had brought from the post-office. As he
cut the heavy cord with his pocket-knife Honeycutt looked on curiously.
King stepped to the table, standing so that out of the corners of his
eyes he commanded both doors, and stripped off the wrapping-paper.

"Look sharp, Honeycutt," he commanded. "Here's money enough to last you
as long as you live. All yours if you can tell me what I want to know."

A golden twenty-dollar coin rolled free, shone with its virgin newness
and lay on the table-top, gleaming its lure into the covetous old eyes.
Another followed it and another. King regretted that there were not
more, that the parcel contained banknotes for the most part. He began
counting it out.

"There's one thousand dollars. Right in that pile," he said. "One
thousand dollars."

"One thousand dollars. An' some of it gold. New-lookin', ain't it, Mark?
Let me have the feel of one of them twenties."

King tossed it; it fell upon the bedding, and Honeycutt's fingers dived
after it and held it tight. He began rubbing it, caressing it.

King went on counting.

"One more thousand in this pile," he said. "That's two thousand,
Honeycutt!"

"Two thousand," repeated Honeycutt, nodding. He was sucking at his lips,
his mouth puckered, his cheeks sunken in. He got up and shambled on his
cane close to the table, leaning against it, thrusting his peering eyes
down.

King counted out the last crisp note.

"Three thousand dollars." He stepped back a pace.

"Three thousand dollars! That's a might of money, Mark. Three thousand
dollars all on my table." His thin voice was a hushed whisper now. "I
never seen that much money, not all at once and spread out."

"It's likely that you'll never see that much again. Unless you and I do
business."

Honeycutt did not answer, perhaps had not heard. His emaciated arms were
uplifted; he had let his cane go, supporting himself by leaning hard
against the table; his arms curved inward, his fingers were like claws,
standing apart. Slowly the hands descended; the fingers began gathering
the few gold pieces, stacking them, lingering with each separate one,
smoothing at it. Gold spoke directly and eloquently to what stood for a
soul in Loony Honeycutt; banknotes had a voice which he understood but
which could never move him, thrill him, lift him to ecstatic heights, as
pure musical, beautiful gold could.

"It's a sight of money, Mark," he whispered "It's a sight of money."

King held his silence. His whole argument was on the table.

       *       *       *       *       *

Only now and then did King catch a glimpse of Honeycutt's eyes, for the
most part hidden by his lowered lids and bent head. At such times,
though he had counted on having to do with cupidity, he was startled by
the look he saw Here was the expression of the one emotion which dwelt
on in the withered, time-beaten body; here was _love_ in one of its ten
thousand forms. Love that is burning desire, that quenches all other
spark of the spirit, that is boundless; love of a hideously grotesque
and deformed sort; love defiled, twisted, misshapen as though Eros had
become an ugly, malformed, leering monstrosity. That love which is the
expression of the last degree of selfish greed, since it demands all and
gives nothing; that love which is like a rank weed, choking tenderer
growths; or more like a poisonous snake. Now it dominated the old man
utterly; the world beyond the rectangular top of the table did not
exist; now its elixir poured through his arteries so that for the first
time in months there came pinkish spots upon the withered cheeks,
showing through the scattering soiled grey hairs of his beard.

... Suddenly King went to the door, standing in the sunshine, filling
his lungs with the outside air. The sight of the gloating miser sickened
him. More than that. It sickened his fancies so that for a minute he
asked himself what he and Brodie were doing! The lure of gold. The thing
had hypnotized him; he wished that he were out in the mountains riding
among the pines and cedars; listening to the voice of the wilderness. It
was clean out there. Listening to Gloria's happy voice. Living in tune
with the springtime, thinking a man's thoughts, dreaming a man's dreams,
doing a man's work. And all for something other than just gold at the
end of it.

But the emotion, like a vertigo, passed as swiftly as it had come. For
he knew within himself that never had that twisted travesty of love
stirred within him; that though he had travelled on many a golden trail
it was clean-heartedly; that it was the game itself that counted ever
with him and no such poisonous emotions as grew within the wretched
breast of Loony Honeycutt. And these golden trails, though inevitably
they brought him trail fellows like Honeycutt, like Swen Brodie, were
none the less paths in which a man's feet might tread without shame and
in which the mire might be left to one side.

He turned back to the room. Honeycutt was near the bunk, groping for his
shotgun. He started guiltily, veiled his eyes, and returned empty-handed
to the table.

"If it was all in gold, now," said Honeycutt hurriedly.

King made no reference to Honeycutt's murderous intent.

"That paper is the same thing as gold," he said. "The government backs
it up."

"I know, I know. But what's a gove'ment? They go busted, don't they,
sometimes? Same as folks? Gold don't go busted. There ain't nothin' else
like gold. You can tie to it. It won't burn on you an' it won't rust."
He shook his head stubbornly. "There ain't nothin' like gold. If that
was all in twenty-dollar gold pieces, now----"

"I'll get a car here," said King. "We'll drive down to Auburn and take a
train to San Francisco. And there I'll undertake to get you the whole
thing in gold. Three thousand dollars. That is one hundred and fifty
twenty-dollar pieces."

But old Honeycutt, sucking and mouthing, shook his head.

"I couldn't leave here, an' you know it. I--I got things here," he said
with a look of great cunning, "I wouldn't go away from. Not if horses
was pullin' me."

"You can bring those things along----"

Honeycutt cried out sharply at that.

"You know I wouldn't durst! With the world full of robbers that would
be after me like hounds runnin' down a rabbit. I won't go; you cain't
make me. No man cain't."

King's patience deserted him.

"I am not going to make you do anything. Further, I am not going to put
in any more time on you. I have offered to pay you three thousand
dollars for what you know--and there is the very strong likelihood that
you don't know a bit more than I do----"

"Don't know!" shrieked Honeycutt. "Wasn't I a boy grown when the dyin',
delerious man stumbled in on the camp? Didn't I hear him talk an' didn't
I see what he had in his fist? Wasn't I settin' right side by side with
Gus Ingle when that happened? Wouldn't I of been one to go, if it hadn't
of been that I had a big knife-cut in my side you could of shoved a cat
in--give to me by a slant-eyed cuss name of Baldy Winch. Didn't I watch
'em go, the whole seven of 'em, Baldy Winch, rot him, jeerin' at me an'
me swearin' I'd get him yet, him an' Gus Ingle an' Preacher Ellson an'
the first Brodie an' Jimmy Kelp an' Manny Howard an' the Italian? Wasn't
I there?" He was almost incoherent.

"Were you?" said King. "And Baldy Winch, the one who knifed you----?"

The sucking old mouth emitted a dry chuckle.

"An' didn't I keep my promise? That very winter after Baldy was the only
man to git back. With my side just healin' didn't I make my way through
the snow out to where he was----"

"His cabin on Lookout?"

"With an axe I got there! An' him havin' a gun an' pistol an' knife.
Phoo! What good did it do him? An' didn't I square with him by takin'
what I wanted?"

"Gold?"

The old dry cackle answered the question; the bleary eyes were bright
with cunning.

"If I don't know nothin'," jibed Honeycutt, "what're you askin' me for?"

King had learned little that he did not already know. He came back to
the table and began gathering up the money.

"Wait a minute, Mark," pleaded the old man, restless as he understood
that the glittering coins were to be taken away. "Let's talk a while.
You an' me ain't had a good chat like this for a year."

"I'm going," retorted King. "But I'll make you one last proposition." He
thrust into his pocket everything excepting five twenty-dollar gold
pieces. These he left standing in a little pile. "I'll give you just
exactly one hundred dollars for a look at what is in that box of yours."

In sudden alarm the old man shambled back to his bunk, his hands on the
bedding over the box.

"You'd grab it an' run," he clacked. "You'd rob me. You're worse than
Brodie----"

"You know better than that," King told him sternly. "If I wanted to rob
you I'd do it without all this monkey business."

In his suspicious old heart Honeycutt knew that. He battled with
himself, his toothless old mouth tight clamped.

"I'll go you!" he said abruptly. "Stand back. An' give me the money
first."

King gave him the money and drew back some three or four paces.
Honeycutt drew out the box, held it lingeringly, fought his battle all
over again, and again went down before the hundred dollars. He opened
the box upon a hinged lid; he made a smooth place in the covers; he
poured out the contents.

What King saw, three articles only, were these: an old leather pouch,
bulging, probably with coins; a parcel; and a burnished gold nugget. The
nugget, he estimated roughly, would be worth five hundred dollars were
it all that it looked from a dozen feet away. The parcel, since it was
enwrapped in a piece of cloth, might have been anything. It was shaped
like a flat box, the size of an octavo volume.

Honeycutt leered.

"If Swen Brodie had of knowed what he had right in his hands," he
gloated, "he'd never of let go! Not even for a shotgun at his head!"

"Brodie hasn't gone far. He'll come back. You have your last chance to
talk business with me, Honeycutt. Brodie will get it next time."

"Ho! Will he? Not where I'm goin' to hide it, Mark King. I got another
place; a better place; a place the old hell-sarpint himself couldn't
find."

       *       *       *       *       *

King left him gloating and placing his treasures back in his box. In his
heart he knew that Brodie would come again. Soon. It began to look as
though Brodie had the bulge on the situation. For that which Mark King
could not come at by fair means Brodie meant to have by foul. For he had
little faith in the new "hidin'-place."

But on a near-by knoll, where she sat with her back to a tree, was
Gloria. He turned toward her; she waved. He saw that Brodie and two men
with him were looking out of a window of the old Honeycutt barn; he
heard one of them laughing. They were looking at Gloria----

King quickened his step to come to her, his blood ruffled by a new anger
which he did not stop to reason over. He could imagine the look in Swen
Brodie's evil little eyes.




_Chapter VII_


Gloria was genuinely glad to see King returning to her. She came to meet
him, smiling her glad welcome.

"It seemed that you were gone _hours_," she explained. "I never saw such
a dreary, lonesome place as this sleepy little town. It gives me the
fidgets," she concluded laughingly.

"These old mining camps have atmospheres all their own," he admitted
understandingly. "Once they were the busiest, most frantic spots of the
whole West; thousands of men hurrying up and down, all full of great,
big, golden hopes. They're gone, but I sometimes half believe their
ghosts hang on; the air is full of that sort of thing. A dead town
turned into a ghost town. It gets on your nerves."

She nodded soberly.

"That's what I felt, though I didn't reason it all out." Her quick smile
came back as she looked up into his face and confessed: "My, it's good
to have you back."

"Come," he said. "We'll go and have lunch. You've no idea how much gayer
things will look then."

"We're not going to eat _here_," she announced, already gay. "I stopped
in at a little funny store and ordered some things. Let's start back,
take them with us, and picnic in the first pretty spot out of sight of
old houses."

As side by side they went along through the sunshine King noted how
Brodie and a couple of men came out to look after them. He heard the
low, sullen bass of the unforgettable voice; saw that Brodie had left
his companions and was going straight to old Honeycutt's shanty. King
frowned and for an instant hung on his heel, drawing Gloria's curious
look.

"You don't like that big man with the big voice," said Gloria.

"No," he said tersely.

"It is Swen Brodie?"

"Yes. But how do you know?"

"Oh, I know lots of things people don't think I know! All girls do.
Girls are rather knowing creatures; I wonder if you realize that?"

"I don't know much about girls," he smiled at her.

She pondered the matter for a dozen steps, swinging her hat at her side
and looking away across the housetops to the mountains. She did not know
any other man who would have said that in just that way. The words were
frank; all sincerity; that is, nothing lay behind them. Archie and
Teddy, any of her boy friends in town--they knew all about girls! Or
thought that they did. Mr. Gratton with his smooth way; he led her to
suppose that he had been giving girls a great deal of studious thought
for many years, and that only after this thorough investigation did he
feel in a position to declare herself to be the most wonderful of her
sex.

"Don't you like girls?" she asked. For once she wasn't "fishing"; she
wanted to know.

"Of course I do," he told her heartily. "As well as a man can--under the
circumstances."

"You mean not knowing them better?" When he nodded she looked up at him
again, hesitated, and then demanded: "You like me, don't you?"

As the question popped out she understood even more clearly than before
that Mark King was utterly different from her various "men friends." She
had never asked a man that before; she was not accustomed to employing
either that direct method or matter-of-fact tone. Just now there was no
hint of the coquette in her; she was just a very grave-eyed girl, as
serious in her _tête-á-tête_ with an interesting male as she could have
been were she sixty years old. And she was concerned with his answer;
already she knew that he had a way of being very direct and straight
from the shoulder.

"Of course I do," he said heartily, a little surprised by the abruptness
of the question and yet without hesitation. "Very much."

She flushed prettily; she, Gloria Gaynor, flushed up because Mark King
said in blunt, unvarnished fashion: "I like you very much." The grave
sobriety went out of her eyes; they shone happily. When they reached the
"funny little store" she was humming a snatch of a bright little waltz
tune. And she was thinking, without putting the thought into words: "And
I like you very much. You are quite the most splendid man I ever saw."

King laughed over Gloria's order. Some bars of sweetened chocolate, a
bag of cookies with stale frosting in pink and white, a diminutive tin
of sardines, and two bottles of soda-water.

"Fine," he chuckled, "as far as it goes. Now we'll complete the larder.
A small coffee-pot, handful of coffee, a tin of condensed milk, a dime's
worth of sugar, can of corned beef, block of butter, loaf of bread, two
tin cups. Your marketing," he grinned at her, "we'll have for dessert."

"I didn't know," countered Gloria, making a face at him, "that I was
entertaining a starved wild man for lunch."

"You'll eat your half, I'll bet, and be ready for more a long time
before we get home."

Gloria, impatient to be on the homeward trail, assumed command in a way
which delighted King; he glimpsed the fact that she had always had her
way and was thoroughly accustomed to the issuance of orders which were
to be obeyed; further, he found her little way of Princess Gloria
entirely captivating: already she was bullying him as all of her life
she had bullied his old friend Ben.

"I'll get all of the parcels together," was what she said, "while you go
for the horses. And you'll hurry, won't you, Mark?"

"On the run, Your Majesty," he laughed.

When he had saddled and returned to her Gloria was waiting with the
various purchases in a barley-sack; she made a great pretence of being
weighted down by the great bulk of provisions demanded by man's
appetite. He took the bag from her, lifted her into her saddle, and they
rode away. Gloria flicked her horse lightly with her whip and galloped
ahead; as King followed he turned in the saddle and looked back toward
Honeycutt's cabin. He was pulled two ways: by the girlish figure ahead,
which he must follow, since it was his responsibility to bring her back
to his friend Ben; by what he fancied happening between Brodie and
Honeycutt. Brodie had been in ugly mood all along; he would be in uglier
mood now after King's interruption and the shotgun episode. Nor could
King forget what he had seen on Lookout Ridge. If Swen Brodie were sure
enough of what he was about to rid himself of Andy Parker, what would he
not do with old Honeycutt?

"I ought to go back," was what King said over and over to himself as he
rode steadily on after Gloria. The last roof lost to sight as they
turned into the mouth of a cañon, he shook off all thought of returning,
overtook Gloria, and determined to forget both Honeycutt and Brodie for
the rest of the day. To-morrow would be another day.

"There are hundreds of pretty places to picnic," said Gloria. "But it is
so much jollier by running water."

"If you can fight down that hunger of yours for a few miles," he told
her, "I'll show you the prettiest picnic spot you ever saw. And one, by
the way, that precious few folks know about. It's tucked away as if the
mountains had the notion to hide it from all invaders."

She was immediately all eagerness to come to it. But she was quick to
see that, though King laughed with her, he retained certain serious
thoughts of his own. Thoughts which, of course, had to do with his
errand to-day. She wondered what had happened at Honeycutt's; if King
had had any words with Swen Brodie. She had been wondering that ever
since he rejoined her under the tree. But now, as then, she held back
her question, since she was also wondering something else--if he would
tell her without being asked.

When they came to a spring freshet which they had crossed this morning
King turned off to the right, riding up-stream, his horse's hoofs
splashing mightily in the water. Gloria, looking on ahead, saw only
rock-bound cañon walls on either hand and a tangle of alder-bushes
across the creek.

"Come on," called King. "Keep your horse right in the water and in two
shakes I'll show you my Hidden Place. You are going to like it."

Though she was little impressed by what she could see, she followed. Now
and then an alder brushed against her; once King waited, holding back a
green barrier which he had thrust to one side. The shrubbery thickened;
in five minutes she could catch but broken glimpses of the slopes rising
to right and left. Their horses splashed through a deep pool, and King
told Gloria to let her animal have his head so that he could pick his
way among submerged boulders. There came a spot where the banks sloped
gently again, and here he rode out upon a bit of springy sward, ringed
with alder and willow. As he dismounted Gloria looked uncertainly about
her. Damp underfoot and a paradise for mosquitoes, was her thought. He
caught her look and laughed.

"We get down here and leave the horses," he informed her. "They can top
off their grain and hay with grass while we dine. We go only about fifty
steps further but we go on foot."

She came down lightly, again all eager curiosity. King carrying their
provision-bag went ahead breaking aside the shrubbery for Gloria close
at his heels. They ploughed through what looked to her like an
impenetrable thicket; they forded the stream where it widened out
placidly, stepping on boulders. Always King went ahead, holding out his
hand to her. Once she slipped, but before her boot had broken the
surface of the water his arm was about her. He caught her up, holding
her an instant. Gloria began to laugh. Then, as she regarded it, a
thoroughly astonishing thing happened; she felt her face flushing,
hotter and hotter, until it burned. She laughed again, a trifle
uncertainly, and jumped unaided to the next boulder and across to the
pebbly shallows, wading out through six inches of water.

"Little fool!" she chided herself, hot with vexation. "What in the world
did you want to blush like that for? He will think you are about ten
years old."

For his part King stood stock-still a moment, regarding the water
rushing about him. He had caught her to save her from falling, he had
held her for something less than a round second. And yet something of
her pervaded his senses, it had been a second fraught with intimacy, her
hair had blown across his face, she had thrilled through him like a
sudden burst of music ... When he jerked his head up and looked at her
he could not see her face; she was very busy with a white pebble she
had picked up. He jumped across to land and went on, and the incident
sank away into silence.

He was glad to come to what he called the door to the Hidden Place. He
opened it for her; that is, he shoved aside a mass of leaves, holding
the branches back with his body. Gloria went through the opening thus
afforded, climbed a long, slanting whitish granite slab, and cried out
ecstatically at the beauty of the spot. Before her was a tiny meadow, as
green and smooth as velvet, thick with white and yellow violets. About
it, rimming it in clean lines which did not invade the sward, were
pines, and beyond the pines, to be seen in broken glimpses among their
sturdy straight trunks, were the cliffs shutting all in. Through one of
these vistas she saw a white waterfall, its wide-flung drops of spray
all the colours of the rainbow as the sun caught them. The water fell
into a green pool, spilled over, flowed through a rock channel of its
own ancient carving, and curved away through the meadow. On the edge of
this granite basin, with showers of spray breaking over it, a little
bird bobbed and dipped and, lifting its head with its own inimitably
bright gesture, broke into a sweet singing as liquidly musical as the
falling water.

"The Water-Ouzel!" cried Gloria. "See, I remembered his name. And he is
here to welcome us."

Under the pines, where the ground was dry, King made their camp-fire, a
small blaze of dry twigs between two flat stones. Gloria was every bit
as exultantly delighted with the moment as she could have been were she
really "about ten years old."

"I want to help. What can I do? Tell me, Mark, what can I do? Oh, the
coffee; you can't make coffee without water, can you?" She caught up the
new tin coffee-pot and ran across the meadow to the creek. The little
bird had given over singing and watched her; when she was mindful of his
previous rights and did not come too near his waterfall, he gave over
any foolish notion he may have had of flight and cocked his eye again at
the pool. Perhaps the coffee-pot put him in mind of his own dinner.
Gloria, kneeling at her task, watched him. He seemed to reflect a
moment; then with a sudden flirt and flutter he had broken the surface
of the water and was gone out of sight. She gasped; he had gone right
under the waterfall, a little bundle of feathers no bigger than her
clenched hand. She knelt with one knee getting wet and never knowing it;
she began to feel positive that the hardy, headlong little fellow surely
must be battered to death and drowned. Then with the abruptness of a
flash of light there he was again, on the surface now, driving himself
forward toward the bank. And there he sat again on his rock, the water
flung from him to flash and mingle with the falling spray, his head
back, his throbbing little throat pouring out his fluent melody. Gloria
laughed happily and went back to King and the fire with her pot of
water.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I love this!" said Gloria softly.

She was drinking a tin cup of strong cheap coffee cooled with condensed
milk; in her other hand was a thick man-made sandwich of bread, butter,
and corned beef. King laughed.

"What?" he demanded. "What particular article of my daintily served
luncheon has made the great hit with you? Is it, perhaps, the rancid
butter that you adore?"

"You know. I love this." Her look embraced the universe--began with the
dying fire, swept on beyond the tree-tops against the deep blue of sky.
"I don't know why people live in cities, with all of this shut out."

"The call of the wild!" He spoke lightly and yet he glimpsed a soul
really stirred; saw that for the moment, if for no longer, the great
solitudes held her enthralled. More seriously he added: "It's the blood
of your ancestors. It is just getting a chance to make itself heard. The
racket of Market Street drowns it out."

She nodded thoughtfully. They did full justice to their lunch, finished
with her purchases for dessert, quite as he had prophesied, and lazed
through the nooning hour. Gloria lay on a yielding mat of pine-needles,
her eyes grave as her spirit within her was grave, moved by influences
at once vague, restless, and tremendous. This was not her first day in
the woods, and yet she felt strangely that it was. He had spoken of her
"ancestors." She knew little of her mother's and her father's forbears;
she had never been greatly concerned with individuals whom she had never
known. In a way she had been led to think, by her own mother, however so
innocently, that she was "living them down." They had been of a ruder
race that had lived in a ruder day. In San Francisco, to Miss Gloria
Gaynor in a pretty new gown, one of a cluster of dainty girls, those
grandparents had seemed further away than the one step of removal
between them and her nearer blood. To-day they came near her, very near,
indeed, for the hour that she lay looking up at the sky. Not many words
passed between her and King; he sat, back to tree, and smoked his pipe
and was quite content with the silence.

She started out of a reverie to find King standing up, his body rigid as
he stood in the attitude of one who listens, his head a little to one
side, his eyes narrowed.

"Wait for me," he said. "I'll be back in just a minute."

She sat up and watched him. He went back to the sloping granite slab,
over it, down among the alders, and out of sight. For a moment she heard
him among the bushes; then as all sound made by him died away there was
only the purl of the creek and the eternal murmur of the pines. Now it
seemed to her more silent than before, even when King had sat wordlessly
near her. And yet, incongruously, whereas the silence was deepened by
utter solitude, the voices of running water and stirring trees rose
clearer, louder, more insistent. A falling pine-needle, striking all but
noiselessly at her side, made her turn swiftly.

Only now did she hear that other sound, which King had detected. It was
the thud of horses' hoofs; with it came men's voices faintly. King had
gone that way, Gloria stood up, smothered under a sense of aloneness
She resented his going; she was on the verge of calling to him; her
heart began to beat faster. She wasn't afraid ... she didn't think she
was afraid....

When he came up over the rock again, gone but a few moments, true to his
word, she ran to meet him. She had not been afraid, but engulfed by an
emotion which had seemed not born within her but a mighty emanation of
the woods themselves, and which in its effect was not unlike fear. An
emotion which, now that King was here, was lifted out of her and blown
away like a whiff of smoke before the mountain winds. She looked at him
with new curiosity, wondering at herself, wondering at him that his
presence or absence could make all this world of difference. She saw him
in a new, bright light, as one may see for the first time a stranger on
whom much depends. He was strong, she thought; strong of body, of mind,
of heart. He was like the mountains, which were not complete without
him. His eyes were frank and clear and honest; and yet they were, for
her, filled with mystery. For he was man, and his physical manhood was
splendidly, vigorously vital. She had danced with men and boys, flirted
with them, made friends of a sort with them. Yet none of them had set
her wondering as King did. The repressed curl of his short, crisp hair,
the warm tan of his face and hands and exposed throat, the very gleam of
his perfect teeth, and the flow of the muscles under his shirt--these
things by the sheer trick of opposites sent her fancies scurrying. To
Gratton. How unlike the two men were. And how glad she was that now it
was King coming up over the rock to her.... It had been to Gratton that
she had said: "He is every inch a man!" She stopped abruptly and waited
for him to come to her side.

"We must be going," he said. "You have rested?"

She nodded, and he began gathering up coffee-pot, cups, scraps of paper;
bits of food he left for bird and chipmunk, but the tin cans were
dropped behind an old log and covered over with leaves. She would not
have thought of that; she understood the reason and was glad that their
own arrival here had not been spoiled for them by finding a litter of
other campers' leavings. He stamped out the few embers of their fire,
and, not entirely satisfied, though there was but little danger of
forest fires here in green young June, nevertheless went to the creek
for water and doused the one or two black charred sticks which still
emitted thin wisps of smoke.

"Those men?" queried Gloria when it was clear that he would require
prompting. "Who were they?"

"Some chaps from Coloma, packing off into the woods."

"Swen Brodie?" she demanded.

"Yes. Swen Brodie and half a dozen of his ilk."

"We will overtake them? Is that why you are in a hurry now?"

"No. We won't see anything of them. That's what I went to find out. We
are within a few hundred yards of the fork in the trail; they turned off
to the right, as I thought they would."

"You would like to follow after them?" She gathered that from a vague
something in his voice and from a look, not so vague, in his eyes. "If I
were not along you would go the way they have gone?"

"Yes," he admitted. "But you are along, you know! What is more,"--as he
realized that she might fear he resented her being with him,--"I am glad
that you are. And now shall we start? We've a long ride ahead of us
yet."

She followed him down through the alders; at the pool where she had
slipped before, and he had held her in his arms, she was very careful
not to slip now. Nor did they look at each other while she lightly
touched his hand and they crossed over. For an hour, until the
wilderness worked its green magic upon them again, they were a very
silent man and girl, he pondering on Brodie and his men pushing on into
the solitudes, she wondering many things about her companion--and about
herself.




_Chapter VIII_


Through the long shadows of evening they rode back to the log house.
While King unsaddled, Gloria stood watching him; her eyes shone softly
through the dusk.

"It has been a truly wonderful day," she said simply.

"It is you who have been wonderful," he answered stoutly. "I know you
are not used to long rides like ours to-day; I know you are tired out.
And you never gave a sign."

"The blood of my ancestors," she laughed happily.

In the house Gratton looked at them sharply and suspiciously; Archie and
Teddy saw only Gloria through sorrowful eyes. King, with a nod to the
various guests and a few words with Mrs. Gaynor, entirely given to warm
praise of her daughter, drew Ben aside for a discussion of conditions as
he had found them and left them to-day. He was dead sure that Brodie had
gone back to Honeycutt, had gotten what he wanted, and was off in a
bee-line to put to the proof the old man's tale.

Gloria was off to bed early, saying "good-night everybody" rather
absently. She climbed up the stairs wearily. When her mother slipped
away from the others, having started the victrola and urged them to
dancing, she found Gloria ready for bed but standing before her window,
looking out at the first stars. Mrs. Gaynor discovered in her little
daughter a new, grave-eyed uncommunicativeness. Gloria usually had so
many bright, gushing things to say after a day of pleasure, but to-night
she appeared oddly preoccupied.

"Oh, I'm dead tired, mamma," she said impatiently. "Nothing happened.
I'll tell you to-morrow--anything I can think of. And now, good-night;
I'm so sleepy." She kissed her mother and added: "I didn't tell Mark
good-night--"

"_Mark_? Already, my dear?"

"He was outside with papa," said Gloria, slipping into bed. "Will you
tell him good-night for me?"

"He's gone," retorted her mother, with a certain relish.

"Gone!" Gloria sat up, a very pretty picture of consternation. "Where?"

"Back into the woods. Where he came from, of course. I actually think,"
and she laughed deprecatingly though with a shrewd watchful look to mark
her daughter's quick play of expression, "that that man couldn't sleep
two consecutive nights under a roof. His clothes smell like a pine-tree.
He wouldn't understand us any more than we could understand him, I
suppose."

Gloria was silent and thoughtful. Then, "Good-night, mamma," she offered
again, her cheek snuggled against her pillow. "And put out the light as
you go, please."

Mrs. Gaynor, accepting her dismissal though reluctantly, sighed and went
out. As the door closed Gloria tossed back the covers and sprang out of
bed, going again to her window. She watched the mountain ridges turn
blacker and blacker; saw a second star and another and suddenly the
heavens filled with a softly glimmering spray of twinkling lights; she
heard the night wind rustling, tender with vague voices. A tiny shiver
shook the white shoulders, a shiver not from cold, since not yet had the
air chilled. Through her mind swept a dozen vivid pictures, all of King,
most of them of him out there, alone with the night and the mountains.
But she saw him also as she had seen him to-day; riding before her,
breaking the alders aside, catching her as she fell. All day she had
thrilled to him. Now, more than ever, she thrilled. She imagined she saw
him striding along through the big boles of the pines; passing swiftly,
silent and stern, through a faint patch of light; standing in the
shadows, listening, his keen eyes drilling the obscurity; passing on
again, vigorous, forceful, determined, and "splendid." She wondered if
he would come up with Swen Brodie; most of all she wondered when she
would see him again.

In all likelihood Miss Gloria, healthy, tired young animal, would have
slept until noon next day had she been left to her own devices. But at
nine o'clock her mother came up with a breakfast-tray. Gloria regarded
it sleepily.

"I would have let you sleep, my dear," said Mrs. Gaynor, "but there are
your guests, you know----"

"Hang my guests," was Gloria's morning greeting. "Just because I invited
them up here do I have to give up every shred of my independence?" She
was lying in identically the same position in which she had dropped off
to sleep the night before; now she turned and emitted a sudden "Ouch!"
Not only was she stiff from head to foot; her whole body ached as though
it were nothing but bruises.

So began Gloria's day after her picnicking with Mark King. And in very
much the same way her day continued. Long before the sun set she had
quarrelled with Georgia, turned up her nose at Teddy, laughed derisively
at poor Archie's dog-like devotion, and considerably perplexed and
worried Mr. Gratton, who was astute enough to keep tactfully in the
background, hurt her mother's feelings, and alarmed her father by a wild
and for the instant perfectly heartfelt determination to go and be a
"movie" actress. There was no dancing that night. Gloria, when they
thought her upstairs, sat alone out in the gloaming, a wistful, drooping
little girl surrendering sweepingly to youthful melancholia. She didn't
know just what the matter was; she didn't seek for reasons and
explanations; she merely stared at the far-off stars which swam in a
blue blur, and felt miserable.

But morning came again, as bright as that first day in Eden; the birds
sang and the air was crisp, and young blood ran pleasantly. She came
down early, all radiant smiles; she kissed her mother on both cheeks and
the lips, rumpled her father's hair affectionately, went for a stroll
with Mr. Gratton before breakfast, craved Georgia's pardon abjectly, and
made the world an abiding-place of joy for the college boys.

Gloria was mildly surprised that Gratton did not appear in the least to
resent her day of adventuring with King. He was interested; he did shake
his head with one of his suave smiles and murmur "Lucky dog!" when King
was referred to. But his interest seemed to be chiefly in "that quaint
little relic of past, turbulent days, Coloma." He had her tell him all
about it; of the deserted houses, the store, everything. Hence his
curiosity in Honeycutt and Brodie, and just what happened between King
and them, did not stand out alone and made no impression on Gloria. Long
ago Gratton had had from her lips what rumours had been repeated by her
father to her mother and then relayed on to her own ears. Down in San
Francisco, busied with her own youthful joys, this quest of Ben Gaynor
and Mark King had had no serious import to the girl; she had merely
chatted of it because of its colourful phases. Naturally, had she
thought a great deal of it, she would have supposed that Gratton, in
nowise concerned, was even more superficially interested than herself.

By the end of the week her guests began taking their leaves. Georgia and
Connie Grayson were off to foregather with a crowd of friends at the
Lake Tahoe "Tavern"; Evelyn returned to her mother in Oakland; Archie
departed importantly to aid his father "in the business"; Teddy went
away regretfully. Even Mr. Gratton, having lingered longest of all, went
back to his city affairs, promising to run up again when he could,
prophesying smilingly that he would see both Gloria and her mother in
town within ten days. Ben, leaving his oldest and most dependable
timber-jack to look out for the womenfolk, hastened back to the
lumber-camp, where he returned like a fish to water to his old pipe and
old clothes and roomy boots. And Gloria was plunged deep into
loneliness.

She would walk up the creek back of the house, sit by the hour near the
pool where the water came slithering down over a green and grey boulder,
watching for the water-ouzel, entertained in an absent sort of way by
his bobbings and flirtings and snatches of song. She dreamed day-dreams;
she started expectantly every time a chipmunk made a scurrying racket
in dead leaves. She made a hundred romantic conclusions to the story,
just begun, by Mark King going in the night into the mountains where
Brodie was. Her mind was rife with speculation, having ample food for
thought in all the information she had extracted from her father. Thus,
she knew of Andy Parker's death; of old Honeycutt's box; of Honeycutt's
boastings of a wild youth; of Brodie's threats and King's interference
and the old man's shotgun. If she could only _know_ what was happening
now out there beyond those silent blue barriers! Night after night she
stood at her window, swayed through many swift moods by her live
fancies.

She grew wildly homesick for town. A theatre, dance, a ride through the
park. Activity. And people. It was for her mother that she consented to
remain here another week. Mrs. Gaynor declared that she must have a few
more days of rest; she was worn out from a year of going eternally,
entertaining or being entertained. Gloria, yielding, plunged into an
orgy of letter-writing. She answered letters weeks old; she scribbled
countless bright and unnecessary notes. Also she succeeded in getting
her mother to drive with her frequently to Tahoe, to call on those of
their friends there who had come to the mountains so early in the
season. Several times they remained overnight at the Tavern.

It was after one of these absences that Jim Spalding, the old
timber-jack, told Mrs. Gaynor in his abashed stammer that Mark King had
showed up while they were gone. Gloria, on her way to her room, whirled
and came back, and extracted the tale in its entirety, pumping it out of
the brief, few-worded old Spalding in jerky details. King had appeared
late yesterday afternoon, coming out of the woods. Looked like he'd been
roughin' it an' goin' it hard, at that. Had told Jim he wanted to
telephone. Had stuck around for a while gettin' his call through; had
eaten supper with Jim; had gone back into the woods just about dark.
That was all Jim knowed about it.

Rather, that was all that he supposed he knew until Miss Gloria was
done with him. She dragged other bits of information to the surface.
King had phoned her father; they had talked ten minutes; Mr. Gaynor was
to telephone to the log house again to-morrow or next day. There would
be a message for King; mos' likely from Coloma. King wanted to know
something; Ben was to find out; King would turn up within a few days for
the message.

Mrs. Gaynor that same day said to her daughter in a way so casual that
Gloria immediately was on the alert:

"You've been very sweet to stay up here in this lonely place with me,
dear. I am ready to go at any time now. Shall we go to-morrow?"

"Mother thinks she is so deep!" was Gloria's unspoken comment.

"We've such a lot of packing to do," said Gloria, with an assumption of
carelessness far more artistic than her mother's. "And I'm as sleepy and
lazy as an owl after being up so late last night." Her yawn, softly
patted by four pink-and-white fingers, was as ingenuous as a kitten's.
"I'm really in no hurry, mamma. To-morrow, if we're ready. Or next day."

They were still in the log house when, twenty-four hours later, the
telephone rang, and Gloria, quick to forestall her mother, heard the
operator saying: "Coloma calling Ben Gaynor's residence."

"Coloma!" thought Gloria with a quickened heartbeat. Then it wouldn't be
her father, after all; it would be Mark King----

But her father it was, and she was disappointed. The message, however,
was for King.

"Mark will show up in a day or so," he said. "Tell him that I did as he
asked; that Brodie is in and out from here, the Lord knows what about;
that old Honeycutt boasts that what he has hidden nobody is going to
find. I think if he ever talks to anybody it will be to me, and I'll run
in and see him whenever I get a chance to get over here. And tell King
that--that----Oh, I guess that's all; better let me have a word with
your mother."

Ben Gaynor was never the man for successful subterfuge, especially with
his daughter; she could read every look in his eye, every twitch of his
mouth, and now, over many miles of country telephone lines, she knew
that her beloved old humbug of a male parent was "holding out on her."
Her first impulse was to face him down and demand to be told the rest.
But realizing that a father at the end of a long-distance line was
possessed of a certain strategic advantage presenting more difficulties
than a mother at hand, she said lightly:

"All right, papa. I'll call her. Be sure you take good care of yourself.
Bydie." She relinquished the telephone instrument to her mother and
stood waiting.

She could hear the buzzing of her father's voice but no distinct word.
Her mother said "Yes?" and "Yes," and "Yes, Ben." And then: "Oh, _Ben_!
I don't understand." And then her mother's voice sharpened, and she cut
into something Gaynor was saying: "I can't say anything like _that_! It
is as though we suspected him of being underhanded. And----"

Such scraps of talk were baffling, and Gloria, with scant patience for
the baffling, moved up and down restlessly. When her mother had clicked
up the receiver, Gloria followed her and demanded to be told. Mrs.
Gaynor looked worried; said it was nothing, and refused to talk. But in
five minutes her daughter knew everything Gaynor had said. King was to
be told that Gratton, instead of going straight to San Francisco, had
gone down to Placerville, and next had turned up at Coloma; that he had
spent three days there; that he had gone several times to Honeycutt's
shanty, and had been seen, more than once, with Swen Brodie.

"It's an outrage," cried Mrs. Gaynor, "to retail all that to Mark King.
What business of his is it if Mr. Gratton does go to Coloma, or anywhere
else?"

"That's for you and papa to argue out," said Gloria serenely.

"We are going back to San Francisco to-morrow!"

"I'm not. You know I'm not ready to go yet."

"That is very undutiful, Gloria," said her mother anxiously. "When your
own mother----"

"Oh, let's not get tragic! And, anyway, papa wanted us to stay until Mr.
King came, so that we could tell him."

"Jim Spalding will be here; he can tell----"

"Why, mamma! After papa has trusted to _us_ to see that his message is
delivered!" Gloria looked shocked, incredulous. "Surely----"

So they waited for Mark King to come again out of the forest. All the
next day Gloria, dressed very daintily and looking so lovely in her
expectancy that even old Jim Spalding's eyes followed her everywhere,
watched from the porch or a window or her place by the creek. She was
sure that he would step out of the shadows into the sun with that
familiar appearance of having just materialized from among the tree
trunks; over and over she was prepared, with prettily simulated
surprise, to greet his coming. But the day passed, night drove them
indoors to a cosy fireplace and lights and fragments of music which
Gloria played wistfully or crashingly in bursts of impatience, and still
he did not come. Mrs. Gaynor went off to bed at nine o'clock; Gloria,
suddenly absorbed in a book, elected to sit up and finish her chapter.
She outwatched the log fire; at eleven o'clock the air was chill, and
Gloria as she went upstairs shivered a little and felt tired and vaguely
sad.

The next day she put on another pretty dress, did her hair in her
favourite way, and went about the house as gay as a lark. The day
dragged by; King did not come. By nightfall the look in Gloria's eyes
had altered, and a stubborn expression played havoc with the tenderer
curves of her mouth. She resented at this late date King's way of going;
not only had he not told her good-bye, he had left no word with her
father for her. She sat smiling over a letter received some days ago
from Gratton--after she had retrieved the letter from a heap of crumpled
papers in her bedroom waste-paper basket. She read to her mother
fragments, bright, gossipy remarks in Gratton's clever way of saying
them; she wrote a long, dashingly composed answer.

Two days later she said to her mother, out of a long silence over the
coffee cups:

"Let's go back to San Francisco. This stupid place gets on my nerves."

"Why, of course, dear," agreed Mrs. Gaynor. "I can have everything
packed this afternoon, and to-morrow----"

"Nonsense," said Gloria. "You know we can get packed in half an hour."

That day they left Jim Spalding in charge and departed for Truckee to
catch a train for San Francisco. Mrs. Gaynor dutifully entrusted to
Spalding her husband's message for Mark King. That is to say, that
portion of the message which she considered important. Gloria herself
left no message with old Jim; not in so many words. But she did impress
him with her abundant gaiety, with her eagerness for San Francisco,
where all of her best and dearest friends were. If any one should ask
old Jim concerning Miss Gloria, Jim would be sure to make it clear that
she had no minutest regret in going but a very lively anticipation of
the fullest happiness elsewhere.




_Chapter IX_


Three or four weeks passed before Mark King and Gloria met again. Weeks
of busy gaiety on her part, of steady, persistent seeking on his. Now
again Gloria and her mother and Ben were at the log house in the
mountains, this time with a fresh set of guests. Only one of the former
flock had been invited: Mr. Gratton. And this despite Ben Gaynor's
uneasy "This chap Gratton, Nellie. He's cutting in pretty strong here of
late, and I don't know that I like him. He's too confounded smooth
somehow."

King came the day after the guests arrived for a talk with Ben. Gloria
knew that he was coming and was coolly prepared to meet him. She gave
him a bright little nod, friendly enough but casual, and resumed her
lively chatter with her friends. King went off with Gaynor. That night
there was no moon, but the stars, those great glittering stars of the
Sierra, made the hour softly palpitant. King betook himself to smoke
upon that particular, remembered corner of the porch; Gloria, slipping
out from a dance, felt the little thrill that would not down when she
found him there. In their two chairs, necessarily close together since
the nook was so cosily narrow, her shoulder now and then brushing his as
she moved, the faint fragrances from her gown and hair blown across his
face by the night breeze--for them his pipe hastily laid aside--they sat
talking softly or in a pleasant silence. The next morning--the matter
seemed to arrange itself with very little help from either--they were to
have a ride together This time they would take their lunch. When they
said good-night Gloria impulsively gave him her two hands; he remembered
how she had done that the first time he had seen her. Her face was
lifted up to his; in the starlight he saw her eyes shining softly,
gloriously; he saw her mouth, the lips barely apart. For an instant his
hands shut down hard on hers; he felt the faint pressure of her own in
return. When they heard her mother in the doorway calling, "Gloria,
where are you?" they started apart. A strange and unanalysed sense of
secrecy had fallen upon them; Gloria whispered, "Good-night, Mark," and
then calling, "Here I am, mamma; just cooling off," she went skipping
down the porch, slipped her arm about her mother, and carried her back
into the house.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before the new day was fairly come they met in the fringe of pines.
Again they shook hands; again for an instant they stood as they had
stood last night. They were tremblingly close to the first kiss.
Suddenly Gloria, with her colour high and her eyes hidden under lashes
which King marvelled at, lashes laid tenderly against her cheeks, pulled
her hands out of his and began drawing on her gauntlets. Gravely, as
though here were a rite to be approached solemnly, he lifted her into
the saddle. They turned their horses and rode up the ridge among the
trees.

They heard together the first sleepy twitterings of hidden birds; they
saw the black shadows thinning; they watched the light come upon the
peaks. Ridges shook off the shadow cloaks, seemed to quiver as they
awoke to the new day, grew flushed and rosy. The chill of the early
morning air was like wine, sparkling, tingling in the blood. The smell
of resinous woods was insistent, the fine bouquet to the rare vintage.
The day, the world, themselves--all were young together--all awakening
to the full, true, and triumphant meaning of life. They rode a mile with
never a spoken word but in a never-broken communion; then it was Gloria
who spoke first, saying, as she had said once before: "I love it!"

They followed narrow trails through the ceanothus-bushes, riding one
behind the other; they climbed steep trails among the pines; then went
down steep trails among granite boulders; they rode side by side through
little upland valleys and grassy meadows. They broke off sprays of
resinous needles as they rode, inhaling the sharp odours; they stooped
for handfuls of fragrant sage; they splashed through swampy places where
the grass and stalks of lush flowers swept their stirrups, through
rock-bound noisy streams where they must pick their way cautiously, and
where the horses snorted and shook their heads and Gloria laughed
gleefully. To-day was like the completion of that other day when they
had ridden to Coloma--to both it seemed that it was only yesterday. The
weeks in between did not matter; they were wiped out of life by the
green magic. Unfinished topics, left over from the first ride, presented
themselves now to be completed. Once Gloria, speaking of their first
woodland luncheon, said "Yesterday." Once King, as they crossed a wild
mountain brook, said, "There's one's nest now. On that rock down by the
waterfall. Looks like a bit of the rock itself, with moss all about it,"
and Gloria understood that it was her water-ouzel he was talking about.

"It was springtime yesterday and to-day it's summer!" said Gloria.

"It's always springtime somewhere in the world," answered King. "To-day
we'll ride from one season up into the other."

"More magic!" laughed Gloria.

It is always springtime somewhere in the world! As youth knows and
remembers, as age forgets. Always a place somewhere for laughter and
love and light hands caressing, for bird song and bird mating and
colourful flowers. And to-day they were seeking this place among the
mountains, riding on expectantly through dark passes, climbing winding
trails, looking across deep cañons and blue ridges. Gloria thought
dreamily that she would like always to be riding thus, leaving summer
behind and below, questing the joyous, full-sapped springtime.

He had promised to show her his latest temporary camp. They came to it
before noon at an altitude of well above seven thousand feet. In a
grassy open space they left their horses; King carried their lunch
bundle and they went on on foot. Along the frothing creek, along the
mountain-side through a wild country of dwarfed vegetation. She began to
understand a thing he had told her; that the Sierra is the land of dwarf
and giant. Pine and cedar and, in one spot he knew, mighty sequoia
piercing at the sky; and here pine, dwarfed, pygmied until it was but a
mat of twisted, broken twigs carpeting the heights. "And I have walked
among the pine tops!" cried Gloria. For up here there was scant soil;
here the winds raged and the snow heaped itself high in the late fall
and remained, icy-crusted, into late summer; and here, now, the
springtime had just come. Never had Gloria seen more beautiful flowers,
flowers half so delicate-looking. And yet how hardy they must be, to
live here at all!

"You are like these flowers," King said quite gravely and with
sincerity. Gloria told him, also gravely and sincerely, that that was
the finest compliment she had ever received--she hoped that he meant it.
At least she understood and she would like to be like them.

His camp was in a little nearly level spot, sheltered by crags and so
hidden by them that one must come fairly upon it before guessing its
proximity. Back of it rose cliffs so sheer that Gloria craned her neck
to look up at them. Below were the headwaters of the creek; across it
the steep slope of the other cañon wall. On all hands bleak, naked rock
with tiny blossoms here and there between in the shallow soil and the
carpeting of pygmy pine and flattened cedar. Only infrequently did a
tree, with roots gripping like claws, lift its ragged top above the big
boulders. A wild place, savagely silent save for the hissing of the wind
around the cliffs above.

King brought water from the creek. He showed her where he had hidden his
few camp utensils; the one small pot, one frying-pan, one cup, one
spoon. To these he added his big-bladed pocket-knife. He made a fire
where already there was a little heap of charred coals against a
blackened rock, and they made coffee and cooked bacon. Gloria used a
stick which he had pointed for her to turn the bacon. They took turns
with the one cup.

"What was it like up on the cliff tops?" King did not know; he had not
yet been up there. And would it take long to climb them? Not over an
hour, he estimated; if she wasn't tired? It was decided that King would
have his postprandial smoke up there; where they could sit and look out
"across the top of the world."

As they climbed they came into a current of rushing air. Higher up the
wind strengthened. They stood poised on boulders, their shoulders thrown
back, heads up, lungs filling. Gloria's hair was whipped out from under
her turban; it blew across her face; a strand of it fluttered across
King's eyes, brushed his lips. He gave her his hand up a steep place
down which they sent a cascade of disintegrating stone. They stood side
by side, shoulders brushing, resting, breathing deeply. Perceptibly the
air thinned; one's lungs were taxed to capacity here; the blood
clamoured for deeper drafts, for more oxygen. When they came to the top
Gloria dropped down, panting, though they had stopped many times on the
way. She closed her eyes and her senses swam through a vast blur. King
gave her a drink from his canteen; she merely thanked him with her eyes.

But in ten minutes she had rested and was on her feet, her slim body
leaning against the wind. He stood by her and they looked out across the
mountains. For what seemed to Gloria a thousand miles there was the
broken wilderness of mountains gashed with gorges, crowned with peaks,
painted with sunlight and distance, glinting white here, veiled in
purple there. She gasped at the bigness of it; it spoke of the vastness
of the world and of the world's primitive savagery. And yet it did not
repel; it fascinated and its message had the seeming of an old,
oft-told, and half-forgotten tale. It threatened with its spires as
cruel as bared fangs, and yet it beckoned and invited with its blue
distances. Always, since the first man fashioned the first club and made
him a knife of a jagged flint, has mankind battled with the great
mother, the earth who bore him. He has striven with her for his food,
warred with her for his raiment, entrenched himself against the
merciless attack of the seasons, winter to stab him with icy spear,
summer to consume him. And always has he loved her and honoured her,
since she is his great mother. Gloria, her thoughts confused by
conflicting instincts, inspired and awed, drew closer to King.

"--But to be out here alone!" The utter, utter loneliness of it. She
looked at him with new, curious eyes. "Doesn't it bear down on you;
don't you feel at times that the loneliness----"

He understood.

"I am used to it, you know. I have never known what it was out here to
feel lonely until----"

She waited for him to finish, her eyes on his. Until----?

"Until after our first ride together," he said.

Again she understood. And now she looked away hastily and her cheeks
reddened. He was about to tell her that he loved her; his eyes had told
her; his lips were shaping to the words "I love you!" And she was
suddenly conscious of a wild nutter in her heart; she was trembling as
though terrified. Other men had told her "I love you." Many times and in
many ways--smiling, with a laugh, with a sigh--whispering the words or
saying them half sternly. And she had always been gay and ready; a
little thrilled, perhaps, as by a chance strain of music. But now--she
could hardly breathe. Now she was frightened. She did not know why; she
could not understand the sense of it; she only knew that she was afraid.
Of what? Nor did she know that. She only knew that here were Gloria
Gaynor and Mark King, man and girl--man and woman--set apart from the
world, lifted above it, clear-cut figures upon a pinnacle piercing the
infinite blue of the heavens, and that a mystery was unfolding before
them. She had a wild wish to stop the flight of time, to thrust it back
upon itself, to have the present not the present but to avoid the Now by
racing back into the serenity of Just A Little While Ago. Ten minutes
ago--anything but this electric, terrifying moment when Mark King, a
surge of emotion upon him, was about to say: "I love you."

"Look!" Gloria started and, forgetful of the strange conflict of
emotions within her, clutched at his sleeve. "A man--here;----"

"Swen Brodie!" muttered King angrily.

Brodie had just clambered up the ridge and came into view only when his
head and bulky shoulders were upthrust beyond a boulder. He came on
until he topped the boulder, standing fully revealed upon its flattish
top, the butt of his rifle resting on his boot. Gloria was suddenly
afraid with a new sort of fear. Though this man was not near enough for
her to see the dancing evil of his little eyes, she saw the brutish face
in full relief against the sky, and marked the jeer on the ugly mouth.
Her one wild thought was that Brodie would murder them both, shoot them
both down in cold blood. She shuddered. King was unarmed; Brodie hated
King as only a man of Brodie's kind, bestial and cruel, could hate. She
remembered what her father had told her; of the death of Andy Parker.
She began tugging at King.

"Take me away!" she gasped. And then, with a terrified look over her
shoulder: "Oh, he is terrible!"

Perhaps Brodie heard. The stiff wind blew her words away from her lips,
tossing them toward him.

"Steady, Gloria," said King in a low voice. "I'll take you away. But we
needn't hurry. He won't hurt you." And, to further soothe her, he added:
"He'd be afraid to shoot, were he minded to. The noise of the gun, you
know. And he doesn't know how many there are with us, or how close they
are. Come, we'll go this way."

He turned his back square on Brodie and with his hand firm on Gloria's
arm led her along the ridge. They passed about a wind-worn rock, and
Gloria looked back, hoping that it had hidden them already from Brodie;
she saw his head over the top of it, felt upon her the eyes which she
could not see, lost as they were under his hat-brim and hurried on. She
ran ahead now with King hastening his step to overtake her.




_Chapter X_


That night when King and Gloria said "good-night" an odd constraint lay
over them. To Gloria, King seemed stiff and preoccupied; she herself had
red spots in her cheeks and was nervously tense. The abrupt approach of
Brodie with his repulsive face--at a moment when the world swirled away
from her underfoot and a divine madness was in her blood--the reaction
and revulsion--all this and the resultant conflict of emotions had worn
her out. She was sure of nothing in all the world--for once was not in
the least certain of herself--when she drew her hand out of King's and
hastened to her guests in the house. It was with a sense of relief that
she heard the door close, shutting her in with familiar, homey objects
and faces, opposing its barrier against the wilderness and a man who was
a part of the wilderness. She knew that King was going back to the
mountains; she knew when he left, going swiftly and silently, like a
shadow among shadows; she knew that this time he went armed, carrying
her father's rifle.

For Mark King knew that it was inevitable that his path and Swen
Brodie's should run closer and closer; that trails made by two men like
King and Brodie could never converge harmoniously; that there was too
much at stake; that it was well to be ready for Brodie in an ugly mood
in an encounter so far removed from the habitations of men that a deed
done would pass without human commentary.

A week passed and Gloria went back to San Francisco. These had been
seven days and nights of uncertainty for her, and had brought hours of
confusion that mounted into bewilderment. She had sung and danced and
flirted as even Gloria Gaynor had never done before; she had made
Gratton sure of her and his eyes had smouldered and his chalky pale face
had flushed; she had sent him off, gnawing at his nails; she had made
other young laughter rise like echoes of her own; she had sighed and sat
long hours at her window, wondering, wondering, wondering. In the end
she had gone, leaving her little note for Mark King.

King did not return to the log house. He knew that long ago Gloria would
have gone; there was nothing to draw him in her absence. He kept in
touch, none too close, with Ben Gaynor; telephoned him once from Coloma,
and once sent a note to him by a hunter he encountered on Five Lakes
Creek, above Hell Hole, the note to be mailed in Truckee some time
later, and to reach Gaynor the following day at his lumber-camp. These
were strenuous days during which King penetrated the most out-of-the-way
corners of the mountains. He constructed his theories and strove
doggedly to set them to the proof. He held that when Baldy Winch had
made him a cabin in so inaccessible and distant a spot as the crest of
Lookout Ridge, it had been because Winch, the sole survivor of those
hardy spirits who had been of Gus Ingle's party, was of a mind to make
sure, day after day, that no other men went where he had been. Perhaps
he knew that he alone remained alive; that the secret was his; that he
had but to wait the winter out, to sit through the spring thaw, and then
go back to claim his own. A man like Baldy Winch, as King envisioned
him, would do that. Hence, from Lookout Ridge one should be able to see
the very point, or a peak standing over the very point, where Gus
Ingle's men had gone. But always the one difficulty: that point might be
a mile away, or ten, twenty, thirty miles away. There was nothing to do
but seek--and he knew that always Swen Brodie, too, was seeking, Brodie
and the men of his own kind whom likeness drew to likeness. So King
spent day after day in the cañons and on the ridges, and yet, through
Ben Gaynor, thought to keep an eye on old Loony Honeycutt.

But there were many hours, alone in the forests resting, sitting over a
bubbling coffee-pot, lying in his blankets under the stars, that King
thought very little of Brodie, Gus Ingle, or Honeycutt. There were times
when the solitudes were empty; when a new, strange feeling of loneliness
swept overpoweringly over him. At such moments he fancied that a girl
came stealing through the trees to him; that she slipped her hand into
his own; that she lifted to his her soft eyes; that something within the
soul of him spoke to her and that she answered. His pulses quickened; a
great yearning as of infinite hunger possessed him. He remembered how
they had stood together upon the ridge the last time; how his arms had
been opening for her; the look in her eyes. That had been a moment when
the world had lain at their feet; when they had been lifted up and up,
close to the gates of paradise.

He saw virtually nothing of Brodie. Now and then smoke from a camp-fire;
once or twice the charred coals where Brodie's men had been before him.
Upon these camp sites he looked contemptuously; carelessness and
wastefulness were two things he hated in a woodsman, and always he found
them in Brodie's wake. Also he found bottles. Further, he was of the
opinion that he could go in the dark to the particular cañon in which
the illicit still made its output of bad moonshine whiskey. But, though
that canon lay in the heart of the country he was combing over, it was
one which he had explored from top to bottom two years ago, and now was
content to leave aside.

One day he came upon signs of a killing made the day before; by one of
Brodie's outfit, he assumed. Some one had baited for a bear and had
killed. The mother bear, he discovered the following morning. For he
came upon a little brown cub whimpering dismally. King made the
rebellious little fellow an unwilling captive--and smiled as he thought
of Gloria. Gloria had talked of bear cubs. If she but had one for a pet!
Well, here was Gloria's pet. King that day turned toward the log house.
And thus he received at last Gloria's note at Jim Spalding's hands:

    "DEAR MARK,

    "Mamma and I have to go back to town to-morrow. I am so sorry
    that I can't stay up here always and always. Do you realize
    that I have never seen you in the city? It's lots of fun, too,
    in its own way, don't you think? Another kind of a wilderness.
    I wonder if you would come down--if I asked you to? I'll say it
    very nicely and properly, like this: 'Miss Gloria Gaynor
    requests the pleasure of Mr. Mark King's presence at her little
    birthday-party, on the evening of August twelfth, at eight
    o'clock.' Just the four of us, Mark; mamma and papa, you and

    "GLORIA."

"August twelfth," said King. "I'll go."

He didn't write, as the necessity of an answer did not suggest itself to
him. He took it for granted that she would know that he would come. He
chuckled as he thought of the birthday gift he would bring her. There
was still a week; he remained with Spalding at the Gaynor mountain home
and devoted hour after hour to taming the cub. On the eleventh he was in
San Francisco. Before he had taken a taxi at the Ferry Building it had
dawned on him that his best suit of clothes was somewhat outworn. It
would never do to go to the Gaynors' in that. Nor was there time for a
tailor. Therefore he went direct to a clothing-store in Market Street
and in something less than half an hour had bought suit, hat, shoes,
socks, shirt, collar, and tie.

"I can have the alterations made by to-morrow afternoon," said the
salesman.

"What alterations?" demanded King, turning before the long glass and
staring at his new finery.

"The coat is a trifle tight just here--the trousers----"

King laughed.

"As long as I'm satisfied, you are, aren't you?" he said.

The clerk watched him with admiring eyes as he went out. For the clerk,
an odd thing in a man who sold clothing and therefore was prone to judge
by clothes, caught a glimpse of the real man.

"Big mining man, most likely," muttered the clerk. "Don't care for
clothes and is rich enough to get by with whatever he wears." He looked
vaguely envious.

King was busied for an hour or so, finding quarters for his cub,
registering at the St. Francis, getting a shave and hair-cut. A
manicurist saw his hands and, smothering a giggle, pointed them out to
the young fellow she was working on.

"Go after them," he grinned. "There's a fortune for you in them."

"Nothing doing," she returned from her higher wisdom. "He ain't the kind
that knows he's got any hands unless he's got a job for them to do."

Later King telephoned to the Gaynor home. A maid answered and informed
him that Mr. Gaynor had not arrived yet, though he was expected this
afternoon or in the morning; that both Mrs. and Miss Gaynor were out.
King hung up without leaving his name.

King sat in the lobby, musing on San Francisco. As Gloria had said, it
was a wilderness of its own sort. Time was when it had appealed to him;
that was in the younger collegiate days. He wondered what had happened
to his one-time proud evening regalia; how he had strutted in it, dances
and dinners and theatre-parties! But briefly and long, long ago. It was
like a half-forgotten former incarnation; or, rather, like the
unfamiliar existence of some other man. He grew restless over his paper
and strolled into the bar. There he was fortunate enough to stumble on a
man he knew, an old mining engineer. The two got off into a corner and
talked. Later they dined and went to the theatre together.

The next evening King got a taxi, called for his bear cub, stopped at a
florist's for an armful of early violets, and growing more eager and
impatient at every block was off to the Gaynor home.

"Here you are, sir," said the chauffeur, opening the door.

King fancied the man had made a mistake in the number. The house was
blazing with lights, upstairs and down; there was an unmistakable air of
revelry about it; faintly the music of a new dance tune, violin and
piccolo and piano, crept out into the night. Above the music he could
hear gay voices, muffled by door and window and wall.

King was of a mind to go back to the hotel. He had counted on the
Gaynors alone, not on this sort of thing. But also, most of all, he had
counted on Gloria, and his hesitation was brief. He jumped down and,
leading his bear cub by its new chain, went up the steps.

A housemaid came to the door, opened it wide for him, saw the cub
against his leg, and screamed.

"Why, what on earth is the matter, Frieda?" said some one.

It was Gloria passing through the front hallway with a worshipful youth.
Gloria came to the door, the youth at her heels, looking over her
shoulder.

"Oh!" cried Gloria. King knew then in a flash that she had not expected
him, that probably because he had never answered her letter she had
forgotten all about it. Unconsciously he stiffened--his old gesture
before a woman.

But now Gloria came running out to him, her two hands offered, her eyes
alight with pleasure.

"You did come," she said gladly.

Gloria's escort, obviously holding himself to be privileged through
virtue of his briefly temporary office, thrust himself along in her
wake. Him King did not notice; King saw only Gloria. As of old she set
his pulse stirring restlessly with her sparkling, vivid loveliness.
To-night was Gloria's night; she was eighteen and queen of the world.

"And----Oh, look!" She let her hands remain in his but her eyes were
all for the little brown bundle of fur at King's feet, that began now to
whine and pull back at its chain. "My birthday present!"

Just now Mark King would have given anything he could think of to have
that bear cub back in the woods where it belonged. He hadn't had time to
analyse impulses; he didn't know why all of a sudden his gift seemed out
of place. As he let Gloria's fingers slip through his he looked at the
young fellow, a boy of Gloria's own age, in the doorway. Perhaps the
full evening dress had something to do with King's new attitude toward
his pet. But now as Gloria, a little timid and holding her skirts back
and yet clearly delighted, flashed him her look of understanding and
gratitude, he was content.

Gloria remembered to make Mr. King known to Mr. Trimble. Then King
suggested that they take the cub around back and lodge him for the night
in the garage. But Gloria, discovering that she could pat and fondle the
little creature, and that he was of friendly disposition, insisted on
having him brought into the house for all to see.

"It's the most delightful present of all!" she whispered to King.

In the hallway they were surrounded by a crowd of the curious. Girls in
pretty dresses, young fellows in black suits, all very exact as to the
proper evening appointments. At first they were disposed to look on King
as "the man who brought the cub," and it was only when Gloria began a
string of introductions that they understood. One and all, they
regarded Mark King curiously.

The cub was made much of, and finally led off to the kitchen for sugar
and a bed in a box under the table. Mrs. Gaynor appeared and was "very
glad indeed to see Mr. King again." Gratton, whom King remembered with
small liking, came up and shook hands, and looked at King in a way which
did nothing to increase the liking. Ben, it appeared, had been unable to
come this year. King was sorry for that as he looked about him. Only now
did he remember the violets he had brought for Gloria.

The evening was anything but that to which he had looked forward. From
the beginning he regretted coming; before the end it was slow torture
for him. He was out of place and felt more out of place than he was.
Glances at his carelessly purchased clothes were veiled, and never
utterly impolite, but he was conscious of them. He was conspicuous
because he was different; outwardly in garb, inwardly in much else.
There was no one here whom he knew; he had never felt that he knew
Gloria's mother, and to-night Gloria's self, puzzling him, baffling him,
was an Unknown. Not that she was not delightful to him; she was just as
delightful to every other man there, and in the same way. His days with
her in the forest blurred and faded.

Gloria gave him the first dance after his arrival, highhandedly
commanding a fair-haired and despondent youth to surrender to King one
of his numbers. King caught her into his arms hungrily--only to feel
that she was very far away from him. He knew that he was dancing
awkwardly; he had not danced for a dozen years. Gloria suggested sitting
out the rest of the dance; she said it prettily but he understood. He
understood, too, by that sixth sense of man which is so keen at certain
moments of mental distress that all of Gloria's friends were wondering
about him, where he came from, "what his business was." He was tanned,
rugged. He was not of them. He fancied, sensitively, that among
themselves they laughed at him. As he sat with Gloria and found little
to say, he was conscious of her eyes probing at him when she thought
that he did not see. He looked away, a shadow in his eyes, and chanced
to see Gratton. Gratton, who had struck him as contemptible in the
woods, a misfit and a poor sort of man at best, was here on his own
heath. He carried himself well, he talked well; he bore himself with a
certain distinction. Clearly he was much in favour among the girls and
women, much envied by the younger men. Yes; Gloria was right: this was
another sort of wilderness where Mark King was the misfit, where Gratton
was as much in tone with his environment as was King among the forest
and crags of the ridges.

Another dance. Gloria excused herself lightly and escaped into the arms
of Gratton himself. Escaped! King understood; that was the word for it.
He watched them; saw Gratton whisper something into her ear, saw Gloria
toss her head, saw her cheeks flush. Then Gratton laughed and she
laughed with him. They danced wonderfully together, swaying together
like two reeds in the same gentle wind. Others than King noticed; there
were knowing smiles. At the end of the dance King saw the look which
Gloria, flushed and happy, flashed up at Gratton, and his heart
contracted in a sudden spasm of pain.

When again couples were seeking each other to the jazzy invitation of
the musicians, King slipped away and went outside. He stood in the
shadows of the porch seeking to get a grip on himself. In a moment he
would go in and say good-night to Mrs. Gaynor; he'd say good-night to
Gloria; he would go and put an end to a hideous nightmare. He held
himself very much of a fool, and he knew that he was fanciful. But he
was of no mind to stay.

Two or three couples came out; he remained unnoticed in the darkness. He
heard a girl's voice:

"But _who_ is he? I think he's terribly handsome. And
distinguished-looking. Superior to our kind of nonsense."

"Who are you talking about, Betty?" Her dancing partner pretended to be
in doubt. "Me?"

A whirlwind of girls' laughter. Then one of them saying:

"_You_ distinguished-looking! Or handsome! She means the
sixty-nine-dollar serge suit."

Good God! Was there a price tag on him?

"Oh, the animal trainer!" They laughed again. Then Gloria came and they
called to her, demanding:

"_Who_ is he?"

"Oh," said Gloria carelessly, "he is an old friend of papa's and his
name is King."

They went in, two of the girls lingering a little behind the others.
Gloria and another. The other, bantering and yet curious, said:

"Georgia told me all about a Mr. King up in the mountains this spring.
And that it looked like love at first sight to her. 'Fess up, Glory, my
dear."

Gloria's laughter, unfettered, spontaneous, was of high amusement.

"Georgia said, just the same, that she'd bet on an elopement--"

King reddened and stirred uneasily. Gloria gasped.

"Georgia's crazy!" she said emphatically. "Why, the man is impossible!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Five minutes later King went in, found his hat, and told Mrs. Gaynor
good-night. She was glad that he was going, and he knew it though she
made the obvious perfunctory remark. Gloria saw and came tripping across
the room.

"Not going so soon?"

"Yes," he said briefly. "Good-bye, Gloria."

"Good-night, you mean, don't you?"

"I mean good-bye," he said quietly.

Gratton thrust forward. King left abruptly, leaving them together,
conscious of the quick look of pleasure on the face of Gloria's mother.




_Chapter XI_


Always Gloria, yielding to the heady impulses of youth, was ready for
High Adventure. Therein lay the explanation of many things which Gloria
did.

Time went scurrying on. Mark King had returned to the Sierra; no word
came from him, and Gloria told herself with an exaggerated air of
indifference that she had just about forgotten him. Autumn came, that
finest of all seasons about San Francisco Bay, the ocean fogs were
thrust back, unveiling the clear sunny skies by day, the crystalline
glitter of stars by night. The city grew gayer as the season advanced;
dinners and dances and theatre-parties made life a gloriously joyful
affair for Gloria. She had hardly the time to ask herself: "Just where
am I going?" It was so much easier to laugh and cry lightly, in the
phrase of the day, "I am on my way!" She had drifted, drifted like one
in a canoe trailing her fingers idly in the clear water and never noting
when the little craft was caught by a steady, purposeful current. It was
speeding now; but she only laughed breathlessly and drank her fill of
the hour, and left to others the thoughts which carve fine lines about
brow and eyes. She knew that her father was beset by some sort of
financial troubles; for the first time in her life he had not come to
her birthday-party, and her mother had explained, rather soberly, that
it was because of a business crisis. Gloria did not know that crises
lasted so long. Weeks and weeks had gone and still she knew from a look
which her mother could not hide that the money troubles were still
stalking her father, and coming so close that for the first time in
history they cast a shadow from the top of the Sierra down into her
mother's heart in San Francisco.

Now Gratton became the man of the hour. He had studied Gloria with
infinite patience and he never displeased her. "He understood her," as
she comfortingly assured herself. That meant, of course, that he gave in
to her always; that tirelessly he exerted himself to please her. At a
time when there was much financial depression, Gratton's obvious
affluence was very agreeable to the pleasure-seeker. He dressed well; he
entertained with due respect for the most charming accessories; he took
her to dance or theatre, or for a drive in the park or down the
peninsula in a new, elegantly appointed limousine. And about the same
time fate had it that by two entirely unassociated trends of
circumstance he should draw to the dregs of Gloria's lively and romantic
interest. In the first place, he began to become a prominent figure in
San Francisco. His name was in the papers with names of "men who
counted." And, of far greater import to Gloria, he became what she liked
to consider a "Man of Mystery!"

For, weeks ago, Gloria had noted that regularly once a week Mr. Gratton
dropped out of sight, to be gone for one or two days. He was never to be
seen Saturday; seldom Sunday; always any day from Monday to Friday
night. During week-ends he was "out of town." And, though there were
countless opportunities for an off-hand explanation, Gratton never gave
it. Others than Gloria remarked the fact; a girl friend insinuatingly
remarked: "Better watch out for him, Glory, dear. _Cherchez la femme_,
you know."

Gloria never suspected any such condition of affairs; she was too sure
of Gratton's attentions. But, being Gloria, she wondered.

One night she and Gratton were having a late supper together at the
Palace. They had been to the theatre and now, yielding to the demands of
her young appetite, they sat before sandwiches and coffee. Gloria saw
the page as he came to the doorway; he stood, an envelope in his hand,
looking up and down the room. When at last his eyes rested on her and
her companion, the boy came to the table.

"Telegram, Mr. Gratton."

Gratton, more interested in what she was saying than in the yellow
envelope, opened it carelessly. But in a flash his attention was whipped
away from her; she stopped in the middle of a sentence and knew that he
had not noticed. A quick spurt of blood flushed his dead-white skin;
his eyes grew bright with excitement. He read in a sweeping glance, and
before his eyes came back to her they went hurriedly to his watch.

"I've got to go, Gloria," he said nervously. "Immediately. This is
important."

"Why, of course," she agreed. "I can get a bite when I get home."

He thrust the telegram into his pocket and came around to the back of
her chair. He was all impatience; it seemed he could not wait until hat
and coats were gotten. On the way to the street he looked again at his
watch.

"I've got to go out of town," he explained. "I'll be gone a couple of
days."

"But this is only Wednesday!"

"And usually I don't go before Saturday?" He was tapping at his
cigarette-case as they came to their taxi. "Yes. But something has
happened."

He helped her in and lifted his foot to follow.

"Gloria," he muttered, "I can't make it. If I see you home I will miss
the last boat across the bay."

She was more and more interested. She had never known Gratton to show
emotion as he showed it to-night; she was more and more curious about
that "business" which carried him out of town. Why hadn't he tossed the
telegram across the table for her to read? Here was a shut door, and
from being barred a door always invites the more temptingly. Especially
to a girl like Gloria.

"Why, I can go home alone--"

"I don't like it. I--" He ended abruptly and thrust his head into the
car, his eyes questing hers in the half-light; the chauffeur with his
engine going looked over his shoulder.

"Come with me, Gloria!"

Gloria wondered what he meant: whether the man was suggesting an
elopement or just a wild bit of downright unconventionality.

"I mean it," said Gratton. "Listen. The new day has already started. By
the time the ferry lands us in Oakland it will be nearly three o'clock.
I've got to drive up into the country; we'll phone your mother and will
start right away. We'll get there long before noon; we'll be back before
night. It would mean only a day's outing and no harm done. Won't you
come, Gloria? Please come!" He pulled out his watch again. "We've just
got time to catch the boat comfortably." He called to the taxi-driver,
"To the ferry," and jumped in.

"But----"

"You can come as far as the ferry, anyway. Even if you won't give me a
day of motoring. It's wonderful out in the country this time of year.
And----"

When they came to the ferry there was no time for debating the matter;
the crowd was pouring toward the last boat, and Gloria, her eyes bright
with the joy of her escapade, went with him through the little gate
where the tickets were presented for the last boat across the bay. It
was unconventional, as she saw quite clearly. But to Gloria
unconventionality was a condition fairly divided into two widely
separated browsing-grounds; there was the thing which was just "daring";
there was that other which was ugly because it was "compromising." This
adventure promised to fall into the safer category; to be off motoring
with Mr. Gratton from three o'clock in the morning until late afternoon
was what she considered a "lark."

They laughed together in anticipation as they crossed the bay. They sat
where they could watch the red and green lights, reflected like topazes
and rubies in the shimmering water, fall away and dwindle as the
silhouette of the embarcadero receded. On the electric train they were
whizzed among many sleepy folk into a sleeping town, Oakland, drowsing
and silent. Gratton summoned a somnolent taxi-driver and they were
whisked through the cool air to a garage. He left her a moment, sitting
in the taxi, while he ran in and arranged for a roadster.

Gloria, left to her own thoughts, began to regret having come. The
thing, reviewed in solitude, was "crazy." She grew vaguely distressed.
She wanted to go back to San Francisco--but there would be no boat now
until full morning, three or four hours; she could not get home before
seven or half-past seven o'clock. She tried to recall a friend on this
side of the bay to whom she could go at this time of night--day, rather!
Her lips shaped to a half smile.

"I've got the car." Gratton was back offering to help her down. "And I
phoned your mother."

"Was she----?"

"She trusts you with me, Gloria," he said quickly.

She let him help her into the car he had hired. Gratton took the wheel
and turned into San Pablo Avenue. The street was deserted and he gently
pressed down the throttle; he had hired a dependable, high-priced car,
and the motor sang softly. The wind blew in Gloria's face and her zest
came back to her.

Gratton would not tell her where they were going; he made a great lark
of their escapade, assuring her gaily that their destination was
reserved as the final surprise for her. He evaded laughingly when she
asked. "Maybe we'll keep right on going, always and always," he jested
with her. She thought that under the jest there was a queer note; when
his eyes flashed briefly toward her she tried to read their message. But
the hour, mystery-filled, filled them with mystery.

Gloria began laughing.

"What will we look like to-morrow--I mean when it's full day! Me dressed
like this--you in evening suit!"

"By Jove!" said Gratton. Then he laughed with her. "It's the lark of my
life."

The ocean breeze smarted in their eyes, the motor thrummed merrily,
trees and houses flew by, the racing car leaped to fresh speed. On the
cement highway the spinning tyres whined musically.

They were far up-country when the sun rose. Gloria, very sleepy now,
watched it climb above the hills. She had watched the sunrise last
June--with Mark King. Later, again with Mark King, she had seen it
thrust its great burning disk above the pine ridges.

She was asleep and started wide awake when the car stopped suddenly.
They were in the one street of a little town; it must be eight o'clock.
She was cold.

"What do you say to a cup of coffee? And toast and eggs?"

"I am hungry," she confessed.

Over their breakfast in the little wayside restaurant, with its untidy
tables and greasy lunch-counter, it was Gratton who did all of the
talking. Gloria by now realized that she was downright sorry she had
come. He seemed eager, his eyes very bright, his voice quick and vibrant
with an electrical urge dominating. She wondered vaguely what made him
seem "different."

"The waiter," she said as they finished, "is staring his head off at our
clothes."

"We're going to remedy that matter. Come on; the stores are open."

"Fancy shopping here!" The thought made her laugh.

"Just the place for what we want. Khaki trousers and flannel shirt and
boots for me; an outing-suit for you."

He took her arm and they walked the half-dozen doors to the dry-goods
store.

"I haven't a cent with me----"

"Let me be your banker," he said lightly.

Gloria hesitated. But very briefly. Hot coffee had done much for her
drooping courage; the escapade, even this going at eight o'clock in the
morning into a country store with a man, and on money borrowed from the
man, was an experience to put the gay note of adventure back into the
affair.

Gloria made her purchases in fifteen minutes and the change from theatre
gown into an olive outing-suit in another fifteen. Her discarded
garments were gathered up, put into a cardboard box by the clerk, and
wrapped in heavy paper to be stowed away in the car. She confronted
Gratton smilingly in her new garb, her hands in her pockets, her face
saucy, her slim body boyish in its swagger and richly feminine in its
unhidden curves. Gratton's eyes shone, quick with admiration. She
laughed and a flush came into her cheeks as he gravely paid for her
clothing and his own. When they went to their car both were strangely
silent.

"I owe you a lot of money," she said with assumed carelessness.

"Which I hope you never repay," he returned meaningly.

At nine o'clock they were threading the streets of Sacramento. At a
little after ten they were in Auburn. They drove through "Old Town,"
passed the courthouse and through the newer portion of the village; by
the Freeman Hotel and the railroad-yards, through the "subway" under the
tracks, and turned off to the right, leaving the highway for the first
time and skirting the olive-orchards on the hill. Then, sweeping around
a wide curve they caught the first glimpse of the American River deep
down in its historic canon. On, over a narrow, red-dirt road, closer
down to the gorge, across the long bridge, up and up the steep, writhing
grade. They came to the top of the ridge; raced through Cool, through
Lotus----

"Coloma!" gasped Gloria. "You are going to Coloma!"

He slowed the car down that he might look at her keenly.

"Well?" he said lightly.

"It is to Coloma that you have been coming every week!"

"Well?" he said a second time.

"Then you--you, too----"

He glanced at the road, cut down the speed still more, and looked back
into her thoughtful eyes.

"Would you rather that it was Mark King or I who succeeded?"

She was clearly perplexed.

"Mark King is papa's partner," she said musingly.

"And I? I hope one day to be more than his partner!"

She understood but gave no sign of understanding. He did not press the
point.

"Here we are," he said presently as the first of the picturesque old
rock-and-mortar houses of Coloma stood forth out of the wilderness. "And
you're dead tired and nearly dead for sleep. I am sorry we can't have a
city hotel up here; but I'll get you a room where you can lie down. You
can sleep and rest for two or three hours; then we'll start back."

Gloria had been tired and sleepy half an hour ago; not now. Gratton was
playing his own hand in his own way--against her father and against Mark
King. And Gratton had a way of winning. Something had happened; some one
had telegraphed for him to come. Gloria was aquiver with excitement. She
watched Gratton while he was watching the road; he, too, was tense and
eager.

When he stopped the car she got down, not knowing just what to do or
say. He led the way to the little "hotel," and she followed. Since she
could not insist on following him about his "business," it was, perhaps,
just as well if she lay down. And, alone, thought things out. He placed
a chair for her and arranged for her room. He paid for it in advance,
saying that they would be leaving in a hurry; he registered for her.
Then Gloria was shown down a long hall and to her room. Here Gratton
left her, impatient to be away. She went to her window and stood looking
out. She heard a man call; a deep, rumbling bass voice. She saw Gratton
come about the corner of the house and start across the street. A man, a
very big man, came to meet him. They stood together talking in the
middle of the road, their voices low, their looks earnest. They went
away together. She shivered and went to her bed and sat down, her hands
tight clasped, a look of trouble in her eyes. Gratton and Swen Brodie
together----

"I don't understand." She said it to herself over and over. "I can't
understand!"

She sprang up and left the room, going in feverish haste back to the
front part of the building. The man who had given Gratton the register
followed her with his speculative eyes. She went to the door and looked
out, seeing neither the dusty road, the deserted house across the way,
nor the mountains beyond. She was groping blindly in a mental fog; she
was tired, very tired. And uncertain. Something was happening--had
happened, or was about to happen, and she did not know which way to
turn. Her father, poor old papa, was fighting hard against some kind of
money troubles. Mark King, Gratton, Brodie--figures to race through her
brain, to confuse her with their own contentions, to baffle and
bewilder. Suddenly she felt utterly alone, hopelessly, helplessly alone.
She wanted her mother, and with the impulse wheeled back toward the man
watching her.

"I want to use the long-distance telephone," she said. "Where is it?"

"This way, miss," said the man, eager to be of service. Then, with a
bashful grin, he amended: "I _beg_ pardon. Mrs. Gratton, I mean!"

Gloria stared at him. Her mouth was open to correct him; she saw how
naturally his mistake was made. But before she could speak a wild
flutter in her heart stopped the words; she went swiftly to the
register. In Gratton's own hand, set opposite the clerk's number seven
indicating her room, were the words: "Gratton & Wife, S.F." She turned
crimson; went white.

"I'll telephone later," she said faintly, and went again to the door and
this time out into the autumn sunshine. All of the high adventure was
dead ashes; the "lark" was lost in a sinister enterprise.

Gratton's wife--Mrs. Gratton----He had done that! She walked on
blindly; tears gathered, tears of mortification, of blazing anger. But
they did not fall; she dabbed viciously at her eyes. Why had he done
that? _Why?_ Never a "why" so insistent in all of the girl's lifetime.
Never a moment of such blind wonder.

"Howdy, miss?" a voice was saying.

It brought her back to earth from a region of swirling vapours, back to
to-day and Coloma. She stopped and looked at the man, startled. He was a
stranger, yet dimly familiar. The little store, his own round face, his
shirt-sleeves and boots----

"I wanted to ask," he said solicitously, "how your father was this
morning."

"My father?" she repeated dully. "Oh, he's quite well, thank you."

Plainly her words puzzled him. He squinted his eyes as though to make
sure of her.

"You're the young lady that stopped in here one day last spring with
Mark King? June it was, wasn't it? You bought some stuff for lunch."

"Yes," she admitted. She would never have remembered him. But he, who
had not seen others like her, remembered.

"Then you're Ben Gaynor's girl?"

"Yes," she said again, and was about to go on, resenting his persistent
meddlesomeness.

"And you say he's _well_?"

"Quite well, I believe," she said coolly.

"But wait a minute," he called after her. "Wasn't he bad hurt last
night?"

"Papa hurt?"

"I supposed that was why you was here----"

"How hurt?" she cried sharply. "When? Where? Tell me; why don't you tell
me?"

He looked at her in wonder.

"All I know is just what I heard. And you know how news gets itself all
twisted up travelling half a mile. I _heard_ he got hurt at old Loony
Honeycutt's last night. Right bad hurt, they said. But I was just asking
you----"

"Where is he?" she cut in excitedly. "Now?"

"Didn't you just come out of the hotel?" He looked more puzzled than
ever. "Wasn't he there?"

"How do I know? Was he taken there?"

He nodded. "Leastways I heard he was. Last night----"

Gloria did not wait for more. She turned and ran back to the building
she had quitted only a moment ago, bursting into the front room,
demanding earnestly and in words that came with a rush:

"Is my father here? Is he hurt?"

"Your father? Hurt----Say, you ain't Ben Gaynor's daughter, are you?"

"Yes, yes. And papa----"

"They had a doctor over from Placerville last night. He's coming back
again this morning some time."

"Take me to papa. Quick!" said Gloria imperiously. "You should have told
me the minute I came."

"But I didn't know----"

"Quick!" repeated Gloria.

He showed her to the room, only three doors beyond her own. He moved to
open the door but Gloria's hand was first to the knob; she opened and
went in, closing the door softly. She was trembling, frightened,
dreading, oppressed by fear of what might be. Though both windows were
open the shades were drawn, the light was dim. She made out a man's form
on the bed; there was a white bandage about his head. He stirred and
turned half over.

"Papa!" cried Gloria, her voice catching.

She ran to him and went down on her knees at his bedside, her two hands
finding his upon the coverlet, clasping them tight. He looked at her in
wonderment; Gloria misread the look in his eyes and for a terrible
moment thought that he was dying.

"Gloria!" he said in amazement. "Here----"

"Oh, papa!"

To Ben Gaynor this unannounced coming of his daughter partook of the
nature of an apparition and of a miracle. At first he would not believe
his senses, fearing that he had just gone off his head. Then it was that
the look in his eyes frightened her. But the hands gripping his were
flesh-and-blood hands, and, besides, Ben Gaynor was a very
matter-of-fact man, little given to prolonged fanciful ideas, even after
a night of pain and mental distress.

"By the Lord, we'll nail their hides to our barn door yet!" were his
first words of greeting. He hitched himself up against his pillows.

"What in the world happened?" Gloria asked after a sigh of relief.

"How you happened to be here gets me," said Gaynor. "It's like magic.
You didn't hear down in San Francisco that I was hurt, did you?"

"No. I--I just happened to be here. You see, papa----"

"That'll come later," he broke in. "You're here; that's all that counts.
You're going to do something for me."

Anything, thought Gloria. And she was glad that he did not seek just now
the explanation of her presence here; of course she would tell him
everything--later. But she was still confused--"Mrs. Gratton "! Did she,
down in the depths of her frivolous girl-heart, want to be that? Had she
glimpsed, when she so gaily left San Francisco last night, that this
escapade was something more than a mere "lark"?

"You are not dangerously hurt, papa?"

"Bless you, no! Not now, that you're here. Though I believe it would
have near killed me if I'd been put out of the running altogether. I got
a crack on the head that sickened me; but the tough old skull held out
against it. And I got an arm broken and a rib cracked----"

Gloria, aghast, was once more in fear for him. But he cried impatiently:

"Don't you worry about me. I'll be on my feet in a week. Now, listen:
I've got to talk fast before somebody comes in. The doctor is apt to be
here any minute, and he's a stiff-necked tyrant. You know the trail
through the mountains to our place; you rode it twice with King."

"Yes."

"I want you to ride it again to-day. You can get a horse at the stable.
Don't let any one know where you are going. I want you to take a message
to King. And it's got to get to him and into nobody's hands but his.
Understand that, Gloria?"

Gloria did not answer promptly; she wanted to demur. She was tired; she
was afraid of the mountains; she did not want to see Mark King. But she
saw a terrible earnestness in her father's eyes and that while he
awaited her answer quick fever spots glowed in his cheeks. She squeezed
his hands and replied:

"Of course, papa. I'll do whatever you want."

"God bless you for that," he muttered. "This is sober, serious
business, Gloria; you are the only one here I could trust. King will be
at the house; at least I hope he will. I sent him word several days ago
that--that something was in the wind, and to meet me there. And, Gloria,
I want you to promise, by all that's good and holy, that you won't let a
word or a sign or a hint slip to anybody else. Not to a soul on earth.
Will you, Gloria?"

"Yes." She looked at him curiously; she had never known her father to be
so tensely in earnest.

"Then," he said, "go turn the key in the lock. And hurry. Before any one
comes."

She locked the door and returned to him.

"Feel under my pillow. Got it?"

She felt the cold barrel of a revolver and started back; never had she
known her father to carry arms. Then, gingerly, she sought again. She
found a small parcel and drew it out. It was a flattish affair and
rectangular, the size and shape of an octavo volume--a flat box, if not
a book. It was wrapped in a bit of soiled cloth.

"Quick," he commanded nervously. "Out of sight with it. Stick it into
your blouse, if you can; tuck it away under your arm; it won't show so
much there."

Catching something of his suppressed excitement, she obeyed.

"I managed a little note to Mark," he said when she had buttoned the
loose shirt again and he had sunk back, white and exhausted, among his
pillows. "I stuck it inside the cloth. Lord, if I was only on my feet!
But you'll do it for me, my girl? With never a hint to any one?"

Gloria stooped and kissed him on the forehead.

"I promise, papa," she said assuringly.

"Unlock the door again, then. There's somebody coming. Sit down over
there, across the room. And leave as soon as you can. We'll let them
think you're going to the log house for--for----"

She was quicker at inventions.

"Doctor Rowell, our family physician, is at Lake Tahoe. I am going to
find him. We would telephone, but he is camped out----"

"Pretty late for camping. Oh, that'll do----"

Gloria sat in her chair across the room, looking innocently the part of
a daughter in a sick-room, when the door opened and the Placerville
doctor came in. A moment later she slipped out.

       *       *       *       *       *

She went out into the sunshine. Down the road she saw Gratton. He came
quickly to meet her. She saw that he was eyeing her keenly, and her
thought was that he was wondering if by chance she had seen the hotel
register.

"I don't know just what to do," said Gratton. "My business is going to
hold me here longer than I had thought. I--I promised to go back with
you this afternoon. Would it be all right if I got a man to drive you
back? I am terribly sorry, Gloria, but----"

"Business is business!" She laughed a trifle nervously. Then her
inspiration: "I know! I can go to our mountain home; I'll phone mamma,
and she will come up. We'll spend a few days, and----"

For an instant his eyes fairly blazed; they were bright with triumph.

"Just the thing! I'll go for the horses. I'll ride over with you and get
right back here."

"But----"

But already, excusing himself hurriedly, Gratton was off for the horses.




_Chapter XII_


It was mid-afternoon when Gloria and Gratton came to the log house in
the woods. Jim Spalding, coming to take their horses away to the stable,
though a man of no wild flights of imagination and given to minding his
own business, was plainly curious.

"We rode on ahead, Jim," Gloria told him, and Jim detected no false
note in her gaiety. "Mamma is coming."

Spalding gave them a key and they went to the house. It was Gloria who
unlocked the door; Gratton, his white face looking more than ever
bloodless, saw her hand tremble. She hurried in, excused herself, and
ran upstairs. She knew that the time had come when she would have to
listen to what Gratton was going to say; she knew what the burden of his
plea would be--she knew everything, she thought wildly, except what her
answer would be.

She heard Gratton stirring restlessly downstairs. He walked up and down,
snapping his fingers incessantly, a habit which in the man bespoke
nervousness. He sat at the piano and the keys jangled under his touch;
he got up and walked again. He was waiting for her to come down; he was
shaping in mind the words which would greet her before she had come
fairly to the bottom of the stairs.

Gloria turned into her own room, locking the door behind her. She looked
at herself in her glass; she was pale, her eyes looked unnaturally big
and brilliant. She bit her lips and turned away. From her blouse she
brought out the parcel her father had entrusted to her, slipping it
under her mattress, smoothing the counterpane when she had done. Then,
with but one clear thought in the world, that of getting into immediate
touch with her mother, she went to the telephone.

On this floor, in a cosy little room opening upon the upstairs
sun-porch, was an extension telephone, installed for the convenience of
Gloria and her mother. Gloria went tiptoeing to it rather than go down
where Gratton was. She rang the necessary bell for the operator in
Truckee and put in her long-distance call in low tones which demanded a
repetition before the operator got it right. Then she sat with the
instrument in her hand, waiting. Once she heard Gratton's step close to
the stairs and jumped to her feet, thinking that he was coming up. But
he passed by and the house grew silent again.

She wondered when Mark King would come! This
afternoon--to-night--to-morrow? Spalding had said nothing; she had not
mentioned King to Spalding, since she had not mentioned him to Gratton
during the long ride----

Her telephone bell rang. After the irritating way of telephones, she was
put presently into communication with Mrs. Gaynor.

"Gloria! Gloria! Is that you?" Her mother's voice sounded strange in
Gloria's ears--shaken with emotion.

"Yes, mamma. I----"

"What has happened, child? Tell me, quick! I am nearly dead with worry.
Are you all right?"

"Of course, mamma. I----"

"But _where_ are you? Where were you all night? Are you sure everything
is all right?"

Never had Gloria known her extremely clear-headed mother to be so wildly
disturbed, so nervously incoherent.

"I have told you I am all right. I am up in the mountains, at our log
house. Didn't Mr. Gratton tell you----?"

"Mr. Gratton?" Mrs. Gaynor was only more mystified. "He has told me
nothing; I haven't seen him. I tried to phone him--oh, I have phoned
everybody we know!--and he is out of town, and----"

But Gloria, panic-str

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