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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10213 ***
+
+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-stricken by something her mother had said, cried:
+
+"You have phoned _everybody!_ Oh, mamma! What--_what_ do you mean?"
+
+"When you didn't come in last night--I have been crazy with worry! I
+thought you might be spending the night with one of your friends; I
+thought that maybe something had happened and it was being kept from me.
+I rang up Georgia Stark and Mildred Carter and the Farrilees--and even
+the emergency hospitals. I thought----"
+
+The rest was only a meaningless buzzing in Gloria's ears; she sat
+speechless herself, bereft of all reason for a dull moment, then
+harbouring quick, clear thoughts, as swift, as vivid as lightning, and
+in the end as blinding by their very quality of blazing light. _The
+newspapers!_
+
+Still, dominated subconsciously by the thought which had brought her to
+the telephone, Gloria managed before the connection was broken to beg
+her mother to come immediately to her at the log house; to tell every
+one that Gloria was with her father. Her mother promised; began asking
+questions, and Gloria said a bleak "good-bye" and hung up.
+
+_The newspapers_. She sat there staring into space and seeing the San
+Francisco _Chronicle_ and _Examiner_, hawked by newsboys, on stands,
+thrust under doors, going like spreading snowflakes of a big storm into
+post-offices, to racing trains, all over the land. Her mother had
+telephoned the emergency hospitals! Gloria could have wept in rage,
+screamed, thrown herself down and given over to paroxysms of weeping.
+But she only sat on, her face whiter and whiter, looking into emptiness
+and seeing headlines that towered as high as immense black cliffs. Her
+mother had telephoned Mildred Carter, that hateful, hateful,
+thrice-hateful Mildred Carter; had confessed that Gloria had gone out
+with Mr. Gratton; was gone all night, no one knew where; Mildred Carter
+who was as good as married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_! And the
+emergency hospitals--Gloria with never a tear coming in her hour of
+greatest distress sat rocking back and forth on her chair, crying: "Oh,
+I wish I were dead!"
+
+As one hears noises through a dream, long powerless to connect them
+logically with familiar happenings, so now did Gloria absently hearken
+to Gratton calling from the foot of the stairs. She jumped up only when
+she heard him start to mount them. Then, galvanized, she sprang to her
+feet, cried to him, "I'll be down in just a second," and ran to her
+room. She stood again looking at herself in her glass.
+
+"Gloria Gaynor," she heard her own pale lips say, "you have gotten
+yourself into a nasty, nasty mess." The lips began to tremble; then,
+with a great struggle for will-power, they steadied. "And," said Gloria
+in a cold, harsh little voice, "it's up to you, and no one else, to get
+out the best you can this time."
+
+She bathed her face and hands; she rubbed her cheeks with a towel,
+determined to bring some vestige of colour back; she took down her hair.
+Only then, so distrait to-day was Gloria, did she think of changing from
+her boyish suit into a house dress. Her eyes, which had harboured only
+bewilderment and terror, now grew speculative. She brought from her
+closet half a dozen dresses; chose a certain pink one without analysing
+the reasons of her selection, found silk stockings and pumps, and
+dressed from top to toe. She would have to have it out with Gratton, one
+way or the other--she began to know which way it would be. But always a
+girl should be at her best. Also, she decided, by the time that she was
+becomingly gowned and her hair arranged tastefully, it was as well to
+let Gratton wait for her a while; waiting always, to some extent,
+brought to the one cooling his heels a sense of disadvantage. In short,
+Gloria had gone through the most panicky of her moments and was getting
+a grip on herself again. When, after Gratton had waited and fumed for
+upward of an hour, she went downstairs she looked cool and pretty, and
+quite unembarrassed. He flashed a look at her that was eloquent of
+nervous excitement.
+
+"I want to explain everything to you, Gloria----"
+
+"It will take a good deal of explaining, won't it, Mr. Gratton?"
+
+They went into the living-room and Gloria sat in a big chair while he
+stood before her, his fingers tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.
+
+"You listened-in while I talked with mamma, didn't you?" she said
+carelessly.
+
+"No!" said Gratton, but so promptly that she knew he lied.
+
+"Well?" she said indifferently. "Suppose we have the explanations now? I
+am sure that they will prove interesting."
+
+"I am afraid," he began, talking swiftly, "that I have been instrumental
+in placing you in a false position. Last night I told you I had
+telephoned to your mother. I did try; they reported the line out of
+order. What could I do? I didn't want to alarm you. It was only a lark;
+I meant innocently, you know that, don't you, Gloria?"
+
+"Did you?" she said, and managed to keep her lips smiling.
+
+"It is only since coming here that I have realized how things will look;
+what people will think--and say, curse them. Our being out so long
+together; my buying clothing for you----"
+
+"Our being registered as Mr. and Mrs. Gratton----"
+
+His eyes burned, his lips clamped tight.
+
+"Forgive me, Gloria! It was the mad impulse of a moment. I thought as we
+went in that it would look strange--a young, unmarried couple; that if I
+put down man and wife no one would think anything at all. And we'd be
+gone in a few hours; and probably you'd never go back there; and no one
+would know who you were."
+
+"I see." Gloria's tone, devoid of expression, gave no clue to her racing
+thoughts. "You did that for my sake!"
+
+"Yes," he said eagerly. "As I would do anything on earth for your sake.
+You know that, Gloria; you know, and have known for a long
+time--always--that I love you. I was going to ask you soon to--to marry
+me, Gloria. And now, now you will marry me, won't you?"
+
+"Yes." But Gloria did not say it aloud; not yet. She merely made it
+perfectly clear to Miss Gloria Gaynor that she was going to marry
+Gratton, and that there was to be no further question of it. And, oh,
+God! at this fateful moment, how she hated him! How she loathed and
+detested him! While a week ago--yesterday--she had wondered, dreamily,
+if she were in love with him! But that was when he was in the city, at
+home in his own wilderness. But now! She was in a trap. This man had
+made it, cunningly using in his work all that he knew of Gloria Gaynor.
+There was no way out, save through the gate of matrimony. And--in her
+heart she laughed at him--through that other wider gate beyond, the
+gate of divorce. She would accept his name; the name of Gratton stood
+high in San Francisco. Then she would tell him how she loathed him; she
+would laugh at him, for physically she had no fear of him. And he would
+never have her for his own, despite all of his money and his position
+and his hideous trickery. Gratton, with all of his shrewdness, had not
+taken into consideration one thing: how in the city, on his native
+heath, he attracted Gloria; how in the woods he impressed her, in his
+unbecoming outdoor togs, as contemptible.
+
+"You know how I love you," he was repeating. And he was sincere; she saw
+that in his eyes, in the unaccustomed colour in his face. He loved her
+as such an unclean animal could love. Oh, how he sickened her! "Will you
+marry me, Gloria? Will you forgive me for having, however
+unintentionally, placed you in a wrong light? Will you give me the right
+to protect you, to defend your good name? Oh, Gloria----"
+
+Strange that the man had never revolted her as he did now! She wanted to
+get up and run from him. Meantime she was telling herself, almost
+calmly: "Yes, you'll marry him. The little beast!" She did get to her
+feet; he followed her into the hall.
+
+"Let me be alone for a little while," she said quietly. She went to the
+stairway. "I am going upstairs; wait here for me----"
+
+"You will come to me? You will marry me?"
+
+"I--think--so. Don't!" she cried sharply as he moved to come to her.
+"Wait----"
+
+He swallowed nervously. "I--I hoped you would. And I saw how terribly
+the events of the last few hours might be misconstrued. So, Gloria,
+daring to hope, I sent word for a justice of the peace. He will be here
+this afternoon or this evening----"
+
+"Justice of the peace!" Gloria's nerves jangled loose in her
+irrepressible laughter.
+
+"We'll have a priest later, of course," he ran on hurriedly. "But I
+couldn't arrange for one so soon."
+
+Gloria went slowly upstairs, walking backward, looking down on him with
+unfathomable eyes.
+
+"Tell me, Gloria. I'll promise not to come near you until you say I
+may. Is it _yes_?"
+
+"Yes," said Gloria, and was gone in a flash, turning, running up and out
+of sight.
+
+He stood looking after her, tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIII_
+
+
+To Gloria the sluggish moments were fraught with despondency or
+pulsating terror. All arrangements were made; she was powerless, in a
+trap; a justice was coming; she was going to marry Gratton. She lay on
+her bed with her door bolted and wept bitterly, moaning over and over:
+"Oh, I wish I were dead!" She heard Gratton stirring restlessly
+downstairs. She herself grew restless; she sprang up, tiptoed to her
+door, and slipped out as silent as a shadow. She went into the little
+room where the telephone was and through it to the sun-porch. For a long
+time she stood looking out across the mountains, her hand pressed to
+lips which trembled. She thought of her mother who, coming as fast as
+she could, no doubt by automobile, since she would not have the patience
+for trains, would not arrive before to-morrow morning. A night
+here--alone, worse than alone----
+
+But great as was the emotional tension, lusty and now wearied youth must
+be served. She had danced and ridden all through the night; she had not
+had over an hour or so of broken sleep; she had been going all day. She
+dropped to sleep on the swing-couch on the porch. It was so very silent
+all about her; the shadows were creeping, creeping among the pines.
+
+She awoke with a start. It was quite dark; the first stars burned with
+steadily growing brilliancy. Some one was standing above her, looking
+down at her. She could see only the vague outline----
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+A little cry of fear broke from her.
+
+"Gloria," pleaded Gratton. "Don't you know I wouldn't----?"
+
+"I'll be down in a minute," she told him, drawing as far away as she
+could, speaking with nervous haste. "Go down, please. Wait for me."
+
+"The justice is downstairs," he said, his own voice agitated despite his
+effort for mastery. "Are you ready?"
+
+"Yes, yes! In a minute I'll be down. Go. Please go."
+
+He hesitated; she could have screamed at him. But presently he began
+withdrawing. Slowly, hideously slowly----
+
+"When you are ready. And--he has a long ride back, Gloria. We should not
+keep him waiting."
+
+She watched until he had gone. Then she crouched, staring with wide,
+unseeing eyes into the outside dark. The man would go right away; she
+would not have even him to mitigate the horrible condition of aloneness
+with Gratton.
+
+"I won't marry him!" she cried out. "I won't. I hate him. He is a beast,
+and--I won't!"
+
+There was, after all, nothing to force her. Nothing--save that she had
+been away all this time with Gratton, that he had bought clothing for
+her, that he had registered himself and wife. _And the newspapers_! She
+heard a door slam and sprang up; if the justice went away now without
+marrying them! She _would_ marry him; why, if he had been of a notion to
+demur she would have made him marry her!
+
+"I can't think clearly. I wonder if I am insane?" She went with heavy,
+leaden steps back to her room. A pale, weary face looked at her from her
+glass. She began arranging her hair. Her fingers, with wills of their
+own, refused to obey her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly
+to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding
+to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers
+raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and
+urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the
+justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing,
+but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She
+guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent to bring the justice.
+
+"Gloria!" Gratton was calling from the foot of the steps.
+
+The voice that answered for her was clear and steady and, downstairs,
+must have sounded untroubled:
+
+"I'm coming. Just a minute."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two hours ago, while Gloria had been watching the shadows creeping among
+the pines, Mark King had arrived. He had come down the ridge from the
+rear and thus to the outbuilding by the stable which housed the
+caretaker, old Jim Spalding.
+
+"Hello, Mark," Jim had said, a trifle startled by King's sudden
+appearance. "Here you come again, like a Injun out'n the woods."
+
+Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench. King paused, saying:
+
+"Hello, Jim. Has Ben showed up yet?"
+
+"No, he ain't showed, Mark. Expectin' him?"
+
+"Yes. Who's in the house, then?"
+
+"Why, some of 'em come on ahead. Ben's girl, for one, and that city guy,
+Gratton, for another. She didn't say anything about Ben comin'; she did
+say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon."
+
+Gloria and Gratton here? King frowned. He had had ample time during the
+long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to
+say to Gloria Gaynor. And now she was here--with Gratton. He turned into
+Jim's quarters. He had no desire--or at least so he told himself very
+emphatically--to see either one of them.
+
+"I've hit the trail hard to-day, Jim," he said as Jim followed him and
+King closed the door. "And I'm dead tired and as hungry as a bear. What
+shape's the cupboard in?"
+
+"Fine," returned Spalding hospitably. "You know me, Mark."
+
+So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone,
+Mark King sat at Spalding's table, not a hundred yards away, and made a
+silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim's crude baking, and a dubious,
+warmed-over stew. Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim's bunk and
+the two smoked their pipes. With nothing in particular to be said,
+virtually nothing was said.
+
+"Needn't tell anybody I'm here, Jim." King was knocking the ashes out of
+his pipe. "I haven't any business with the folks in there. But keep your
+eye peeled for Ben, will you? The minute he comes I want to see him."
+
+"Maybe," suggested Spalding, "his girl brought word?"
+
+"No. Ben is in Coloma. Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would
+have come up from the city, you know. That means they would have come
+through Placerville or Truckee."
+
+"Guess so," agreed Spalding. "That's right. I'll set outside where I can
+watch for Ben. Goin' to take a snooze?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And after lying ten minutes staring up at the ceiling above him King
+went to sleep.
+
+"Must of been goin' some to-day," meditated the man who was once more on
+his bench outside the door. "King looks tuckered."
+
+He sat through the thickening shadows watching the stars come trooping
+into the darkening sky, hearkening to the night breeze among the trees,
+and the thin singing noises of insects. An hour or so later he heard
+horses. "That would be Ben, now," was his first thought. His second was
+that it might be some one else, and that there was no sense waking a
+tired man for nothing. So he went down toward the house. He saw two men
+dismount and tie their horses; he saw the door open and Gratton come
+out. The horsemen went up to the porch. Neither was Ben Gaynor. One, as
+he passed in through the light-filled doorway, was a little grey man
+whom Jim had never seen before; the other man, it happened, he knew.
+Rather well by sight and reputation, a good-for-nothin' scalawag, as
+Jim catalogued him, name of Steve Jarrold. The door closed after them
+and Jim went back to his bench.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the house they were waiting for Gloria. The little grey man whom they
+called "judge," and who had a way of clearing his throat before and
+after the most trifling remark, went up and down with his hands under
+his coat-tails, peering near-sightedly at pictures and books and
+wall-paper.
+
+"Quite a tidy little place Ben Gaynor's got here," he said
+patronizingly. "Quite a tidy little place."
+
+Gratton paced back and forth, whirling always abreast of the stairs,
+looking up expectantly. Steve Jarrold, the man whom Gloria had heard
+laugh, never budged from the spot where he had landed when entering the
+living-room; his wide, spraddled legs seemed rooted through the big feet
+into the floor. Big-framed and bony, with startlingly black restless
+eyes and a three or four days' growth of wiry beard no less lustrously
+black, he was ragged, unkempt, and unthinkably dirty. His eyes roved all
+about the room; they came back to Gratton, sped up the steps, came back
+to Gratton with a leer in them, and all the while he turned and turned
+his black dusty hat like a man doing a job he was being paid for.
+
+At last, since no delay holds back for ever the rolling of the great
+wheels of time, Gloria came. Slowly she descended the stairs, one hand
+at her breast, one gripping the banister. Her pallor was so great that
+her lips, though pale also, looked unnaturally red in contrast. They
+were just a little apart; she seemed to breathe with difficulty. Her
+eyes, glancing wildly about the room and at the men to be seen in the
+hallway, were the eyes of one in a trap, seeking frantically for escape,
+knowing that there was no escape. Her brain, like one's in a fever, was
+quick to impressions, alive with broken fragments of thought like so
+many flashes of vari-coloured light. She noted trifles; she saw a
+painting over Gratton's head--a seascape her father had given her for
+her fourteenth birthday. She saw three pairs of eyes staring at her,
+men's eyes, to her the eyes of wild animals; she read as clearly as if
+their messages had been in large, printed letters what lay in the mind
+of each: in the little grey man's, the judge's, speculation; in Steve
+Jarrold's, the jeers of a man of Jarrold's type at such a moment when
+they fall upon the bride; in Gratton's, quickened desire of her and
+triumphant cunning.
+
+"My dear," said Gratton, coming forward as though to meet her and then
+pausing abruptly and holding back, "this is Judge--Judge Summerling. He
+will--perform the ceremony, you know. And this is Mr. Jarrold. He
+brought the judge and will be a witness."
+
+Gloria from the last step regarded the three men as a prisoner might
+have looked upon jailers coming to drag her to execution. Her lips moved
+but no sound issued. "Judge" Summerling bowed stiffly and cleared his
+throat. Steve Jarrold's hat ceased revolving an instant, then fairly
+spun as though to make up for lost time.
+
+Suddenly Gloria began to laugh hysterically, uncontrollably. Gratton
+whipped back and stared at her; Summerling and Jarrold were mystified.
+She looked so little like laughter! And, as both had cause to regard the
+situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no
+clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little
+grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven,
+leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding!
+She was near madness with the hideous, cruel travesty of such weddings
+as are dear to the hearts of San Francisco "society" girls.
+
+The "judge" was clearing his throat again. She looked at him curiously,
+with the odd sensation that while Gloria Gaynor was asleep, drugged into
+a deep stupor, there was within her another Gloria who took a keen
+interest in the smallest happenings.
+
+"This affair ain't any more regular than it ought to be," he was saying.
+"Now, just the matter of the licence----"
+
+Gratton jerked about and glared at him. The "judge" broke off with a
+vehement clearing of his throat. In a moment he spoke again.
+
+"Seein' as both parties _want_ to get married," he said hastily, "and as
+circumstances is what they is--keepin' in mind how circumstances does
+alter cases--well then--are you ready?"
+
+That "Are you ready?" seemed to explode like a pistol shot in Gloria's
+ears. Something within her shrieked: "No, no, no!" Gratton had said a
+quiet "Yes," and was looking at her. She heard herself saying faintly:
+"Yes."
+
+Gratton put out his hand as though to help her down the last step. She
+made a little gesture, motioning him back. He bit at his lip and obeyed,
+though with a quick flash of the eyes. Gloria looked down at the step.
+About six inches high, and yet--and yet where she stood was as high as
+heaven, down there as deep as hell. She seemed powerless to achieve that
+last step. But Gratton was stirring restlessly; he would put out his
+hand again to help her. She shuddered and moved quickly. Now she stood
+on the same level as Gratton and the others; the physical fact was
+sinister as though symbolical of the psychical.
+
+The "judge" began to grow vastly businesslike. He must have the full
+names correctly, ages, birthplaces. Gratton answered for himself and for
+Gloria, who stood now with her hand on the back of a chair just within
+the living-room door. Across the room was the fireplace; over it an
+ornamental mirror. She wondered dully what she looked like; the "bride"!
+But from where she stood she could see only the reflection of the window
+across the room, the strip of curtain at the side stirring softly in the
+evening breeze. That breeze came down through the pines; it wandered
+free; why couldn't she, Gloria, be like that? She thought poignantly of
+her few days among the pines with Mark King. Oh, the remembered glory of
+it, the clean, sweet freedom of it.
+
+"Now, folks, if you're ready. Stand side by side--"
+
+"Oh!" cried Gloria.
+
+"Eh? What's that?" demanded the "judge."
+
+She tried to smile.
+
+"I--I think----" She saw Steve Jarrold leering. "The witness," she said
+wildly. "There is only one, and----"
+
+"It's usual to have two, anyhow," admitted the "judge." "But, being as
+things _is_ a bit irregular and everything, why we'll make one do."
+
+"There's Jim," said Gloria. She did not look toward Gratton, but he
+understood that she addressed him. "Jim Spalding. I'd feel better if
+some one I knew--if you'd get Jim to come, please."
+
+She knew that she did not care whether Jim Spalding came or did not
+come; that she was fighting for delay and could not help snatching at
+any straw, though she knew that in the end she would go down,
+overwhelmed by circumstance. Circumstance and--Gratton. Gratton also
+knew and frowned.
+
+"Gloria," he said smoothly, "that isn't necessary, is it?"
+
+"Yes, it is!" she flared out at him hotly. "Go, get him."
+
+"It will take only a minute," Gratton said over his shoulder as he went.
+He would see to it that it took no great amount of time. Spalding on his
+bench saw Gratton running toward him.
+
+"You're wanted in the house a minute, Spalding," he said curtly. "Step
+lively, will you?"
+
+Spalding, not given to stepping lively at other men's commands, was slow
+in answering, and then spoke drawlingly:
+
+"Wanted, am I? Well, that's interestin'. By who? I'm wonderin'."
+
+"Miss Gloria. She wants you right away."
+
+"That's different," said old Jim, getting to his feet.
+
+Gratton turned and hastened back to the house, Jim quickening his own
+pace as he sensed something out of the ordinary. The house door stood
+open as Gratton had left it, and the two entered hastily. Jim looked
+from face to face with keen, shrewd eyes, ignored Jarrold, who said a
+mirthful "Evenin', Jim," and turned to Gloria for explanation.
+
+"Miss Gloria wanted----" began Gratton. But Jim Spalding lifted a big
+hand as though to ward off the words.
+
+"I'm here, miss," he said when Gloria's white face only stared at him."
+You ain't sick, are you?"
+
+"No, Jim, I--I am going to be married, and----"
+
+"Married!" Jim looked incredulous and then puzzled as again his eyes
+went swiftly from one to the other of the three men's faces.
+
+"Yes, Jim. And I want you to be a witness."
+
+Jim flushed up and shifted uneasily. He had never been at a wedding; he
+did not know what a "witness" had to do. And to witness the wedding of
+Miss Gloria, who had never appeared to come down to earth long enough to
+know that there was such a man as Jim Spalding on the same sphere with
+her----He managed an uneasy "Yes'm," and backed off toward the door.
+
+"Now, if you folks is ready," began the "judge" again.
+
+"Right now?" muttered Jim. "You're gettin' married right now?"
+
+"Yes," said Gloria wearily. And to Summerling: "I am ready."
+
+"But I ain't!" cried Spalding. He got to the door and started down the
+hall. "Wait a minute, will you?"
+
+Gratton hurried after him, his face hot with rage, while Steve Jarrold
+guffawed loudly and then, under Gloria's startled look, dropped his
+eyes.
+
+"Come back here, Spalding," commanded Gratton angrily. "Whatever you've
+got to do can wait a minute----"
+
+"_You_ wait," growled Jim. "I'll be back quick enough."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mark King was awakened by old Jim rushing into the room, lighting a lamp
+hastily, and making a deal of clatter. He sat up, demanding:
+
+"Has Ben come?"
+
+Jim began chuckling. After all, a wedding was a wedding, and therefore
+a matter well worth a man's allowing himself to get a bit excited. From
+a cupboard he began dragging forth his one and only serviceable suit of
+clothes, dingy black, shiny affairs, but Jim's "best." He kicked off his
+breeches, drew on the black trousers, and caught up the coat.
+
+"No, Ben ain't back," he grinned at King. "Guess he'll be surprised when
+he does come. His girl's gettin' herself married. To that city guy,
+Gratton. Right now in the house!"
+
+"What!" King had heard well enough, but that "What!" broke from him
+explosively.
+
+"An' me, I'm a witness," said old Jim. "Steve Jarrold's another. They
+got the preacher there an' everything." He paused a moment and
+reflected, with puckered brows. "What do you think of her marryin' that
+swab, now? Think Ben's goin' to be pleased? Kind of surprising ain't it,
+Mark?"
+
+King managed a laugh which escaped critical notice only because old Jim
+was only half listening.
+
+"Oh, it's been open and shut all along that she'd marry Gratton," he
+said, keeping his head down as he drew a match across the floor as
+though to like a pipe whose bowl was empty. "If it suits his womenfolk,
+I guess Ben will stand for it."
+
+By now Jim had drawn his coat on and was back at the door.
+
+"Better come along, Mark," he invited. "You don't see a weddin' every
+day. Comin'?"
+
+"No, thanks," said King. He broke his match between nervous fingers. He
+raised his head to watch Jim go.
+
+"Lord, Mark," said Spalding, holding on his heel a moment. "You must of
+made one all-mighty day of it! You sure do look tuckered!"
+
+King rose and went to the door and stood looking after the swiftly
+departing figure. He saw the house, the windows bright with lights,
+light streaming out through the door to the porch. There was Gloria.
+Just there. And he had slept, and Gloria was marrying. And here was the
+end of it--the end of everything, it dawned on him. He, who had never
+looked twice on a woman, had looked thrice on her and again. He, the
+one-woman man, had found the one woman--and had lost her. He looked out
+toward the house and through its thick log walls saw Gloria; Gloria as
+she had come down the stairs to him that first day, floating down like a
+pink thistledown, putting her two hands into his, looking up into his
+eyes with eyes which he would never forget; he saw her in the woods,
+riding with him; by the spring waiting eagerly for the little
+water-ouzel, she so like a bird herself; crossing a stream on
+boulders--she had slipped; he had caught her into his arms--close. Her
+hair had blown across his face. He stood with her on the highest crest
+of a ridge; the world lay below them, they were alone in the blue
+heavens. And he loved her. He groaned and ran his hand across his eyes
+as though to wipe the pictures out--pictures which would never pass
+away.
+
+Gloria was marrying. Gratton. Now. He looked up into the sky bright with
+stars; its great message to him was "Emptiness." The world was empty,
+life was empty. There was nothing. Simply because Gloria had come, had
+laughed into his eyes, and had gone on. She was like the springtime
+which came dancing into the mountains which softened them and brightened
+them--and laughed and passed on and away. She would be laughing
+now--into Gratton's eyes.
+
+He would never see her again after to-night. Other men had loved and
+their loves had crumbled to ashes, blown away by the winds of time. But
+to-night he _would_ see her. The last time. While still she was Gloria
+Gaynor and not Gratton's wife----
+
+He started and hurried toward the house. They were waiting for Jim and
+Jim had hurried. He came to the porch and, with never a board to creak
+under his careful tread, he made his way silently around to the
+living-room side of the house. There was a window there; the shade was
+not drawn; the curtains were blowing back and forth. He drew close and
+stood, watching. He would look at Gloria one last time, turning away
+just before the preacher said the last words; it was like looking for
+the last time on a beloved face before the sod fell----
+
+He saw her. Her back was turned to him; her head was down. He watched
+her fingers moving nervously at her sides and his brow contracted with a
+sudden access of pain. Those fingers had touched his and he had thrilled
+to the soft, warm contact; he loved them better than he loved life. And
+soon they would find their way into Gratton's.
+
+Not once did he move his eyes from her. She did not turn toward him, but
+as the "judge" began talking she lifted her head and King saw her
+throat, her cheek. How pale she was----
+
+Though her head was up, her slim body drooped. Like a little wildwood
+flower wilting. So she remained for what seemed a very long time. Then
+suddenly he saw her body stiffen; her hands flew to her breast. The
+"judge," hurrying along, had asked:
+
+"And do you take this man to be your wedded husband?"
+
+King did not want to hear the answer; he turned to go. But hear now he
+must, for though until now responses had been low-voiced, hardly above a
+murmur, he heard Gloria crying:
+
+"_No! No and no and no_!"
+
+King stopped like a man paralysed. Had he gone mad? Then his pulses
+leaped and hammered. Gloria had cried "_No_!" A tremor shook him; he
+could no longer see her, but he stood where he was, his senses keyed to
+hear a falling pin within.
+
+"He is a beast and I hate him!" cried Gloria wildly. "He tried to trick
+me and trap me. He tried to make me marry him But I won't! I won't! I'd
+rather die."
+
+Her voice died chokingly away, and for five seconds it was deathly
+still. Still King did not move. He heard Gratton's exclamation,
+Gratton's hurried step. The man was excited, was expostulating. Other
+voices; the other men had drawn aside, amazed, leaving Gratton a clear
+field with his unwilling bride.
+
+"Have you gone mad, Gloria?" King could hear the words now. "Think what
+you are saying----"
+
+"I have thought. I hate you. Go away. Let me go."
+
+Gratton's pale eyes must be ablaze with wrath now; his tone told that.
+
+"There's no way out for you. You've got to marry me. I----"
+
+"Take your hand off----"
+
+Her voice broke into a scream.
+
+"You're hurting me----"
+
+And now Mark King moved at last. Before the last word had done vibrating
+through the still room he was through the window, taking the shortest
+way. Gratton's hand was on Gloria's shoulder; King threw it off, hurling
+the man backward across the room. Gloria turned to him----
+
+"Mark!" she cried. "Oh, Mark King!"
+
+He put his arms about her, thinking that she was going to fall. For an
+instant he held her tight; he felt her heart beating as though it would
+burst through her bosom.
+
+"You won't let him----?"
+
+He moved with her to a chair, placed her in it, and turned toward
+Gratton, a look like a naked knife in his eyes.
+
+"By jings!" muttered old Jim under his breath. "By jings!"
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIV_
+
+
+At this, the most critical moment of her life, it would appear
+inevitable that Gloria must bend every mental faculty to grappling with
+the vital issues. And yet, as she sat swallowed up in the big chair, for
+a space of time she was in a spell, caught up and whirled away from
+those about her; she forgot Gratton with the white, angry face; she had
+no eyes for Mark King or for Summerling, Steve Jarrold or Jim Spalding.
+She was thinking of another day, two years ago, when she and her mother
+had been alone in this room. They had been busied with the last touches
+of furniture arrangement; they had discussed locations for chairs and
+had argued over pictures. Both tired out with a day of effort, they had
+come near tears in a verbal battle over the best place for the sole
+article remaining unplaced. Gloria wanted it in the hallway; Mrs. Gaynor
+pleaded for it over the mantel in the living-room. Finally it was Gloria
+who cried with sudden laughter:
+
+"Oh, what _difference_ does it make? We're getting silly over trifles.
+Have it your way, mamma."
+
+Trifles! Gloria wondered if any other act of her life had had the
+tremendous import of that sudden yielding to her mother's wishes. If the
+mirror had been placed anywhere else in the universe, even by a few
+inches removed from its present abiding-place, would there be a _Gloria
+Gaynor_ in all the world right now? Or would her chair hold quite
+another sort of person--Mrs. Gratton? If she had not lifted her
+desperate eyes and seen Mark King reflected at the window, how would she
+have answered that one final question the "judge" propounded? Would she
+have said "Yes"? Or would it have been "No"? She did not know; she would
+never know. She had been on the verge, dizzy with profitless
+speculation. And now, only the extent of one little word stood between
+her and an unthinkable condition. That a whole life should be steered
+down one channel or another--oh, what immeasurably separated
+channels!--by one's breath in a single-syllabled word----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You don't answer!" a voice was saying irritably.
+
+She started. They were talking to her, they had been talking to her, and
+now she realized that she had heard voices across a great distance, and
+by no means as clear to her consciousness as the remembered voice of her
+mother two years ago arguing for a mirror over the fireplace. She turned
+her eyes on Gratton, since obviously it was he who insisted on an
+answer. But King spoke for her.
+
+"Look here, Gratton," he said bluntly, "as far as I can see there is no
+reason why Miss Gaynor should pay the least attention to your
+effervescings if she doesn't care to. She is a free agent and under no
+obligations to you."
+
+"I'll ask your opinion when I want it," snapped Gratton. "Miss
+Gloria----"
+
+"You asked me something?" said Gloria. "Pardon me. I didn't hear."
+
+Her aloof reply disconcerted him. Her attitude was spontaneous,
+unaffected, and hence unconsciously one of polite indifference. Suddenly
+Gratton, fume as he would, had become of not the least importance.
+
+"You said that you would marry me. Not a dozen minutes ago."
+
+"Did I?" she demanded coolly. "Are you quite sure I said that?"
+
+"Look here, Miss Gloria." It was Jim Spalding, who had been ill at ease
+all along and now had the brains and perhaps the delicacy to understand
+that this was no place for him. "If you don't need me after all, I'll
+go."
+
+"And the rest of us with you," said King. "If Miss Gaynor cares to talk
+things over with Gratton----"
+
+Gloria put out her hand impulsively, touching King's arm.
+
+"_You_ stay. Please. Until--he goes."
+
+King inclined his head gravely, not realizing that his body stiffened
+under her light touch.
+
+"What about _me_?" demanded the "judge" sharply. "Am I needed or ain't
+I?"
+
+"I'd say not this evening," King's dry voice answered him. "Good-night
+to you."
+
+"That's a fine way to treat a man," cried Summerling truculently. "Here
+I ride all this way in the dark, and without stoppin' for so much as
+supper; here I ain't had a bite to eat since dinner-time, and it's
+good-night and get out! And that hundred dollars I was to get so fast,
+how about that? Think I'm the man to let folks trample on me and----"
+
+"Maybe Jim will give you a hand-out at his cabin," King told him. "As
+for your money, get it out of Gratton if he promised it to you--or," he
+added with a flash of heat, "take it out of his hide, for all I care."
+
+"Wait for me outside, Summerling," muttered Gratton. "_I_ haven't said
+you won't be needed, have I?"
+
+"Just the same, I wouldn't mind takin' what's comin' to me now----"
+
+"Man alive!" shouted Gratton, whirling on him. "Haven't I got enough on
+my hands without you yelping at me?"
+
+"Just the same----"
+
+"Jim," called King above the incoherent mouthings, "slip your arm
+through Summerling's and lead him off with you. Feed him if you feel
+like it, and let him stick around for a word with Gratton if he wants.
+And you, Steve Jarrold, Ben Gaynor isn't here, but just the same you can
+take it from me that neither you nor any other of Swen Brodie's hangdogs
+is wanted in Ben Gaynor's house. Out you go."
+
+Jarrold's eyes slanted off to Gratton. Then, seeing himself ignored and
+forgotten, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his hat, and went out.
+Behind him, arm in arm, one smiling widely and the other pulling back
+and still sputtering, went Jim and the "judge."
+
+To all this Gloria had given scant attention. The spell no longer lay
+over her; she was keenly awake to the demands of the present; she was
+thinking, thinking, thinking! It seemed that she had walked on
+quicksands; that a hand had drawn her up and placed her where she was
+now, with solid ground underfoot; but that still all about her were
+quicksands. What temporary sense of security was hers was due to Mark
+King, to his presence. As long as he stood there, where she could put
+out a hand and touch him, she could rest calmly, assured of safety. But
+when he went, there remained Gratton and his venom. Quicksands all about
+her in which she would be floundering at this moment but for Mark
+King----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which
+became delicately flushed. Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and
+once more almost childlike--eyes to remind a man that here, after all,
+was no woman of the world, but only a young girl--rose to King's and met
+his long and searchingly. Yet there was that in their expression that
+made him understand that she was not looking at him, the physical man,
+so much as through him. For the first time in her pampered life the day
+had come when she was face to face with vital issues; when there was no
+mamma and no papa to turn to; when there were no shoulders other than
+her own to feel the weight of events. She must do her own thinking, come
+to her own decisions. Here was no time for a misstep. The one great step
+she had already taken; she had cried "No!" That step could be
+reconsidered, retraced; she looked at Gratton's face and saw that. But
+now she would not do that; she could not. In the city, seeing the two
+men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father's log
+house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did
+men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to
+another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon?
+A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know
+more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within
+her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl
+who was very young, spoiled, vain, and selfish; a girl who was older,
+who looked above and beyond the confines of her own self, who was
+warmhearted and impulsive, and could be generous. There was the Gloria
+who was the product of her mother's teaching and pampering; there was
+that other Gloria who was the true daughter of a pioneer stock, a girl
+linked to the city through tradition, bound to the outdoors through
+instinct. There was the Gloria who was ashamed of Mark King at a formal
+gathering in her own home; there was the Gloria who was thrilled to the
+depths of her being as in the forest-lands she knew a breathless moment
+in the arms of Mark King.
+
+Well, here were considerations to linger over on an idle day. Now,
+without seeking for hidden springs, there were on the surface certain
+plain facts. No matter what she had felt toward Gratton before, she
+detested him now; no matter what he might have appeared in San
+Francisco, here in his unaccustomed garb he looked to her puny, shallow,
+and contemptible. He was, as she had told him, a beast. He had betrayed
+her confidence; he had taken advantage of her headlong youth; he had
+displayed to her view the vileness within him. He loved her, did he? So
+much the better. It lay within her power, then, to repay him, if only in
+part, for what he had made her suffer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I repeat, Miss Gloria," Gratton was saying, a stubborn look in his
+eyes, "that you promised to marry me. You have had a hard day, I
+realize; there has been much to unnerve you. I erred in haste, perhaps;
+I should have waited until you had a night's rest. But you know why I
+did not wait. It was for your sake."
+
+Gloria heard him through with a hard little smile.
+
+"Nothing is further from my intention, Mr. Gratton," she told him icily,
+"than to marry you. Now or ever. Please let us consider the matter
+closed once and for all."
+
+His fingers worked nervously at his sides. Gloria chose the moment to
+lift her eyes again fleetingly to King's. She wanted Gratton to see, she
+wanted to hurt him all that she could. She looked back to see him wince.
+Nor did his quick contraction of the brows result from her glance alone;
+he had seen the look lying unhidden in King's eyes. Mark King had
+to-night, for the first time, swept barriers aside and looked straight
+into his own heart and known that all of the love that was in him to
+give had been given to Gloria Gaynor; he had come from Jim's cabin to
+look on her for the last time; he was giving her up. And then, when he
+had turned away rather than hear her murmur "Yes," she had cried out
+ringingly: "No!" The sod had not fallen upon a beloved face; death had
+not entered the door; life was not extinguished--where there was life
+invariably there was hope--he had given Gloria up, yes; but she had come
+back from beyond the frontier, she had come calling to him. He was
+certain of nothing just now beyond the tremendous, all-excluding fact
+that, wise or fool, he loved her. He wanted her with a want that is
+greater than hunger or thirst, or love of man for man or of man for life
+itself. Much of this lay shining in his eyes for Gratton to read--or for
+Gloria.
+
+"I am no boy to be thrown aside like an old glove," cried Gratton,
+beside himself, shaken with jealous fury. "You have promised; you have
+loved me; in your heart you love me now. Shall I stand back for a girl's
+nervous whim? I tell you, you shall marry me."
+
+Gloria's laughter, cool and insolent, maddened him. He clenched his
+hands and was swept away by his passion to gusty vehemence:
+
+"Think before you laugh! What if, instead of doing the gentlemanly
+thing, I refused to marry you? Alone with me all this time; all last
+night; a clerk to swear I bought clothing for you; a register to show
+where we engaged a room as man and wife; the San Francisco papers
+already bandying your name about, already nosing after scandal. You've
+_got_ to marry me; there is nothing else for you to do!"
+
+Gloria flushed hotly. But only in anger this time. King mystified,
+looking from one to the other, turned at last to Gloria and muttered:
+
+"For God's sake let me throw him out of the door!"
+
+"I think it might be best first," she answered quietly, "if Mr. Gratton
+remained long enough to understand that this is the last time I shall
+ever speak to him or listen to a word from him. He has tried to get me
+into a nasty situation; he will do all that he can to promote scandal.
+But I want him to know that he will, in the end of it all, have my
+father to reckon with--and my friends." Again she looked swiftly at King
+and again Gratton writhed at the look. "Papa will not be here to-night;
+he is hurt and in Coloma, and I'll give you his message soon. But----"
+
+"You saw your father! In Coloma!" It was a gasp of astonishment from
+Gratton. "You said nothing. You brought a message to King here?"
+
+"And you escorted me and never guessed!" Gloria taunted him. "Really it
+seems too bad, after all of your week-end trips to Coloma, after all of
+your conferences with the estimable Mr. Swen Brodie!"
+
+His prominent eyes bulged, written large with consternation. For a
+moment he stood the picture of uncertainty, plucking at his lip.
+
+"Gloria," he said shortly, "despite all you have said I shall see you
+again. To-morrow, when we have both rested, I'll come to you. Now, if
+you will pardon me, I'll have a word with King. Strictly business, you
+may be sure, King," he concluded sarcastically.
+
+"There's to be no business between you and me," King told him promptly.
+
+"But there is. If you've got two grains of common sense. Look you, Loony
+Honeycutt is dead at last. His secret is no longer his secret. Swen
+Brodie knows something--a whole lot----"
+
+"It strikes me," frowned King, "that you know more of this than I gave
+you credit for. Where do you come in?"
+
+"I know--nearly all that it is necessary to know!" His eyes flashed
+triumphantly. "Think I'm the man to let the crowd of you lift a fortune
+right under my nose? Here is my proposition, and you'll thank your stars
+that I make it: We are not friends, you and I, but that is no reason
+that we cannot be business associates until this trick is turned. You
+and I enter into a pact right now, purely business, you understand." He
+was speaking more and more rapidly in the grip of a new emotion.
+"Whatever we find we divide, fifty-fifty;----"
+
+King's sudden laughter, no pleasant sound in Gratton's ears, checked the
+rush of words. To accept Gratton as a partner--on a fifty-fifty split of
+the spoils! Was the man crazy?
+
+"I have been working with Brodie," shouted Gratton. "If I go on with him
+now, with him and the men with him, six or eight of them taking what he
+gives them either in money or in curses and orders--if, I say, I chip
+in with him against you, what will the inevitable end be, I ask you?
+Look at the odds----"
+
+"The inevitable end," said King sternly, "will be that they'll pick your
+bones and kick you out."
+
+"I demand to know what word Gaynor sent----"
+
+"Will you have him go, Mark?" said Gloria. "He--sickens me."
+
+King, unleashed by her words, took a quick step forward.
+
+"Gratton," he said, "you'd better go."
+
+Gratton, rising to fresh fury, shouted at him:
+
+"And leave you and her here? Alone? All night----"
+
+King bore down upon him and struck him across the mouth, hurling him
+back so that Gratton tripped and fell. Gloria rose and stood watching,
+terrified and yet fascinated. She saw Gratton crawl to his feet; his
+hand went out to the table to draw himself up; it found one of the heavy
+bronze book-ends; the fingers gripped it so that the tendons stood out
+like cords. She could see the faces of both men, Gratton's twitching and
+vindictive, King's immobile, looking at once calm and terribly stern. If
+there were two Glorias within her, one of them fled now; the other
+watched with quick bright eyes and gloried in the man who had come at
+her hour of direst need; one vanished, afraid, the other felt a little
+thrill go singing through her blood. And though that bronze block, were
+it hurled at King's head, might have been the death of him, she was not
+once in doubt as to the end of this conflict. There before her eyes a
+man contended with a manikin.
+
+"Drop that, Gratton! Do you hear me? Drop it, I say!"
+
+He even drew closer while he spoke. In his voice was assurance that he
+would be obeyed; in his look was the promise of death or near-death, to
+be meted out swiftly and relentlessly for disobedience. Gratton, like a
+man in a daze, hesitated. King's hand shot out swiftly, gripping his
+wrist. There was a sudden jerk and the bit of bronze crashed to the
+floor.
+
+"You'll go now!"
+
+"Yes, I'll go. But----"
+
+"On your way, then!"
+
+"But----"
+
+"Shut up!" A tremor not to be repressed shook King's voice. "And go
+before I----Just go!"
+
+Gratton caught up his hat, stood for a moment plucking at his lip and
+staring at Gloria, and then turned and went out. Strangely, only now
+that he had gone, did Gloria shiver and look after him fearfully. The
+man here had seemed so futile and yet she had seen that last look, so
+filled with malevolence that in his wake the room seemed steeped in
+menace. King must have had somewhat the same sort of an impression; he
+went to the door and called out loudly:
+
+"Jim! Oh, Jim."
+
+Jim's voice answered from the cabin:
+
+"Comin', Mark."
+
+"Gratton's outside. I've told him to clear out. Give him about two
+minutes, and if he's still here throw a gun on him and run him off the
+place."
+
+"Oh, I'm going fast enough." From somewhere off in the dark it was
+Gratton's voice calling back hatefully. "And don't you forget it, Mark
+King, I am going where an offer like mine to you will be accepted. We'll
+be there before you yet, a dozen men that won't lay down before you! And
+you can tell that girl in there, with my compliments, she'll be on her
+knees to me before she's a day older." He lifted his voice so that
+Gloria, shivering in the silent house, must hear every word. "You can
+tell her, too, that if I didn't telephone to her mother from Oakland, I
+did call up two of the San Francisco newspaper offices! Tell her to
+watch for the papers. And when they get wind of the nice little
+situation to-night, Gloria here all night----"
+
+King had held the door open only to see if Gratton was going to his
+horse. Now, however, he slammed it suddenly and went back to Gloria.
+After all, Jim could be depended on to see to Gratton and to do his job
+thoroughly and with joy in the doing. There was still the message to be
+had from Ben Gaynor, who, it seemed, lay hurt somewhere in Coloma.
+
+But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Gloria, and for the moment
+all thoughts of Gaynor or a message fled from his mind. Again she was as
+pale as death; she caught at the back of the chair which had served her
+thus before; she lifted to King eyes sick with terror.
+
+"I haven't got the straight of things very well," King said to her,
+speaking very gently. For in his heart he was thinking: "Poor little
+kid! She's only a kid of a girl and she's pretty near the
+breaking-point, from the look of things, and small wonder." But aloud he
+continued: "Only one thing seems clear. You are tired half to death and
+worried the other half. I wouldn't let myself think of that snake
+Gratton or his poison drippings. Things will work out all right." He
+managed a smile of a sort, the first smile to-night, and added: "They
+always do, you know."
+
+"Do they?" she asked listlessly. And she, too, forced a smile, so wan
+and bleak that it came close to putting a dash of tears into King's
+eyes.
+
+"For one thing," he said brusquely, "I'll bet you haven't had a bite to
+eat since you got here; have you?" She shook her head; she hadn't
+thought of such a thing as eating. When had she eaten last? Not since
+she and Gratton, motoring up from San Francisco, had stopped at the
+wayside lunch-counter? Perhaps that was why this giddy faintness
+troubled her, why the blood drummed in her ears.
+
+"You'll sit right down," commanded King. "Or lie down is better. In two
+shakes I'll have something ready for you."
+
+"You are so good to me." That came straight from Gloria's heart; her
+eyes shone with a gratitude which struck him as far beyond proportion to
+the small deed of the moment. "I'll go upstairs a moment; papa's
+message----"
+
+"It can wait ten minutes."
+
+"Let me get it now. I--I will lie down in my room until you call me, if
+you want me to."
+
+"That's good." He watched her go slowly upstairs and then hastened to
+the kitchen. He got a wood fire going in the range, scouted for coffee,
+found a glass jar of bacon, a tin of milk, all kinds of canned goods.
+And meantime, though occupied with much speculation concerning all that
+had happened to-night and must have happened before and might happen in
+the future, he never for an instant entirely forgot Gloria and how
+pitifully borne down she looked. Gratton had tricked her some way, had
+coerced her, had come close to breaking her utterly. And yet her
+indomitable spirit had in the end triumphed over Gratton's scheming;
+King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless "No!
+No and no and no!"
+
+"Just a little kid of a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity
+of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother,
+spoiled to the _n_th degree, given no opportunity to develop her own
+character, to grow up to life's responsibilities. Her mother had not
+even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of them, making Gloria
+ashamed. Grandparents of whom any one might be justly proud; folk of
+integrity, of stamina, of fearless hardihood, men and women of that
+glorious type that builds empires. And Gloria, King sensed, was like
+them. Deep within her, under the layers of artificiality which her
+mother had striven so indefatigably and lovingly to lay on, she was like
+them. He remembered his two days with her alone in the mountains and
+sought to forget the fragment of one evening in the city. "Here she was
+her real self; there she had been what her mother had made her over."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gloria, with lagging steps, had gone to her room. Now she lay on her
+bed, her hands pressed tight upon her closed eyes, her will set against
+heeding the throbbing in her temples as she strove to think clearly.
+Gratton's words rang in her ears. They plunged her into panic. For
+scores of "friends" and hundreds of acquaintances she would furnish a
+topic of talk. Girls who were jealous of her would get into a warm
+flurry of excitement; Gloria could picture a dozen of them sitting at
+their telephones, calling up this, that, and the other Mabel and
+Ernestine, saying: "Oh, did you hear about Gloria Gaynor? Isn't it
+_terrible_! What _could_ she have been thinking of? I knew she was----"
+and so forth and so on, "ringing interminable changes." Youth, though
+declared by the thoughtless to be a period of heedlessness, takes to
+heart far more seriously than does Age all happenings which touch its
+own interests. Pure tragedy is Youth's own realm. It feels acutely, its
+imaginings are fearful, it magnifies and distorts beyond all reason. Had
+Gloria been above thirty instead of under twenty this moment would have
+been far, far less deeply immersed in the gloom of despair. She suffered
+dry-eyed.
+
+But Youth, condition of wedded extremes, while it holds tragedy to its
+bleeding heart, cannot entirely fail in time to listen to the voice of
+hope. Gloria clung passionately to the one straw offered her: Mark King
+had come; he had saved her, if only for the moment. If there were
+further salvation, it lay in Mark King. And so she came presently to a
+thought that made her sit bolt upright, that set her heart racing, that
+brought a new look into her eyes. Just now it had seemed so clear that
+only one thing could save her from clacking diatribes, from torture
+under the tongues of Ernestines and Mabels and daily newspapers--
+marriage with Gratton. But Gratton was gone and Mark King was here! If
+she married King! The "judge" was still here. King was her father's
+friend; between men like them there was nothing which would be denied
+when friendship asked. What if she went to King, saying to him
+straightforwardly: "Thus and such is my predicament. For my sake--for
+the sake of papa's daughter and hence for papa's sake no less--will you
+go through the form of marrying me? I shall be no burden; it will make
+no difference in your life. For to-morrow I will go back to San
+Francisco and you need never see me again. You can let me have a
+divorce; you will have lost nothing; I shall have been saved everything.
+Will you many me, Mark King?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gloria!" King was calling. "Will you come down now? Everything's
+ready."
+
+"Coming," answered Gloria. "Right away."
+
+She glanced in her glass as she went out; the colour which had played
+hide-and-seek all day was again tinting her cheeks a delicate rose. What
+were fatigue and hunger when hope attended them?
+
+But it happened that Gloria's impulse, which was at least honest and
+frank, was for a little held in abeyance, and thus it came about that
+she lost the opportunity to appear before Mark King at a critical moment
+as being straight-dealing, direct, and outspoken. She thanked him with
+her eyes for the lunch he had set forth for her; she gave him a quick
+little smile as he waited on her. He poured the coffee, gave her milk
+and sugar, brought the hot things from the stove. And all of the time
+there was in his eyes a look which he had no suspicion was there, the
+look of a man's adoration.
+
+"He will do whatever I ask him to do," something sang within her.
+
+"Won't you sit down with me, Mark?" she smiled at him.
+
+And there, while one Gloria had determined to indulge in plain talk, the
+other Gloria came forward obliquely, demanding the place which had
+always been hers when it was a case of man and girl together. The smile
+was the smile of a coquette; it intoxicated; it made a man's heart beat
+hard; it brought him in close to her and thrust the world back. She
+could not have helped the smile or its message.
+
+"I have eaten," he said a trifle harshly, she thought.
+
+"You are so good to me." She stirred her coffee and he saw only the
+lashes and their black shadows on her cheeks. Then she said brightly:
+"This is our third little picnic together, isn't it?"
+
+"Then you haven't forgotten? The others?" The words said themselves for
+him. The human comedy had begun, or the comedy begun long ago was
+resumed smoothly in its third act, King unconsciously answering to his
+cue. After that it was neither Gloria nor himself who played the part of
+stage-director; that time-honoured responsibility was back in the hands
+of the oldest of all stage-managers. The wind that drives autumn leaves
+scurrying, the sun that awakens spring buds were no more resistless or
+inevitable forces than the one now voicing its dictates.
+
+"It would be--unmaidenly to ask him to marry you," whispered that other
+self within her. Oh, if she could only guess which was the _real self_,
+which the pretender! "And there is no need. Look at his eyes!"
+
+King saw lying on the table the package done up in an old cloth which
+she had brought. Further, he knew that he had seen it before and where
+he had seen it. He knew that at last he had old Loony Honeycutt's secret
+where he could put out his hand to it, with none to gainsay him. He knew
+that with it was a message from his old friend Ben; that Ben, himself,
+lay at this moment in Coloma hurt. And yet his eyes clung to the eyes of
+Gloria and all of these things were swept aside in his mind. He saw that
+when her eyes came to a meeting with his the flush in her cheeks grew
+hotter. He tried to remember how he had come away from her in San
+Francisco; how he had given her up for all time. But that memory
+blurred; in its place he stood with her on a boulder in a creek, holding
+her in his arms; he stood with her on a mountain top, with the world
+lost below them. He sought to get a grip on himself; here and now was no
+time to talk to her of love. She was alone; it was his one job right now
+to take Ben's place, to protect her and efface his own madness. But was
+he mad? And was now no time, after all? She was alone, yes; but if some
+day she would marry him, was not now the time? What would he not give
+for the right to stop the nasty mouth of Gratton once and for all.
+
+Fragmentary thoughts, by no means logically aligned. They came and went
+with other thoughts between, pro and con. But thoughts do not always
+sway destiny. In the crisis often enough there is no time for so slow a
+process as thinking; instinct leaps. Instinct compels. All of the
+thought in the world will not draw a steel needle to a bit of wood; all
+of the thought in the world will not hold back the same needle from a
+magnet. There are urges which must be obeyed, the urge of spinning
+worlds to circling suns, the urge of man to maid.
+
+"Gloria!" he said huskily. "Gloria!"
+
+"Yes, Mark?" she said quietly, trying to speak very calmly and as though
+she did not know, oh, so well, all that tumult that lay behind his
+calling her name. But despite her determination she was agitated; the
+moment had come; there was no stopping it. And did she want it? What did
+she want? What, exactly, did she feel?
+
+She knew what was in his heart! His soul exulted as the certainty rushed
+upon him. She knew what he was going to say; words were needless between
+them. And the colour merely deepened in her cheeks while she hid her
+eyes from him.
+
+He came to her swiftly. She rose as swiftly to her feet. He saw that a
+tremor shook her. He saw that she did not draw back from him; her eyes
+at last lifted to meet his own. They baffled him; he could not read
+their meaning. But they shone on him softly; they were the eyes of her
+whom he loved. Like magnet and steel they were swept together. He had
+her in his arms; he felt against his breast the wild flutter of her
+heart, against his face the soft brushing of her hair. He felt her body
+tense but unresisting in his arms; suddenly she relaxed, her head was
+against his breast. Gloria in his arms--Gloria's sweet face hidden from
+him against his rough shirt----
+
+"Gloria!" he cried again. "Gloria!"
+
+"The--the bacon!" gasped Gloria. "It's burning----"
+
+She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with
+the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from
+across the table. Then she fled to the stove and retrieved the burning
+bacon as though here were the one matter of transcendent importance.
+King began to laugh, his laughter as joyous as a boy's.
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+"That's five times you've said 'Gloria,'" she informed him hurriedly.
+"And----Please, Mark," as he moved toward her. "And you haven't read
+papa's letter yet. And--and I'm dying to know what is in that funny
+package. Aren't you?"
+
+"If I'm dying at all," he told her gravely, though he found a smile to
+answer her own--and two very serious smiles they were--"it is of quite
+another complaint. And this time----"
+
+"But _please_, Mark! I am here all alone--with you--and----"
+
+"I know. I haven't forgotten. But, Gloria----"
+
+They both started to a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch.
+Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought
+condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had
+escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the
+puckered and perplexed face of the "judge"; they were just in time to
+see a big hand grasp him by the shoulder and yank him out of sight. They
+heard Summerling expostulate; they heard Jim Spalding's far from gentle
+voice cursing him.
+
+King understood, at least in part, what must lie under Gloria's look of
+distress. Surely circumstance had placed her in an equivocal position
+to-night. Summerling was the type to blab; he was in no charitable frame
+of mind; he had found her alone here with men, had come to marry her to
+one man, and now had seen her in the arms of another. There was but one
+answer, even to Mark King.
+
+"Some time you are going to marry me, Gloria," he said gravely. "Why not
+now?"
+
+"It sounds like--like an advertisement, Mark," she laughed somewhat
+wildly.
+
+"Poor little kid," he muttered, seeing how she trembled. "But, Gloria,
+why not? Some time you are going to give yourself to me, aren't you,
+dear? While this man is still here, won't you let him marry us? It will
+give me the right to shut that fool Gratton's mouth for him and----Oh,
+Gloria, my dear, my dear----"
+
+She stood staring at him with wide eyes. He pleaded with her.
+
+"Will you, Gloria?"
+
+And then from lips which did not smile he heard the very faint but no
+longer evasive "Yes."
+
+"Now, Gloria?"
+
+"Yes, Mark. If you are sure that you want me." She spoke humbly; at the
+instant she was humble. "But," she added hastily, "still you haven't
+read poor papa's letter. He was very anxious. Let me go a minute, Mark.
+I am going upstairs. I--I want to phone to mamma first. And while I am
+gone you can read papa's letter, and--and----" Her face was hot with
+blushes.
+
+"And arrange with the judge," he said, his own voice uncertain. "Yes,
+Gloria."
+
+She ran by him then. He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door
+closing after her. Then like a man who treads on air he went to the
+window and threw it up and called:
+
+"Jim! Tell the judge not to go. I have business with him. I want him and
+you here in ten minutes."
+
+And then when Jim's voice had answered him he thought to take up the
+parcel on the table--largely because Gloria had asked him! A hurried
+letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt's. Something here for
+which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only
+because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to
+bend them to a letter--this was in the beginning an effort. But Ben's
+words caught him when he had read the first line. He had opened the
+packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a
+Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone;
+Gaynor's letter was slipped into it:
+
+    "DEAR MARK:
+
+    "Honeycutt's dead. I've got his secret. But Brodie came
+    near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got
+    there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the
+    "parson's" and then Gus Ingle's. As I was going out of
+    the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me.
+    In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not
+    see; it was just that near! They came close to killing
+    me; when I came to I found they'd been through my
+    pockets. I don't know how much Brodie knows. I do know
+    he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook. I think you
+    can beat them to it, hands down. And, for God's sake,
+    Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don't let the
+    grass grow! I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy;
+    laid up this way I don't see a chance unless you find
+    what we've been after so long _and find it quick_. Will
+    you start without any delay? As soon as you get this
+    phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma. Leave word for me. And
+    let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you!
+    Then I won't go crazy here with worry. And watch out for
+    Gratton as well as Brodie.
+
+    "BEN."
+
+A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old
+excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove
+and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in
+a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace
+left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful
+labourings, was the "secret" at last--Gus Ingle's message come to him
+across the dead years:
+
+    "Good god I never see such gold nor no man neither and
+    when he come in to camp you could reed in his look he
+    had found it because no man could have looked at that
+    Mother load and not look like Jimmy. And big Brodie
+    grabbed him by the throat and shook him and nearly
+    killed him until Jimmy told. And I guess there was
+    enough there for everybody in all the world. We went
+    down the gorge to the narrow place over on the big
+    seedar that had broke off and that was how we come to
+    the First Caive, and then we come to Caive number thre
+    and two. And good god have mercy on my soul when Ime
+    dead but I got the thought right then if it was only all
+    mine--we worked all seven until we dropped that day and
+    night and early in the morning and the storm was coming
+    but we stayed. And for two weeks maybe thre we lost
+    track of time until this grate big pile of gold was dug
+    that I am setting right on top of right now how can a
+    man eat gold when he is dying of hunger and burn it when
+    he is freezing. And it was big Brodie killed pore Manny
+    I seen him and the next day or maybe it was two days
+    Dago was gone and never come back was it Manny's goast
+    got him and drug him down the cliffs screaming horrible
+    and in the gorge--anyway that was Two. and I am all that
+    is left and I am going--I tride to get out and the Big
+    storm drov me back and all I can see is Jimmy Kelp and
+    the parson if I had not of killed them they would killed
+    me sure and big Brodie's gone he is crazy and cant never
+    make it back across the mountains in this storm, and
+    Baldy Winch he took a big nugget and went off, and he
+    stoled what handful of grub there was. And now I can
+    look down in the gorge and see the water all white and
+    snow and ice sickles and I am afraide to get lost in the
+    caives and if I write all this in the bible that was
+    preacher Elsons and tie it up safe in oilcloath and
+    canvas and make a bote out of a chunk of wood and throw
+    it in the river maybe it will get to one of the camps
+    down there and a good man will find it and Ile give him
+    half. You come up the old trail past where the thre
+    Eytalians had their camp last year and over the big
+    mountain strate ahead and about another seven miles
+    strate on and then there is the pass with the big black
+    rocks on one side and streaks of white granite on the
+    other and down into the gorge and strate up four or five
+    miles where the old seedar broke off and fell acrost. My
+    god here goes.
+
+    "GUS INGLE."
+
+To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark
+King, Gus Ingle's message would have brought only stupefaction. But to
+King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the "secret" lay bare. Old names
+held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as
+Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River
+then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.
+
+"What is more," he thought triumphantly, "I know where two caves are in
+there. But where the devil is 'Caive thre'?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were
+steps on the porch. Jim and the "judge" were coming----
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XV_
+
+
+"It strikes me," said Summerling sarcastically, "that there's mighty
+funny goings-on here to-night. I show up to marry one man to a girl and
+nex' thing I know I peek in a winder and see----"
+
+"Never mind that," cut in King hastily. "You are going to marry her
+after all. Only to another man."
+
+"Meanin' you, Mark?" demanded Jim. On his honest old face was a look of
+utter bewilderment; for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he or
+every one else had gone crazy.
+
+King flushed under the look, but nodded and managed a calm "Yes, Jim."
+
+Summerling cleared his throat and thereafter scratched his head.
+
+"It's irregular. I told Gratton that. But he said there was--was
+extenuatin' circumstances and all that. Hadn't been time for a licence.
+It's irregular; don't know as I mightn't get in trouble for it----"
+
+"The marriage would be binding, wouldn't it?" demanded King.
+
+"Sure it would; once I said 'man and wife' nary man could set _that_
+aside. But, if any one wanted to get _me_ in bad, seeing there's no
+licence--well, it would make trouble with my bondsmen and they'd make
+trouble with me."
+
+King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the
+living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should
+hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had
+undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then,
+"either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself
+will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"
+
+"Gratton promised me a hundred dollars," muttered the "judge." "And he
+cleared out without taking the trouble to pay me."
+
+King's face cleared. His cheque for a hundred dollars decided the
+"judge."
+
+"That's a might of money to pay the old duffer for one night's work,
+Mark," muttered Jim. "Strikes me that way, anyhow."
+
+A might of money! King laughed.
+
+"Now if you folks are ready," said Summerling, grown impatient the
+moment the cheque was in his pocket, "I've got a long ride ahead of me."
+
+This time Gloria did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase
+to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a
+thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking--she, too,
+remembered--how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him;
+she put out her two hands to him as she had done that other time. And
+right there they were married--on Gus Ingle's old Bible.
+
+"It's done!" whispered Mark, bending over her. "You are mine now; mine
+for all time, Gloria. And, girl of mine," he added reverently, "may God
+deal with me as I deal with you."
+
+"It's done!" In an awed little voice came Gloria's response, like an
+echo. Mark King had seen her across the quicksands.
+
+Jim and the "judge" had gone. They two were alone in the still house.
+Gloria was nervous; King could see that and thought that he understood.
+So he went for wood, made a cheery blaze in the fireplace, and drew two
+chairs up to it.
+
+"Tell me about papa's letter," said Gloria hastily Had there not been
+that obvious topic she would have caught at another, any other. "He
+didn't tell me how badly he was hurt or what had happened."
+
+King put out his hand for hers, and while Gloria looked into the fire
+and he looked into her face, he told her. At the end he brought out Gus
+Ingle's Bible and read to her what was written in it. All the time that
+his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But
+by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of
+her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay
+this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of treachery
+and lonely death.
+
+"And you know where it is?"
+
+"I can go to it as straight as a string. Two days to get to it and to
+stake a claim; two days to come out with a couple of horses loaded to
+the guards. And that itself means a fortune, if it's clean, raw gold, as
+would seem to be the case. We need not fear the poorhouse, you and I,
+Mrs. King!"
+
+"But Brodie? And Mr. Gratton?"
+
+"They don't know where it is! They can't know, since we've got the
+Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they
+would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before
+dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if
+they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have
+lost the game!"
+
+"You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"
+
+"He wanted me to telephone as soon as I got this." He rose, lingering
+over her. "We mustn't forget him, even for our own happiness." He
+brushed her hair with his lips; he hastened the few steps to the
+telephone in Ben's study.
+
+"I--I am going upstairs, Mark," called Gloria after him.
+
+"All right, Queen of the World," he answered her. "I'm just to phone in
+a message for him. It won't take me five minutes to get it done; just to
+say: 'Tell Ben that I start at dawn and that he's got my word for it
+that nothing's going to stop me! And--that I've just married Gloria!'"
+
+But he was at the telephone longer than he thought to be. The operator
+buzzed into his ear as he took down the receiver; San Francisco was
+trying to get a message through. For Gloria Gaynor. Would he take the
+message? Then an operator in San Francisco, droning the words: "For Miss
+Gloria Gaynor. Your father is hurt in Coloma. Just sent me word. Says
+not dangerously, but I must go to him immediately. Meet me there.
+Mamma."
+
+"Got it," said King, and San Francisco rang off. Thereafter he got his
+own message through; he wondered how Mrs. Gaynor would take the news of
+her new son-in-law. Ben would be glad; he was sure of Ben.
+
+Gloria was still upstairs. King sat in front of the fire, staring into
+the flames, listening to the wind in the chimney, waiting for Gloria.
+When time passed and she did not come, he went softly upstairs and to
+her door. It was closed and he knocked lightly, then dropped his hand to
+the knob, awaiting her voice.
+
+His knuckles had hardly brushed the door, this door which he approached
+in reverence; Gloria had not even heard him. He called softly, his voice
+little above a whisper:
+
+"Gloria!"  He heard her move; for a moment she did not answer. He could
+not know how she stood, scarcely breathing, her hands at her breast; nor
+how, now that the great step was taken, she was again half-frightened,
+half-regretful, altogether bewildered and uncertain. Of herself, of him,
+of everything----
+
+"Is it you, Mark?"
+
+"Yes. May I come in, Gloria?"
+
+"Please, Mark. It's all so new, so strange ... I intended to come right
+back downstairs, but I'm so tired, Mark. And I want to be alone a
+little; to think. I haven't had time to think of anything! You don't
+mind, do you, Mark?"
+
+He answered promptly and heartily, refusing to allow himself to harbour
+a shadow of disappointment.
+
+"No. No, of course not. You will go right to bed? I know you must be
+half-dead for sleep."
+
+"Yes." There was a note of eagerness in the voice coming to him from
+beyond the shut door.
+
+"There was a message from your mother; she has gone to your father and
+wanted you to meet her there. But we will talk of that later."
+
+"Yes.... Good-night, Mark."
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss me good-night?" he asked, hesitating a little
+between the words. His new privilege, a lover's, a husband's, was not an
+hour old; he felt strangely shy as he spoke softly to her.
+
+"Please, Mark! I am terribly tired out, and--and I'm afraid I've mislaid
+the key, and----"
+
+That hurt him; his eyes darkened with the quick pain that came to him
+from her words. He had hoped that Gloria had known him better than that.
+
+"You need never lock your door against me, my dear," he told her gently.
+"I don't want you to be afraid of me. Why, God bless you, I wouldn't
+touch the hem of your dress if you didn't want me to."
+
+"Yes," said Gloria. "I know. You are so good, Mark. But now----"
+
+"I am going," he returned tenderly, "to sit by the fire and think. Just
+to soak myself in the realization," he added with a happy laugh, "that
+you are mine."
+
+"Before you go in the morning you will come to my door?"
+
+"If you want me to...."
+
+"Of course, Mark."
+
+"Then--good-night, dear."
+
+"Good-night, Mark."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVI_
+
+
+King was astir long before dawn. He got the fire going in the kitchen
+and started breakfast, seeking to be very silent and succeeding in
+making the usual clatter of a male among pots and pans. Whilst water
+heated and bacon sizzled, he rummaged through the store-room at the rear
+of the house, gathering what he meant to put into his pack for the four
+or five days' trip. As he returned from the last journey to the
+store-room, his arms full of camp accessories, including canvas and camp
+blankets, he confronted Gloria, fully dressed. He dropped his arm-load
+and filled his eyes with her. Any shadow left overnight in his heart was
+sent scurrying before his new joyousness. Gloria had come down to him
+while he deemed her fast asleep!
+
+"Gloria!" he cried.
+
+A more radiantly lovely Gloria he had never looked upon. She had slept
+and rested; she had bathed and groomed and set herself in order. She was
+dressed after a fashion to bewilder a mere man in the only utterly
+ravishing outing costume Mark King had ever seen. He felt insanely
+inclined to pick up her little boots, one after the other, and go down
+on his knees and kiss them; her hat was a flopsy turban, from under the
+brim of which the most adorable of golden-brown curls half escaped to
+throw kiss-shadows on her rosy cheeks. And Gloria's eyes!
+
+This time there was no door between them, nor even the memory of a
+door. He gathered her up into his arms so that her boot-heels swung
+clear of the floor.
+
+"Do you know ... do you guess ... have you the faintest suspicion how I
+love you?"
+
+"The--the coffee!" gasped Gloria. "It's boiling over!"
+
+He laughed joyously at that, and finally, when he had set her down,
+Gloria, bright and flushed, laughed too.
+
+"Burning bacon last night, boiling coffee this morning!" he chuckled.
+And then, there in the kitchen, they sat down to breakfast. "It's sweet
+of you," he told her softly, "to get up and come down and see me off."
+
+"Oh," said Gloria, "I am going with you."
+
+Not once had King dared think of a thing like that. He had thought that
+at best he would be with her again in four or five days. But that she
+should go with him into the mountains on this quest of his? He sat and
+pondered and stared at her.
+
+"Don't you want me?" asked Gloria. "Aren't you glad, Mark?"
+
+She was serenely prepared for objections, should they be forthcoming.
+For it was not on any spur of the moment, but after long deliberation,
+that she had decided that she would go with him. She wanted no scandal
+in the papers; she meant that there should be none. If it were rumoured
+that she had gone out of town with Gratton; if Gratton wanted to be ugly
+and feed rumour; then on top of that if she appeared within reach of a
+reporter without a husband, there would be talk. If it were answered
+that she was married to Mark King, there would be the question: "And
+where, my dear, is this Mark King?" Those girl friends in San Francisco
+who had met him at her birthday-party would be fairly squirming with
+excited curiosity to know _everything_. Among themselves they would make
+insinuations about the Bear Tamer or the Animal Trainer, as Gloria knew
+that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find
+it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next
+without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they
+would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork
+of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation.... From
+upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the
+"judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake
+outright, not to allow the scotched reptile to writhe free. She was
+married; she was going with her husband into the wilderness on the most
+romantic of all honeymoons. The papers were free to make much of that.
+
+"Of course I want you," said King slowly. "Glad? Glad that you want to
+come with me? Can't you see that I am the gladdest man on earth?
+But----"
+
+"I have already written a message I wanted to send to a girl friend in
+San Francisco...." It was to Miss Mildred Carter, who was engaged to be
+married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_.... "I was going to have it
+phoned in to her. It tells her I'm--married. To you, Mark. And that
+we're off on the most wonderful trip together into the heart of the wild
+country."
+
+"God bless you," he said heartily. But Gloria, glancing at him swiftly,
+saw that his eyes were clouded with perplexity.
+
+"Of course," she said, "if you don't want a girl along----"
+
+"Gloria!"
+
+"Well, then? It's settled? I'm to go?"
+
+"Only I'm afraid it isn't the sort of a trip for a girl. It's hard
+going, and--Oh, it's a cursed shame I can't put it off."
+
+"You said last night that you weren't afraid of anything Brodie and his
+men could do? That they didn't even know where to go? That they'd never
+know where to find you?"
+
+"Yes. And I meant it. But----"
+
+He wanted her with him; she wanted to come. Further, it pained him to
+think that those first glorious days should be spent with the mountains
+between them. He was tempted, sorely tempted. Gloria knew; she smiled
+at him across the table; she tempted him further. ...Was there really
+any danger, would there be danger to her? If he thought so, that there
+was the faintest likelihood of harm to her, he would say no, no matter
+what the yearning in his heart. But if they made a quick dash in and
+out; two days each way, not over one day at Gus Ingle's caves? If they
+went on horseback nearly all the way, and travelled light? He carried a
+rifle nowadays, and he rather believed he might carry it ten years
+without ever firing a shot at any man of their hulking crowd. They could
+go in one way, come out another. They had at least a full day's head
+start of any possible followers. No, in his heart he did not believe
+that there would be any danger to Gloria. Further, the thought struck
+him that she would not be altogether safe here; there was venom in
+Gratton, God only knew how virulent. And there was sinister significance
+in the fact that Gratton was hand in glove now with Swen Brodie. Then,
+too, Gratton knew from Gloria's own lips that she had brought the
+message from her father in Coloma; hence Gratton might suspect, and
+Brodie after him, that Gloria was in possession of old Loony Honeycutt's
+secret. Instead of seeming hazardous to take Gloria with him, it began
+to appear that his new responsibility of guarding her from all harm had
+begun already, and that he could best protect her from any possible evil
+by having her always with him. He could not allow her to go to her
+parents in Coloma; he thought of that, but that was Brodie's hangout,
+and Ben was in no condition to send for her. Nor was it advisable for
+her to go alone to San Francisco; her mother was not there, and Gratton
+might be looked on to follow her....So with himself communed Mark King,
+never a man overly given to caution, but seeking now to measure chances,
+to set them in the scales over against the desire of his heart. A
+fanciful thought insisted on being heard: had Gus Ingle's treasure
+hidden itself all these years, awaiting the time when he and Gloria
+together came to it? Their wedding gift! How much more precious then
+than mere gold!
+
+"We'd travel light," he said thoughtfully, and Gloria knew that she had
+won. "We'd go in quick, out quick. It's getting late in the year," he
+added with a smile, "and we'd have to hurry, Brodie or no Brodie. I've
+no notion for a prolonged honeymoon snow-bound in those mountains."
+
+Her eyes danced.
+
+"Wouldn't that be fun!"
+
+His smile quickened. Her childish ignorance of what such an adventure
+would mean was in keeping with her vast inexperience with matters of the
+outdoors; she had merely begun, in his company, to glimpse the true
+meanings of the solitudes. She would learn further--with him. And a warm
+glow of pleasure came with the thought that Gloria wanted to go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pearl-grey dawn was flowering into a still pink morning when they
+locked the door behind them and stepped out into the crisp, sweet
+freshness of the autumn air. He had made two small packs, provisions
+rolled into the bedding and the whole wrapped in pieces of canvas; he
+estimated they would be gone five days, and then, making due allowance
+for any reasonable delay, provisioned for ten. When he saw that Gloria
+had noted how for the first time on a woodland jaunt with her he carried
+a very businesslike-looking rifle, he explained laughingly that if they
+developed abnormal appetites there were both deer and bear to be had.
+She was much interested in everything, and looked out to the mountains
+eagerly when King had swung her up to her saddle on Blackie, the tall,
+sober-faced horse, where she sat with a roll of blankets at her back and
+with the horn before her decorated with a miscellany of camp
+equipment--a frying-pan, a short-handled axe in its sheath, an overcoat
+done into a compact bundle. Here was another moment when thoughts were
+too slow processes to emphasize themselves; she was swayed by emotions
+provoked by the moment. Where were the trunks and suitcases and
+hat-boxes to accompany the young bride? In their stead, a coat tied into
+a tight bundle and a frying-pan before her. King looked at her and
+marvelled; her cheeks were roses, her eyes were Gloria's own, wonderful
+and big and deep beyond fathoming. From his own saddle on the buckskin
+he nodded his approval of her.
+
+"You are not afraid that I can't take care of you, are you, Gloria?" he
+asked.
+
+And Gloria laughed gaily, answering:
+
+"My dear Mr. Man, I am not the least little bit afraid of anything in
+all the world this morning!"
+
+So with the glorious day brightening all about them they turned away
+from the log house and into the trail which straightway King dubbed
+"Adventure Trail." And as they went he sang out joyously:
+
+ "The Lord knows what we'll find, dear heart, and the deuce knows what
+      we'll do.
+  But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
+  And Life runs large on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVII_
+
+
+The magnificent wilderness into which rode Mark and Gloria King seemed
+to prostrate its august self to do them honour upon this their wedding
+morning. Succeeding the paler tints of the earlier hour came the rare
+blue day. Last night's clouds had vanished; the air was clear and crisp,
+with still a hint of frost. On all hands had October in passing splashed
+the world with colour. Along the creek the aspens danced and played and
+shivered in bright golden raiment; through the bushes there was a
+glimpse of vivid scarlet where the leaves of a dwarf maple were as
+bright as snow-plants. A little grove of gracefully slender poplars
+trembled in yellow against the azure above. The clear, thin sunlight
+pricked out colours until it made the woods a riot of them, greens dark
+and light, the grey of sage, the white of a granite seam, the black of a
+lava rock, and in the creek spray a brilliant vari-coloured rainbow
+sheen. They two, riding side by side, while the broad trail permitted,
+passed over the ridge and out of sight of the house. Immediately the
+solitudes shut down about them with titanic walls. They rode down into a
+long, shadowy hollow, out through a tiny verdant meadow fringed with the
+rusty brown of sunflower leaves, and on up to the crest of the second
+ridge. Already they were alone in the world, a man and his mate, with
+only infinity and its concrete symbols embracing them, ancient and
+ageless trees, limitless sky, mile after mile of ridge and precipice and
+barren peak. And upon them and about them and within them the utter
+serene hush of the Sierra.
+
+With every swinging step of the horses taking them on, a new gladness
+blossomed in King's heart. For they were pushing ever further into the
+portion of the world which he knew best, loved best. The present left
+him nothing to wish for; he had Gloria, and Gloria had elected to come
+with him. Until high noon they would wind along, for the most part
+climbing pretty steadily with the old trail--Indian trail, miners'
+trail, trail which even to-day seems to lead from the first generation
+of the twentieth century straight back into the heart of 1850 and
+beyond. Here men did not penetrate save at long intervals; here was true
+solitude. And soon, when they should leave this trail to travel as
+straight a line as the broken country would allow toward Gus Ingle's
+caves, they would enter a region given over entirely to the wild's own
+bright-eyed, shy inhabitants.
+
+There were red spots in Gloria's cheeks when they started. King sought
+to guess at what might be the emotions of a young girl going on with
+Gloria's present emotional adventure--vain task of a mere man seeking to
+fathom those troubled feminine depths!--marking that she was a little
+nervous and distrait.
+
+"I know the place Gus Ingle tried to describe," he said, "as well as I
+know my old hat. Or at least I'd have said so until he mentioned the
+third cave. I've been there dozens of times, too, but I've got to see
+more than two caves there yet."
+
+Together they had read the crabbed lines in the Bible; they had been
+silent thereafter as to each came imagined pictures like ghosts from the
+past; ghosts of greed and envy and despair. Now Gloria mused aloud:
+
+"I wonder--do you suppose we'll find it as he says?"
+
+"At least we'll see about it. And whether there be heaps and piles of
+red, red gold, as the tale telleth, be sure our trip is going to be
+worth the two days' ride. I'll show you such chasms and gorges and crags
+as you've never turned those two lovely eyes of yours upon, Mrs. Gloria
+King." (He couldn't abstain absolutely from all love-making.) "And a
+little grove of sequoias which belongs to me. Or, at least, I believe I
+am the only man who knows where they are. Friends of mine, those big
+fellows are, five old noble-souled monarchs."
+
+She looked interested and treated him to a fleeting smile, but asked
+curiously:
+
+"How can a man speak of a tree that way? As though it were alive--" She
+broke off, laughing, and amended: "But they _are_ alive, aren't they? I
+mean--human."
+
+"Why, you poor little city-bred angel," he cried heartily. "You will
+answer your own question inside of two days. No doubt I'm going to grow
+jealous of old Vulcan and Thor and Majesty. Sure, I've named them," he
+chuckled. "And you'll come with me into their dim cathedral to-morrow at
+dusk and listen with me to their old sermon. A man ought to go to church
+to them at least once a year, to keep his soul cleaned out and growing
+properly."
+
+Gloria appeared thoughtful; that she was interested just now less in
+that of which he spoke than in the man himself he did not suspect. She
+was noting how he spoke of trees as friends; how he was different from
+other men whom she knew in that he stood so much closer to the ancient
+mother, the wilderness now embracing them. Instinctively she knew that
+it behoved her to penetrate as deeply as she might into the inner nature
+of this man who, hardly more than a pleasant, attractive stranger
+yesterday, was to-day her husband.
+
+"What is the oldest thing in the world?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+She wrinkled her brows prettily at him.
+
+"Church to-morrow evening and school now?" she countered lightly.
+
+"Answer," insisted King. "Just at a rough guess what would you say was
+the oldest thing in the world?"
+
+Gloria cudgelled her brains. Finally, since he seemed quite serious, and
+she knew that wisdom lay in pleasing the male of the species in small
+and unimportant matters, she sought to reply.
+
+"The Sphinx or the Pyramids, I'd guess," she offered.
+
+"Naturally," he returned. "And what will you say when I introduce you to
+the Pharaoh who was a big, husky giant before Thebes was thought of?"
+
+Again she looked to see a twinkle of jest in his eyes.
+
+"Pharaoh?" she said. "Just a tree? Over two or three thousand years
+old!"
+
+"By at least another thousand," he rejoined triumphantly. "And as
+staunch an old gentleman as you'll find."
+
+Even Gloria, a poor little city-bred angel, must muse upon the
+statement. Having caught her interest he told her picturesquely of his
+old friends; how they had dwelt on serenely while peoples were born and
+empires rose and fell; while Rome smote Greece and both went down in the
+dust; while Columbus pushed his three boats across the seas; while the
+world itself passed from one phase to another; how they were all but
+co-eternal with eternity.
+
+"When you think how these old fellows were a thousand years old when the
+Christ was a little boy," he ended simply, "you will begin to realize
+the sort of things they have a way of saying to you while you lie still
+and look up and up, and still up among their branches that seem at
+night to brush against the stars."
+
+She let her fancies drift in the leash of his. But again they left the
+picturesque ancient trees and returned to him. A little smile touched
+her lips and was gone before he was sure of it; she was thinking that a
+man like King kept always in his heart something of the simplicity of a
+little child; she wondered if she herself, though so much younger in
+actual years, were not worlds more sophisticated. For his part King
+noted that she displayed to-day none of that chattering, singing gaiety
+of their former rides together; he remembered, sympathetically, that she
+had had very little sleep last night, and that she had endured a
+wearisome twenty-four hours before, and that the long, nervous strain
+under which she had struggled must certainly have told upon her, both
+physically and mentally. So, believing that she would be grateful for
+silence, he grew silent with her.
+
+Further and ever further into the heart of the solitudes they rode
+through the quiet hours of the forenoon, with Gloria ever more
+abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence,
+drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They
+forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad
+little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a
+flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar
+grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land
+over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the
+work it had to do before many weeks passed. Though there were some few
+level spaces, though now and then as King sought for her the easier way
+they rode down short slopes, with every mile put behind them they had
+climbed perceptibly. Already Gloria had the sensation of being by the
+world forgotten--though for her the world could not be forgot. A ridge
+from which they looked out across the peaks and valleys seemed to her
+like an island, lost, remote, eternally set apart from other people
+whom she knew, from all her life as she had lived it. She went on and on
+and felt like one in a dream, journeying into a fierce, rugged land over
+which lay a spell of enchantment, a spell that had been cast over it
+before King's all but immortal trees had burst from the seeds, so that
+now, while the outside world pulsed and beat with life, and swung back
+and forth with its pendulous progress, here all was unchanged,
+changeless.
+
+King led her, well before midday, to the spot in which from the first he
+had planned that they would noon. A forest pool ringed with boulders,
+which were green with moss under the splashing of the water from above,
+where the swaying pines mirrored themselves and shivered in the little
+breeze which ruffled the clear, cold water. Here was a tiny upland
+meadow and much rich grass; here a sheltered spot where Gloria might sit
+in the sun and be protected from the colder air.
+
+He was quick to help her to dismount and noted that she came down
+stiffly; the eyes which she turned to him were heavy with fatigue; some
+of the rose flush had faded from her cheeks.
+
+"Maybe I shouldn't have let you come after all, dear," he said
+contritely. "These are harder trails than we've ridden before, and we've
+had to keep at it steadier."
+
+There was an effort in her smile answering him.
+
+"The last two days _have_ been hard to get through with," she said as
+she yielded to his insistence and sat down on the sun-warmed
+pine-needles. "I am sorry I am so--so----"
+
+He did not allow her to run down the elusive word.
+
+"Nonsense," he told her heartily. "You've got a right to be tired. But
+when you've had some hot lunch and a cup of hot coffee you'll be tip-top
+again. You'll see."
+
+King unsaddled and tethered the horses where they could browse and rest
+and roll; built his little fire and went about lunch-getting with a joy
+he had never known in the old accustomed routine before. Now and then he
+glanced toward Gloria; he could not help that. But he saw that she was
+lying back, her eyes closed, and while his heart went out to her he did
+not force his sympathy on her. She was tired and, what was more, she had
+every right and reason to be tired. He hoped that she might get three
+winks of sleep. When he came near her for the coffee-pot he tiptoed. She
+seemed to be asleep.
+
+But Gloria was not asleep. Never had her mind raced so. It was done and
+she was Mark King's wife! Higher and higher loomed that fact above all
+other considerations. But there were other considerations; her father
+hurt, she did not know how badly; her mother mystified, by now perhaps
+informed of Gloria's marriage; Gratton with the poison extracted from
+his fangs had the fangs still; gold ahead somewhere, in caves where men
+long ago had laboured and fought and snarled at one another like
+starving wolves and died; Brodie somewhere, Brodie with the horrible
+face. She shivered and stirred restlessly, and King, who saw everything,
+thought that she had dreamed a bad dream. But lunch was ready; he came
+to her with plate and cup. And again Gloria did her best to smile
+gratefully.
+
+"You are so good to me, Mark," she said. Her eyes were thoughtful; would
+he always be good to her? Even when--but she was too weary to think. It
+seemed to her that only now was she beginning to feel the effects of all
+she had been through.
+
+"I want to learn how to be good to you, wife of mine," he said very
+gently. "That is all on earth I ask. Just to make you happy."
+
+"You love me so much, Mark?" she asked, as one who wondered at what she
+had read in his low voice and glimpsed in his eyes.
+
+"Gloria," he told her gently, "I don't understand this thing they call
+love yet; it is too new, too wonderful. But I do know that in all the
+world there is nothing else that matters."
+
+"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold?" she said rather more lightly than
+she had spoken.
+
+"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold."
+
+She looked at him long and curiously.
+
+"You would do anything you could to make me happy? Anything, Mark?"
+
+"I pray with all my heart and soul that I always may!"
+
+Gloria seemed to rest through the noon hour and to brighten. When she
+saw him the second time look at the sun she got up from the ground and
+said:
+
+"Time to go on? I'm ready. And after that banquet I feel all _me_
+again!"
+
+He laughed and went off after the horses, singing at the top of his
+voice. She stood very still, looking off after him, her brows puckering
+into a shadowy frown. Oh, if she could only read herself as he allowed
+her to read him; if she could only be as sure of Gloria as she was of
+Mark; if she could only look deep into her heart as she looked into his.
+But she could not! His heart was like the clear pool just yonder across
+which the sunshine lay and far down in which she could see the stones
+and pebbles as through so much clear glass; hers was like the rushing
+stream above, eddying and swirling and hiding itself under its own light
+spray. All day long she had tried to see what lay under the surface.
+_Did she love Mark King_? She had thrilled to him as she had thrilled to
+no other man; but that had been in the springtime. Twice then she had
+been sure that she loved him. But that was so long ago. And now that she
+had allowed him to carry her out of the quicksands? What now? She was so
+borne down by all that she had lived through; he was so much a part of
+the mountainous solitudes towering about them. And was she one to love
+the wilderness--for long? Or did it not begin to bear down upon her
+uncertain spirit? Did it not menace and frighten and, in the end, would
+it not repel? Oh, if she had only let him go on alone this morning; if
+she had remained where she could rest and think and thus come to see
+clearly, even into her own troubled heart!
+
+Their first hour after lunch led them through a region which, given
+over to silence itself, denied them any considerable opportunity for
+conversation. King rode ahead, turning off to the left from their
+resting-place by the pool, and riding through a sea of grey brush,
+following a narrow trail made by deer. Then the mountain-side reared its
+barrier and made all forward and upward progress slow and toilsome.
+Three times they dismounted and King led the horses; here Gloria clung
+to the steep mountain-side, looking fearfully down into the monster
+gorge carved at its base, dwelling with fascinated fancies on the
+thought of slipping, losing handhold and foothold and plunging down
+among the jagged boulders strewing the lower levels. There was really no
+great danger, she told herself over and over; King's cheery calls
+reassured her; no danger so long as they went forward on foot. But now
+and then when a horse's foot slipped and a wild cascade of loose soil
+and rocks went hurtling downward, she grew rigid with apprehension.
+
+But there was only an hour of this. Thereafter they rode down a long
+slope and into a long, narrow, twisting ravine, rocky cliffs on one hand
+and a noisy stream on the other, a fair trail underfoot. Nearly always
+now King rode ahead, finding the way for her; and Gloria, her spirits
+drooping again with the advancing afternoon, vaguely oppressed by the
+solemn stillness about her, was glad that she too could be silent. When
+he did call to her she needed only nod or smile; he turned to point out
+some rare view that appealed to him, a vista worth her seeing, a cascade
+or a fall of cliff, or a ferny nook, or perhaps a late ceanothus-
+blossom. He pointed out a scampering Douglas squirrel and had her
+hearken to a quail.
+
+"We're already in the finest timber belt in the world," he told her,
+full of enthusiastic loyalty to his beloved mountains.
+
+Thus, he leading the way, she following with head down and shoulders
+drooping, they came about four o'clock to a small meadow, cliff-ringed,
+studded with big yellow pines and here and there graced with an incense
+cedar. Stopping in the open, sitting sideways in the saddle, he waited
+for her.
+
+"And what do you think of this, Miss Gloria?" he called gaily as her
+horse thrust his black nose through the alders down by the creek.
+
+Gloria drew rein and looked at him with large eyes across the twenty
+paces separating them.
+
+"I can't go any further," she said bleakly. "I'm tired out!"
+
+He was quick to see a gathering of tears, and swung down from his horse
+and went to her with long strides, his own eyes filled with concern.
+
+"Poor little kidlet," he said humbly. "I've let you do yourself up...."
+
+And it was his duty, his privilege, and no one's else in the world, to
+shelter her, to stand between her and all hardship. He put out his arms
+to take her into them quite as he could have picked up a little maid of
+six, something stirring in the depths of him which in man is twin to the
+maternal instinct in woman. But Gloria said hurriedly: "Please, Mark, I
+am so tired ..." and drew back, and he let his hands fall to his side.
+For a second time her act hurt him; her gesture was akin to locking a
+door last night. But in a moment, his pity and loyalty and staunch faith
+in her crowding the small ache out of his heart, he was unrolling a
+pack, making a temporary couch for her and commanding her lovingly just
+to lie down and look up at the tree-tops above her, and rest while he
+staked out the horses. Sensing that perhaps the very bigness and
+majestic silence of these uplands might rest heavy upon her spirit and
+perhaps depress if not actually awake in her an emotion akin to fear, he
+strove to cheer her by his own blithe acceptance of the fortune of the
+hour. He told her heartily that she had earned a rest if any one ever
+had; that it was well, after all, to get an early start at pitching
+camp; that he was going to make his lady-love as cosy here in his big
+outdoor home as was ever princess in castle walls. Gloria shivered and
+threw herself face down on the blankets. Gloria did not know what
+possessed her; she fought for repression, hiding her face from him. Out
+of a hideously stern world a black spirit had leaped upon her; it
+clutched at her throat, it dragged at her heart. When King called a
+cheery word from beyond the thicket where he had gone with the horses,
+she could have screamed. She was so nervous that now and again a fierce
+tremor shook her from head to foot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King was counting it fortunate that they were granted so likely a camp
+site for the night. He looked up at the tall black cliffs shutting in
+the little meadow; they would hold back the night winds from Gloria. He
+chose the spot, well back from the creek, where she would sleep. High
+overhead, like brooding giants, stood the upright pines. Where a little
+clump of mere youngsters, lusty fellows not a score of years old, had
+the air of pressing close together as though thus with their combined
+strength they sought to match the strength of their aloof parents, a
+compact grove to make a further shelter against the mountain air, Gloria
+would sleep. He stretched a strip of canvas from tree to tree, making a
+five-foot wall of it. Close by he started his fire, knowing from
+experience oft repeated how a cheery blaze in the forest may dispel
+shadows within even as it makes the sombrest of shadows dance gaily
+under the trees; to one side he laid many resinous faggots, planning on
+their crackling light later on when the dark came. He ringed his fire
+with rocks, lugging them as heavy as he could carry up from the creek
+side, making the rudest of fireplaces. But it had the merit that it
+threw the heat back toward his extended canvas, and there between it
+would be snug and warm. All about him, as he laboured, was the singing
+of water and, high in air, the singing of pine tops. They made merry
+music and King, gone down to the stream to fill his coffee-pot, sang
+with it from a full, brimming heart. Gloria was tired, but she was
+resting now. And in a little while, when dark came, he and she would sit
+by his fire and look into it and talk in hushed voices, hand locked in
+hand; they would watch for the first of the big blazing stars to come
+out--he and Gloria, alone in the wilderness.
+
+He saw a trout swinging lazily in a quiet pool. Trout for Gloria! He
+glanced toward where she lay; he was glad that she was not looking. It
+would be a surprise for her. He hurried to his kit in his pack, got out
+hook and line, baited with a tiny bit of red flannel, and went back to
+the creek. For he knew that it was not likely that the trout here could
+have had any remembered encounters with man; they were plentiful and
+might, like many other sorts of beings, be lured to their undoing by
+curiosity and greed. He cut a willow pole, stood back and cast out his
+gay bit of bait, letting it drift with the riffles. There came a quick
+tug, another, sharp and vigorous, and he swung his prize out of the
+water, breaking the surface into scattering jewels, flashing in the
+sunlight as it struck against the grass along the creek's edge.
+
+Dusk gathered while he worked over his fire. The aroma of boiling coffee
+rose, crept through the air, blended with the aromas of the woods. He
+had made toast, holding the bread to the coals upon a sharpened stick.
+There were strips of crisp bacon garnishing a trout browned to the last
+painstaking turn. There were fried potatoes, cut by King's pocket-knife
+into thin strips and turned into gold by the alchemy of cooking. He set
+out his dishes upon a flat-topped rock, replenished his fire, threw on
+some fresh-cut green cedar boughs for their delightful fragrance, and
+went to call Gloria.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gloria, too tired bodily and mentally to wage a winning battle against
+those black vapours which flock so frequently about luckless youth, had
+suffered and yielded and gone down in misery. She had been crying, just
+why she knew not; crying because she could not help it. Hers was a state
+of overwrought nerves which forbade clear thinking, which distorted and
+warped and magnified. The babble of the water which had been music to
+King was to her a chorus of jeering voices; the wind in the pines an
+eerie moaning as of lost spirits wailing; the trees themselves, merging
+with the dusk, were brooding, shadowy giant things which she suddenly
+both feared and hated; the cliffs rising against the sky loomed so near
+and so gigantically tall that she felt as though they were pressing in
+upon her to suffocate her, to crush her, to annihilate her. The world
+was turning black with the night; the night rushed, treading out the
+last gleam of sunlight; even the one star which she had glimpsed through
+her tears impressed her only with its remoteness. She was frightened;
+not because of any physical violence, for Mark King stood between her
+and that. But of vague horrors. She thought of San Francisco; of her own
+bright room there; of the lights in the streets, of pedestrians and
+motors and street-cars filling that other steel-cañoned wilderness with
+familiar noises. And somehow, San Francisco seemed further away,
+immeasurably further away, than that one remote star blazing through the
+vastness of space.
+
+"A cup of coffee and a bit of supper," King said gently. "You'll feel a
+lot better."
+
+She rose wearily and followed him. Without a word she dropped down
+beside his banquet, putting out a listless hand to her tin cup. The
+firelight upon her face showed him her thoughtful eyes; but they were
+turned not toward him but toward the bed of coals. He had anticipated
+her lively surprise at the trout; she pushed the brown morsel aside,
+saying absently:
+
+"I am not hungry. It was good of you to go to all of this trouble. I am
+afraid I am not much of a camper." She forced the shadow of a smile with
+the admission.
+
+"Tuckered out," he thought as he looked into her face across which light
+and shadow flickered as flame and smoke in the camp-fire came and went
+fitfully, twisted by the evening breeze. "Clean tuckered out."
+
+Gloria, feeling his gaze so steady upon her, turned her eyes toward his,
+eyes heavy and sober with her drooping spirit. As the flames frolicked
+about the pitch-pine he had tossed to the coals, he saw the traces of
+tears. He said nothing, supposing that he understood; he but strove the
+harder to be good to her, to share with her some of that rare joy
+filling his own heart. He sought with unobtrusive tenderness to
+anticipate her slightest want; he jumped to his feet and brought her a
+cup of water; he shoved aside a burning branch which rolled impudently
+too near the divine foot; he removed the offending fish from under her
+nostrils hastily and half apologetically; he piled the fire high when he
+saw her shiver. And finally when she pushed her cup away and let her two
+hands drop into her lap he gathered the dishes and carried them away to
+the nearest pool to wash them, leaving Gloria silent and thoughtful,
+brooding over his fire.
+
+When he came back to her in the hush of the first hour of night, he
+thought that he understood her need for silence, and spoke only
+infrequently and briefly, and very, very softly, calling her attention
+now to the last lingering light upon the piney ridge behind them or to
+the liquid music of the creek, which, with the coming of night, seemed
+to grow clearer and finer and sweeter, or finally to the big star
+burning gloriously in the perfect deep-blue sky.
+
+"And now," he said, taking up his short-handled axe, "I am going to make
+for my lady-love the finest couch for tranquil, restful sleep that
+mortal ever had."
+
+As he strode away toward a grove of firs he was lost to her eyes before
+he had gone a hundred paces. The night came so swiftly it seemed to her
+feverish fancies that in the dark the big tree trunks were huddling
+closer together. In a moment she heard the sound of his axe, striking
+softly through green juicy branches. He worked swiftly, grudging every
+minute away from her. And then, with his arms full of the fragrant,
+balsamy boughs, he stopped and let them slip down to the ground and
+himself sat down upon a log and filled his pipe with slow fingers. He'd
+force himself to smoke one pipe before he went back to her, thinking
+that she would be grateful for a few moments alone.
+
+Almost with the first puff of smoke there came to him Gloria's piercing
+scream. His heart stopping, he jumped up and ran through the trees to
+her, shouting: "Gloria I Gloria! I'm coming. What is it?"
+
+Gloria was cowering against the nearest tree, her face showing
+frightened in the firelight, her eyes wide with nervous horror.
+
+"There is something there ... in the bushes!" she cried excitedly. "I
+heard it moving...."
+
+He looked where she pointed. Down by the creek, just waddling back into
+the alders, was a fat old porcupine, dimly seen in the fringe of the
+camp-fire. But King did not laugh. His first impulse upon him,
+strengthened by Gloria's helplessness, he took her into his arms,
+holding her close to him.
+
+"Why did you leave me?" asked Gloria petulantly. "So long."
+
+He had been away from her fifteen minutes while he cut an armful of
+fir-boughs, and thereafter filled and lighted his pipe--and to Gloria
+the time had seemed long! Little enough of love's confession, surely,
+but a golden crumb to a man's starving love. He drew her closer; their
+faces, ruddy with fire-glow, each tense with its own emotion, were close
+together.
+
+"Oh!" cried Gloria. She wrenched away from him violently. "You--you hurt
+me. Let me go!" She buried her face in her hands; he saw her shoulders
+lift and droop; he heard her sob: "Oh, I was a fool----"
+
+His arms had dropped to his sides and he stood for a moment speechless,
+staring at her as across a chasm shadow-filled.
+
+"Gloria," he said, bewildered.
+
+But now her hands, too, were at her sides, clenched and nervous; her
+white face was lifted and she broke out passionately into hot words; he
+saw her breast heaving and sensed that she was stirred to depths never
+until now plumbed. What he could not glimpse were the vague,
+unreasonable reasons, the distorted horrors grinning at her among the
+spaces of black gloom into which her spirit had sunk; had he been a
+fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and
+nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an
+understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy,
+and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition
+which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that
+had gone before.
+
+"I was half-mad last night," she panted. "There was no way to turn. That
+beast of a man drove me to desperation. Then you came, and--and----Oh,
+I wish that I were dead!"
+
+Incredulous, amazed, near stupefied, he stood rooted to the ground.
+
+"I don't understand," he said dully after a long silence broken only by
+a tumble and frolic of the water and Gloria's quick, hard breathing. He
+strove to be very gentle with her. "Just what is it? Can you tell me,
+dear?"
+
+"Don't call me dear ... like that," she cried sharply. "Just as though I
+were your ... _property_." He saw the roundness of her eyes. She
+shuddered. "You knew that I was driven to it, to save my name, to stop
+hideous gossip...."
+
+In her disordered mind she had been flung, as upon shoals, to many bleak
+points of view; she had blamed fate for her undoing, she had blamed
+Gratton, she had laid the responsibility upon her mother for having
+allowed her to drift; but always she had looked upon herself as the
+victim. Now, in her agitation, which had risen close to hysteria, it was
+suddenly Mark King whom she blamed for everything; he, in the guise of
+fate, had betrayed her!
+
+"You saw that I was half dead with terror; that I hardly knew what I was
+doing; that all I could think of was escape from the horrible trap that
+had been set for me; you----"
+
+"So that was it?" But still his tone was utterly devoid of any emotion
+save that of incredulity. "You mean you didn't love me, Gloria?"
+
+"When did you ever ask me if I loved you?"
+
+"But you ... you married me.... Great God!" He ran his hand across his
+brow as though to brush away an obsession. "Not loving me, you married
+me just to save yourself from possible scandal?"
+
+"What girl wouldn't?" she cried wildly. "Driven as I was?"
+
+He tried to think with all of that calm deliberation which this moment
+so plainly required. In mind he went back stage by stage through all of
+last night's events. And so he came in retrospect in due time to the
+moment when he had come to the porch and had looked in through the
+window to take his last farewell of her; when he had seen her standing
+at Gratton's side. She had drooped so like a figure of despondency; she
+had lifted her head slowly at the "judge's" question. And then there had
+occurred that sudden change in her bearing and in her voice alike, when
+abruptly she had cried out: "No. No and no and no!"
+
+"Tell me," said King heavily, "when you refused to marry Gratton last
+night--did you know that I was outside?"
+
+"Yes," she answered. She wondered why he asked. "There was a mirror; I
+saw your reflection in it."
+
+"If I had not come--would you have gone on with the thing?" He
+hesitated, then said harshly: "Would you have married him?"
+
+"I don't know. Oh," she exclaimed, twisting at her hands, "how can I
+tell what I would have done? driven one way, torn another----"
+
+"You might have married him? You but chose me as the lesser of two
+evils? Was that it?"
+
+"I tell you I don't know! I only know that I was hideously compromised;
+I would never have dared show my face again in San Francisco--anywhere--it
+would have killed me----"
+
+And even yet there was in King's face only a queer tortured incredulity.
+For a long time neither moved nor spoke. His eyes were on her, hers
+intently on him. When he answered it was in a voice from which all of
+to-day's joyousness had fled.
+
+"I'm going to make your bed, Gloria," he said evenly. "Near the fire,
+which I'll keep going. I'll make mine on the outside, so you need not
+be afraid of any prowling animal. Then in the morning we will talk."
+
+She watched him go back for his scattered fir-boughs. And even Gloria
+noted how heavy was his walk. But she could not guess how when he was
+alone with his trees, and the darkness dropped curtainwise between him
+and her he went down on both knees and buried his face in one of those
+same fallen sprays from the fir.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVIII_
+
+
+Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon
+the slow procession of the stars. Just so had he lain many a night in
+the forest-land--but life then and now were as two distinct existences
+which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds,
+remote one from the other. Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the
+physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the
+darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and
+sparkle. Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long
+years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion.
+Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the
+message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to
+him across the limitless vastitude of the universe. Countless times that
+voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of
+the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him
+with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human
+strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a "small" act; he
+marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and
+eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two
+feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them. He
+had known that firefly cluster of lights above to be the majestic
+processional of worlds. He saw himself as small; the universe as big.
+And the knowledge did not crush; it elevated. Throughout the whole of
+creation ran the fine chain of divine ordinance, of a law that flowered
+in beauty. There was God's work above him, about him, within him. And
+God stood back of it all, vouching for it, making it good. The spinning
+of worlds, the pulses of tides, the course of the blood in his
+veins--these were kindred phenomena; the law of God bound about with its
+fine chain of divine will and love the greater and the lesser bodies
+moving through the universe. Upon such a comprehension, brotherhood of
+man and tree and sun and flower, had been raised Mark King's haphazard
+edifice of a theory of life. The stars reminded him that through the
+eons all had been right with the world of worlds; they sang of hope and
+happiness and beauty. They showed a man the way to rich, full
+contentment. They lighted the path to generous dealings with other men.
+They threw their searchlight upon the day a man had just done with and
+set him thinking; they led his thoughts ahead to the day soon to dawn,
+making him wish to make a better job of things.
+
+But to-night between him and his beloved stars stretched a region of
+shadows through which the eyes of his soul did not look. Something
+within him had been stricken; sorely wounded; beaten to its knees;
+chilled with death. He sought to think quite calmly, and for a long time
+clear consecutive thought was beyond his reach. A moment had come when
+he could only _feel_. He was swept this way and that. He had given to
+Gloria his love without stint, without reservation, without limit. The
+love which no other woman had ever awakened had poured itself out before
+Gloria like a flood of clear swift water breaking free. He loved after
+the only fashion possible to him, with his whole heart and soul, with
+his whole being. He adored. He made of his beloved a princess, a
+goddess. He saw her upon a plane where no woman ever lived, in an
+atmosphere too rare for flesh-and-blood humanity. A man does not love
+through human reason; rather through a reason, hidden even to him,
+deeper than humanity. Then Gloria had put her hand into his; Gloria had
+married him; Gloria had elected to come with him. After that he had seen
+nothing in its true light; Gloria had remade the world into paradise
+ineffable.
+
+He had been on the heights, lifted among the stars. And without warning,
+without mercy, the world had crashed about him. From the zenith to the
+nadir. Small wonder that thoughts did not come logically! He floundered,
+lost, crushed, bewildered.
+
+Just yonder, on the bed of fir-boughs he had made for her, lay Gloria.
+He did not look that way. The wind was rising; he heard it go rushing
+through the tree-tops; it struck with sudden, relentless impact; it set
+the shivering needles to shrill whistling; it made the staunch old
+trunks shudder. He heard the canvas flap-flapping by Gloria's bed; above
+him tossing boughs scraped and creaked.
+
+One thing only seemed clear to him: the time had come when a man must
+seek to hold himself in check, when he must not leap, when he must
+strive with all the stubborn will in him to reserve judgment. His own
+life's crisis had come to him, revealing itself with the blinding
+swiftness of a flash of lightning. A step forward or back now would be
+one step toward which his entire destiny, from the hour of birth until
+now, had led him; there would be no retracing it; it would be final; and
+everything--everything--was at stake. He must think; he must try to
+understand all that Gloria had experienced; to see what impulses had
+moved her; to make allowances for her; to come to read aright what lay
+in her heart. He must see clearly into two human hearts! Task for the
+gods! As though the wilderness about him were a colossal malevolent
+entity endowed with the power to look into human breasts, it jeered at
+him with its voice of the wind.
+
+He had but half a mind to give to physical senses. Though the wind
+howled all night long, he scarce was conscious of it; though the cold
+increased, he did not know that he was cold before he had grown numb.
+He had given to Gloria all of their bedding, save alone the one blanket
+he had wrapped about him; he had kept on all his clothing, buttoned up
+his coat, and forgotten that he was not warmly covered. Now he got up
+and walked up and down; he made the fire blaze up; he sat huddled over
+it until it burned down to a bed of glowing red coals.
+
+Once or twice he heard Gloria stir restlessly upon her fir-bough bed.
+But he did not speak. There was nothing to be said between them now;
+they would wait until she had rested, until morning. Then there would be
+no more delay. They would understand each other then as few men and
+women had understood; there would be plain words and but few of them. He
+grew impatient for morning and sat looking forward to its coming with a
+face set and hard, growing as stern as death.
+
+Gloria, exhausted, had gone to sleep, snuggled warmly into her blankets.
+It was the wind that awoke her; she started wide awake, her heart in her
+throat, startled by the flapping of the canvas at her head. She lay
+still and looked up; the pines were black and swayed dismally; the wind
+among them made shuddersome music; the cold began to drive through her
+blankets, through her clothing. Her body was stiff and sore; the
+branches of fir under her hurt her through the canvas and one blanket
+which covered them. She turned, twisting into a position of less
+discomfort. The creek babbled and splashed; its voice merged with the
+wilds into a bleak, cheerless duet.
+
+She lifted her head a little; the fire was dying out and King had gone!
+The darkness bore down upon her; she heard everywhere vague sounds,
+noises as of stealthy feet. She knew a moment of blind terror; she tried
+to cry out but only a little choking gasp resulted. She saw something
+moving, a vague, formless, dreadful something, and lay back, chilled
+with fright. It was King; he was bringing fresh fuel. She sank back and
+again looked up at the pines swaying against the field of stars. She
+began to shiver; a nervous chill. She felt the slow tears form and spill
+over and trickle down her cheeks. She gathered her nether lip between
+her teeth and lay very still, shaken now and then by a noiseless sob.
+
+She existed through a period of suppressed excitement. If King found
+cool logic eluding him, Gloria's mind was an orgy of nervous imaginings.
+She was back with her mother, weeping, sobbing out upon a comforting
+breast all of her hideous adventures; she was reading the tall headlines
+in the newspapers; she was commenting on them with simulated flippancy
+to Georgia and Ernestine; she was meeting Mr. Gratton for the first time
+again, treating him to such haughty disdain as put hot blood into his
+white face; she was standing erect in the morning, confronting Mark King
+fearlessly, demanding her rights, commanding that he take her home. And,
+piteously lonely and frightened, she was longing to have him come to her
+now, to put his arms about her, to hold her tight, to set his fearless
+body between hers and the vague and terrible menaces of the night and
+the jeering night voices. She heard a twig snap; her heart beat wildly;
+she wondered what she would do when he came--and she saw that he sat
+motionless by the fire.
+
+The night wore on. She dozed now and then, fitfully, awakened always
+rudely by unaccustomed noises or by the cold or the discomfort of her
+bed. She put her hand to her cheek, wondering if she were going to be
+feverish; her face was cold. She saw that King had lighted his pipe. She
+wanted to scream at him. How she hated him for that. That he could smoke
+while she lay here in such wretchedness made her briefly hot with anger.
+He was a man, and sweepingly she told herself that she loathed all
+mankind. She accused him of heartlessness, of lack of understanding, of
+brutal lack of sympathy. He and he alone was responsible for
+everything--that vague, terrible _everything_. He sat there as still as
+a rooted tree; he bulked big through the gloom like a rugged boulder; he
+was a part of this wild land, as indifferent, as cold, as merciless.
+The thought now that he might come to her made her quake with fear; she
+was afraid of him.
+
+If she could only sleep! No sleep to-night, little the night before,
+less the night before that. No wonder her brain swirled. If all this had
+happened at any other time--She was a bundle of nerves--nerves that
+vibrated at the slightest suggestion. She was going to be ill. Perhaps
+the end of it would be that she would die. All of the misshapen,
+monstrous fancies which are bred of a sleepless and nervous night made
+for her a period of such stress that as the hours wore on they blanched
+her cheeks and put dark shadows under her eyes and taunted her with
+longings for a rest which they denied her.
+
+Thus, in the stern grips of their destinies, Mark King and Gloria lived
+through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And
+thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the
+ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they
+must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night
+the wind, like a hateful voice, jeered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At four o'clock that chill, wind-blown morning King began the day. He
+saw that Gloria was awake and sitting up, looking straight ahead of her.
+He gave no sign of having noted her, but busied himself in a swift,
+silent sort of way with fire-building and breakfast preparation. Gloria,
+in turn, saw him; she experienced aloof wonder at the look on his face.
+He was haggard; his mouth was set and hard.
+
+She had thought to be thankful when daylight came. Now she got up and
+went to the fire, rubbing her cold hands together, looking at an
+awakened world with dull, lack-lustre eyes. It was not yet full day;
+what light filtered down here into this sheltered spot was cheerless; as
+it drew forest details out of the thinning shadows it seemed to be
+painting them in cold grey monotones upon a cold grey world.
+
+He and she, when he came back with an arm-load of wood, looked straight
+into each other's eyes, long and soberly, searchingly and hopelessly.
+After that they did not again look into each other's faces; no
+good-morning had passed between them since both sensed that any time for
+empty civilities had gone. There could be no conventional pretence at
+harmony even in small things; they must be in each other's arms or
+worlds apart.
+
+Out of a night's grappling with chimeras, King had come to one and only
+one determination: he would go slowly, he would hold an iron check upon
+himself, he would throttle down a temper which more than once in his
+life, at moments of tempest, had blazed out uncontrollably. He would
+smother within himself that passion which in forthright men is so prone
+to burst into violence. Were Gloria to show herself to be this or that,
+were she to say this word or another, he would speak with her coolly, he
+would listen to her calmly, and in the end, since judge he must, he
+would judge with his heart ordered to beat steadily and not with a wild
+rush of blood. He had set a guard in his own breast as he might have set
+a guard over a camp of treacherous enemies.
+
+Yet, from the outset, nothing was more unlikely than that these two
+should advance by smooth paths to a clear and utter understanding. His
+one glimpse of her face dethroned his cold logic and moved him very
+deeply; she was so white, so pitifully sad-looking. She, too, had
+suffered; God knew that she had battled through hours of anguish. He
+wanted her in his arms; he wanted to batter at the world with his fists
+to save her from its flings of grief and pain. He bit savagely at his
+lip and turned away. And she, seeing his haggard eyes, his drawn face,
+knew that she had been unjust last night when she had hated him for
+seeming a soulless man, who could smoke his pipe in all serenity and
+feel nothing of the unhappiness of the night. He did not look like the
+Mark King of yesterday; the glad gleam of joy had died in his eyes; the
+quick resiliency had gone out of his step. He, too, had lived through
+slow hours of torture. He did love her--she could never doubt that----
+
+Had he suddenly caught her to him then, had he crushed her close in his
+arms, had he cried out in headlong passion that she _must_ love him,
+that he would make her love him, that she was his, that he would not
+give her up--would she have wrenched away from him, hot with anger--or
+would she have crept close and known at last whether or not she loved
+him? But here was something else she could not know; he turned and went
+off for his wood; she crouched shivering by the fire.
+
+They breakfasted in silence, the fire between them. Neither did much
+more than drink the strong coffee. Gloria sat tossing bits of bread into
+the fire. It was on his lips to tell her not to do that; waste in the
+wilderness is a crime. But he held his words back. He went methodically
+about camp work; cleaned the plates and cups and pans; remade the two
+packs. All this time she did not stir. At last he came back to her and
+stood by the dying fire, ominously silent. She grew nervously restive,
+wishing that he would say something.
+
+"There's a day's work to be done," he said at last. His voice, meant to
+be impersonal, was only stern. "That means an early start. And--"
+
+"Is it very much further to the caves?" she asked.
+
+He had paused; she had to say something.
+
+"It will take a long day getting there. You see, we didn't come very far
+yesterday."
+
+This, she supposed, was a fling at her, and she stiffened under it. But
+when she spoke it was to ignore the innuendo, intended or not. For,
+wherever they might be led, she hoped it would not be into sordid
+quarrelling.
+
+"It begins to be rather obvious that I should not have come. Doesn't
+it?" she asked.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Now, if I turn back----"
+
+"To the house?"
+
+"And then to mamma and papa, in Coloma. And then to San Francisco."
+
+"And I?"
+
+"If you would go with me as far as the house----"
+
+She saw how his body straightened, how his broad shoulders squared.
+There was something eloquent in the gesture; Mark King, with no
+toleration of a clutter of side issues, came straight to the main
+barrier, which must be swept aside for good and all, or which must be
+skirted and so passed and relegated to the limbo of dead hopes.
+
+"Do you love me, Gloria?" he demanded. "As lovers love? As I have loved
+you? As a wife should love her husband?"
+
+"Didn't I explain all of that last night?" she said petulantly. "Must we
+go over it all again? If I have ... have pained you, I am sorry. I can't
+say any more than that, can I? I thought I made you see how I was
+placed, how there was but the one thing for me to do...."
+
+"Marry Gratton or me? And you chose me?"
+
+She hesitated. She knew that he was angry, though he gave so little
+outward sign. Nor did she fail to recognize that he had grounds for
+anger. But none the less she resented his insistent questionings. She
+stood looking blankly at him. If she had only obeyed her straightforward
+impulse at the house to go to him and explain her predicament!
+
+"I intended," she began in a low, strange voice, "to go to you, to tell
+you----"
+
+"Answer me," he said sternly. "Yes or no. Did you marry me without love
+and just to save yourself from possible gossip of being alone all night
+with a man? Is that why you married me? Yes or no?"
+
+To Gloria, as to King, the issue was clear and not to be clouded; to her
+credit be it said that she wasted no time in fruitless evasion. This
+matter would demand settlement, as well now as later. There was wisdom
+in ending all unpleasantness once and for ever.
+
+"Yes," she answered defiantly.
+
+Then suddenly it was given her to see a Mark King she had never dreamed
+of, a Mark King of blazing wrath thrusting aside the man whom she knew
+and who had held himself in check and throttled down his emotion until
+she spoke that quiet "Yes." The word was like a spark to a train of
+gunpowder. His determination to beat down his temper, no matter what
+came, was gone; his memory of her ordeals was wiped out; from his whole
+tense being there flashed out upon her a hot, heady anger, like stabbing
+lightning from an ominous cloud. His few words seared and scorched a
+place in her memory to endure always.
+
+He clenched his hands and raised them; for an instant she thought he was
+going to strike her down.
+
+"You are utterly contemptible!" he shouted at her. "And I am done with
+you!"
+
+He turned and left her. Gloria stared after him in amazement. She saw
+how he walked swiftly, his big boots crunching through the gravel down
+by the creek bed, splashing through the water, carrying him up the
+timbered slope toward the horses. She could not know that he was almost
+running because he was telling himself in his fierce white passion that
+unless he left her thus he would lose the last power of restraint, and
+set his hands to her pink-and-white throat and choke her. Until the last
+second he had sought not to condemn too soon. Now, after his fashion, he
+condemned sweepingly. For the moment he held that she was less to him
+than the grime upon his boots.
+
+When he came to the horses he was white with anger; he lifted his hand
+and looked at his fingers queerly; they were trembling. He cursed
+himself for a fool, shut the hand into a hard fist as steady as rock,
+and for an instant glared at it blackly. Then he opened the fingers
+slowly; a hard smile made his mouth ugly and left it cruel; the fingers
+had hearkened to a superb will, and gave no greater hint of trembling
+than did the nigged hole of the giant cedar under which he stood.
+
+He coiled his horse's tie-rope and led him back to camp. As he drew
+near, Gloria promptly turned her back and studied her nails; she had had
+encounters with men before now and had not yet gauged the profundity of
+this man's emotion. She counted fully on bringing him to a full and
+contrite sense of his crime before she condescended so much as to look
+at him. But when she flashed him a quick, furtive glance she saw that he
+had his back upon her, and that he gave neither hint of softening nor
+yet of knowledge of her presence. He bridled the buckskin, saddled, tied
+his rope at the saddle-horn, and began making his pack. She watched,
+uneasy and concerned but not yet fully understanding. But when she noted
+how he took from their breakfast-table one cup, one plate, one knife and
+fork, only; how he did not appear interested in the marmalade-jar which
+she knew had been brought for her; how he left half of the coffee and
+bacon and sugar; a strange alarm came over her. She glanced wildly
+around. The forest glowered darkly; the silence was overpowering; the
+loneliness bewildering. He was going to leave her--she had not the
+faintest idea in the world where the trail lay.
+
+King went swiftly about his preparations. He did not even see her; he
+studiously kept his eyes aloof. Within his soul he swore that he would
+never look at her again....He took up his rifle.
+
+Gloria stirred uneasily. She did not like to yield to him even to the
+extent of saying a stiff word. But she felt that the man was not playing
+a part, and that in another moment she would be alone.
+
+"You are not going to leave me here alone, are you?" she demanded
+coldly.
+
+"I am going on," was his curt rejoinder.
+
+"And I?" she persisted.
+
+"What you please."
+
+He went on with his preparations. Terror sprang up into the girl's
+heart.
+
+"I would never find my way out," she cried, jumping to her feet and
+coming toward him. "I am not used to the mountains ...I don't know which
+way ...I would die...."
+
+"To be rid of you the easiest way," he returned bluntly, "I would turn
+back with you until we got within striking distance of the open. But
+you have made me waste time as it is, and I promised Ben that I'd be in
+Gus Ingle's caves with no time lost. So I am going on."
+
+"But," and all of her surging terror trembled in her rushing words, "I
+would die, I tell you...."
+
+"And I tell you," he snapped back at her, "that I don't care a damn if
+you do. Must I tell you twice that I am through with you?"
+
+He set his foot to the stirrup. Gloria, pride lost in panic, ran to him
+and grasped his arm, crying to him:
+
+"You mustn't leave me this way! It's brutal ... it's murder."
+
+"I gave my promise to Ben," he said. "You are not worth breaking a
+promise."
+
+"If you won't take me back, then let me go with you."
+
+"Worthless and selfish and cowardly! Useless and vain and brainless!
+Good God! am I, a man full grown, to loiter on the trail with the like
+of you? Let go!" He shook her hand off roughly and swung up into the
+saddle, sending his horse with a boot-heel in the flank down to the
+ford. But Gloria screamed after him, and ran after him, down to the
+creek and through it, calling out:
+
+"Mark! Mark! For God's sake don't leave me. I am afraid; I will die of
+fear. Take me with you...."
+
+He did not look back at her, but he did pause. After all, she was the
+daughter of his old friend.
+
+"The woods are free and open," he said slowly. "To even such as you. For
+the third time and for the last I tell you this: I am done with you. But
+if you like you may follow behind me. I will wait for you ten minutes.
+Not here, but on the ridge up there. And if you have not come, I will go
+on at the end of that time. That is my solemn word, Gloria Gaynor."
+
+He rode from her, straight and massive in the saddle, up the slope among
+the big-boled trees, and in a trice out of sight. She stood like one in
+a sudden trance. Then, with an inarticulate moan, she ran into the grove
+and grasped Blackie's rope, and dragged at him trying to make him run
+with her to her saddle and few belongings. The saddle nearly
+overmastered her; it was heavy, and she knew as little of it as did any
+city girl. But her need was sore and her young body not without supple
+strength. In half of the allotted time Gloria came riding up the ridge.
+Now King glanced toward her briefly. But less at her than at her pack.
+
+"You had better go back for the rest of the grub," he said to her. "And
+for your blanket-roll. That would be my advice to the devil himself....
+You can do it in the five minutes left to you."
+
+Gloria flung up her head, opened her lips for a stinging reply, and then
+held for a moment in silence and hesitation.
+
+"You hideous brute!" she flung at him. But none the less she hastened
+back for her outfit. Five minutes later they rode on into the
+ever-deepening wilderness, she just keeping his form in sight, he never
+turning nor speaking.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIX_
+
+
+For his brutal treatment of her Gloria fully meant that in the ripeness
+of time he should pay to the uttermost. After that first panic she felt
+toward King only such anger as she had never experienced before, never
+having cause for it. Perhaps the emotion was the beginning of a new
+soul-life for her; certainly here was a moment of reversion to a
+condition of unplumbed progenital influences; the scorching anger
+arising from such a primitive situation was in itself primal. Hence the
+emotion no less that the experience itself was novel; clean, searing
+anger.
+
+Following this emotion which rode her and sapped her nervous strength
+came a period of faintness and nausea. She closed her eyes and dropped
+her head and clung to the horn of her saddle with hands which went cold
+and shook. In this mood she called out once to King. But he was far
+ahead and did not turn. She did not know whether he had heard her.
+Gradually the weakness passed; they topped the ridge and the sun wanned
+her. Coolly and collectedly she turned her thoughts upon the
+insufferable insult and came back through a sort of circle to her first
+intention. Now the decision was cold and stubborn: he would pay and in
+full.
+
+King led the way unfalteringly. Time and again she saw no hint of a
+trail underfoot or ahead; they broke through brush or made a difficult
+way through a thicket of alders or willows and invariably came again
+upon a trail. It was evident that the man thought only of his journey's
+end and was hastening; hence he took all the short cuts which he knew.
+In one of these pathless places, where the scrub-trees and tangle of
+brush were above her head, where it seemed that she must smother, she
+lost all sight of him. Her horse came to a dead halt. She listened and
+could not hear the hoofs of his horse. Again panic mastered her, and she
+cried out wildly. But just ahead was a mad mountain stream filling the
+gorge with its thunder. She knew that King could not hear her; she felt
+the desperate certainty that he would not heed could he hear. Then she
+struck her horse frantically with her bare hands, and pounded him with
+her heels, longing for the sight of King as one athirst in the bad lands
+longs for water. The horse snorted, and whirling and plunging went
+ripping through the bushes which whipped at her and tore the skin of
+hands and face. But in three minutes he brought her into the open and
+into full sight of King, riding up a gentle slope through big red-boled
+cedars. When her fear died, as it did swiftly after the way of fear, it
+left not the old, hot anger, but a new elemental emotion--cold hatred.
+
+Thus upon their second morning the honeymoon entered upon its second
+phase. Every moment brought some new discomfort to her; the saddle hurt
+her: her clothes were torn, her tender skin bruised and scratched;
+pains came stabbingly with early fatigue As for King, he had come
+abruptly to look down upon her as utterly despicable; being a man of
+high honour he convicted her out of hand as one without honour;
+despising her, he despised himself for having linked his life in ever so
+little with hers. But yesterday he had knelt to her humbly in his
+innermost heart of hearts; now he sought to shut his mind against her
+quite as definitely as he turned his back on her.
+
+What sombre, misshapen edifice they should build upon these
+corner-stones of hate and contempt was a matter into which no conjecture
+could enter even slightly had their compelling environment been
+different. In the city they would have turned their backs and walked
+away from each other. But two storm-driven men upon a raft don't
+separate until land is sighted. Gloria, at least, was in her present
+plight comparable to a shipwrecked sailor of little skill and less
+resource. Hence, what was to be, remained to be seen.
+
+At ten o'clock the air was sun-warmed and sweet. Half an hour later the
+genial day was made over by the high wind trailing vapours into a chill
+bleak sky. They had climbed to fresh altitudes; the timber through which
+they progressed indicated that a height of at least seven thousand feet
+above sea-level had been passed. They passed through groves of the
+thin-barked tamaracks, came at the base of a rugged slope to scattering
+mountain pines, which reared into lusty perfection on bleak, wind-swept
+levels, where many of their companion growths were beginning to run out
+in dwarfed, twisted misery, and came to a rocky pass through the
+mountains where on all sides the red cedar, the juniper of the Sierra,
+throve hardily among bare boulders, crowning the lofty crests like a
+sparse, stiff, hirsute display upon the gigantic body of the world. The
+dwarf pine lingered here, straggling along the slopes, beaten down by
+many a winter of wind and heavy snow. But by noon they had made a slow,
+tedious way down a rocky ridge and were once more in the heart of the
+upper forest belt. In an upland meadow, through whose narrow boundaries
+a thin, cold stream trickled, they nooned. Long had Gloria hungered for
+the moment when she would see King swing down from the saddle; during
+the last half-hour she had begun to fear that his brutality knew no
+bounds and that he would spare neither the horses nor her but crowd on
+until nightfall. When he did dismount by the creek she drew rein fifty
+feet from him.
+
+King slipped Buck's bridle, dropped the tie-rope, and let the animal
+forage along the fringes of the brook. To Gloria, in a voice which
+struck her as being as chill as the grey, overcast sky, he said:
+
+"Better let your horse eat. We've got to go pretty steady to get
+anywhere to-day."
+
+Gloria got down stiffly from her saddle. In all the days of her life she
+had never been so unutterably weary. Further, she was faint from hunger
+and her throat pained her; she went to the creek and threw herself down
+and put her face into the cool water, from which she rose with a long
+sigh. She had seen how King did with his tie-rope; she did similarly,
+but was too tired to trouble with removing the bit from her horse's
+mouth. Still Blackie accepted his handicapped opportunity and joined
+Buck in tearing and ripping at the lush grass. It was more inviting than
+the manzanita-bushes and occasional sunflower-leaves at which he had
+snatched during the day.
+
+King made coffee and fried bacon; the horses had earned an hour of rest
+and fodder, and a man has the right to bacon and coffee even though hard
+miles lie before him. While he pottered with his fire he looked more
+than once at the sky in the south-west. With all of his heart he wished
+that he had turned back with Gloria this morning. By now he could have
+set her feet in a trail which even a fool could travel back to the log
+house, and he could be again hastening upon his errand. Gloria lay
+inert; she chewed slowly at a bit broken from a slab of hard chocolate
+and kept her eyes closed. Her face was very white; two big tears of
+distress slipped out from the shut lids. But King did not come close
+enough to see them.
+
+When his coffee was ready he called to her, saying indifferently:
+"Better have a cup. It helps." But Gloria did not reply. King seemed not
+to notice whether she ate or not. But, when he had drunk his own coffee
+and she still lay quiet on the grass, he sweetened a cup for her, put
+some milk in it, and set it at her elbow. "Better drink it," he said
+coldly. And Gloria gathered her strength and sat up and drank.
+Thereafter she ate some bread and potted ham. Fragments of bread, the
+crust, and half of the ham she threw away. King opened his mouth to
+protest; then shrugged and remained silent. His back to a tree, he sat
+and smoked until the hour had passed.
+
+Precisely at one o'clock they were on their way. Gloria caught her own
+horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and
+to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was
+all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities
+began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that
+she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie
+here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as
+one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of
+death seemed less terrible than that of utter desertion. The mountains
+were so big they stifled her. With every tortuous step forward this
+formidable land all about her had grown more severe, more lonely, more
+to her like the kingdom of desolation than she had ever dreamed existed.
+There were slope fields strewn with black lava rock where never a
+solitary blade of grass upthrust a thin spear; there were broken
+expanses across which the eye might travel wearily for what appeared
+endless miles. One could call out here with never a faint hope of being
+heard; one left alone here could die miserably, taunted only by the
+echoes of her own choking voice. This devil's land took on a vindictive
+personality; it was a hideous colossus, stooping over her, inspired with
+but one cruel desire, to crush her soft white body, to stamp out her
+life, to annihilate her and gloat over her shrieking despair. She felt
+like some hapless little princess in a fairy-tale who had wandered into
+a monstrous land of black sorcery.
+
+By four o'clock, when it seemed to Gloria that she had reached and was
+passing the limits of her endurance, came two momentous occurrences.
+King, riding ahead as usual, was not quite so far in advance, and did
+not have his back turned square upon her. For the first time he had
+briefly mistaken the trail; they were on the steep flank of the
+mountain; he turned and rode back in her general direction but some
+hundred yards lower on the slope.
+
+"The trail's down here," he announced shortly. He did not lift his eyes
+to her face, did not note the droop of the weary body. His look was all
+for her horse, and a new and unreasonable spurt of anger was in his
+heart Through her unbounded ignorance she had needlessly fatigued her
+mount, having no knowledge of the ways one employs to save his horse.
+
+Gloria understood dully that she was too far up and must ride down to
+his level. She was beyond complaining or asking questions; with a sudden
+jerk upon the reins she brought Blackie about. King cursed under his
+breath.
+
+"That's too steep!" he called to her. "Want to kill your horse?"
+
+Blackie tried to swerve and sidle down. Gloria lifted her whip and
+struck him. Blackie snorted and obeyed her command. Some loose dirt gave
+way underfoot, the tired beast stumbled, a dead limb caught at his legs,
+tripping him, and Blackie lurched downward and fell. Through the grace
+of fortune Gloria rolled clear and unhurt. Blackie got up, tottering,
+with one quivering fore-leg lifted. King's face went black with rage.
+
+But this time it was wordless rage. He dismounted and made his way up to
+the lamed horse; Gloria, from where she lay, thought at first that of
+course he was coming to her. But he kept his back to her as he lifted
+the horse's fore-leg and felt tenderly at the wrenched muscle. Gloria,
+without stirring, and without experiencing any poignant emotion, watched
+him listlessly, then shut her eyes. Her most clear sensation was one of
+relief; they would no doubt make camp here.
+
+A cold drop of rain splashed on her cheek. She opened her eyes. King was
+removing Blackie's saddle. Gloria closed her eyes again and sighed. A
+sort of dreary thankfulness blossomed feebly in her heart that the
+torturous day was over. King would make some sort of a shelter; she
+would drink a cup of coffee and crawl into her blankets and go to
+sleep....
+
+"Come on," called a voice as though from some great distance. "We've got
+to hurry as fast as God will let us."
+
+Blackie was standing where King had led him, his saddle and bridle swung
+up into a tree, his foot still lifted, his nostrils close to the long
+grass but untempted. Gloria's canvas-rolled pack and the rifle were
+across King's back. As she sat up and stared at him she read his
+intentions. He was going on on foot, expecting her to take his horse.
+
+"I can't," she said miserably.
+
+He looked up into the sky and not at her.
+
+"You can do what you please," he retorted curtly. "I am going on."
+
+She rose and went stumbling down the slope. She swayed as she tried to
+mount, but he did not offer his hand. When she was in the saddle he
+strode on ahead. Blackie looked after them wistfully.
+
+"The leg's not broken," King told her gruffly. "Just a bad sprain. Not
+your fault it isn't worse, though. He'll take care of himself; God knows
+he's got as good a chance as we have."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.
+
+He merely swung up his arm toward the sky by way of answer and went on.
+The second big rain-drop hit Gloria's cheek. It was chill; its dullness
+seemed to drive straight to her heart.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XX_
+
+
+The storm caught them as it has caught so many a wayfarer before and
+since. The wintry season was not due for a full four weeks, but the
+winter had thrust sign and season aside and made his regal entry after
+his own ancient fashion. There came a crash of reverberating thunder, a
+scurry in the thickening mass of black clouds, a drenching downpour of
+rain. For twenty minutes they crouched in what scant shelter was
+afforded them by a squat, wide-limbed cedar. Then the wind went ripping
+off through the tree-tops, exacting its toll of flying twigs and leaving
+in its wake a brief, hushed calm. Through the still air fell scattering
+flakes of snow, big and unbroken and feathery. King's eyes were filled
+with concern; his face was ominous like the face of the world about him.
+
+Again Gloria's tired body was assured of rest; again King said
+expressionlessly: "Come on." This time he helped her into the saddle,
+being in haste and of no mind to wait for trifles. He hurried on ahead;
+she followed on Buck listlessly, clinging to the saddle, her eyes often
+shut.
+
+For an hour it snowed. Though there was no sun it was not dark save in
+the deeper cañons. Nor was it as cold as Gloria had thought it must
+be--or else she was too tired to feel the pinch of the sharp air. But
+presently the flakes grew fewer and then ceased utterly. Those that lay
+on the ground or clung to branches melted swiftly; and with their
+departure the last light of the day was gone. Now King led the horse and
+Gloria rode through a gathering darkness. She wanted to ask why they did
+not stop; why they did not turn back, but lacked the spirit. Now and
+then she half dozed.
+
+At last it was pitch dark and the rain was beginning again. King had
+stopped and was helping her down. She was numb now in body; her brain
+was numb. The rain hardened into a rattle of hail. Thereafter the air
+softened and filled with swirling snow. Gloria could not see if they
+were in an open valley or shut in by canon walls or upon the slope of a
+mountain. Nor did she greatly care. She waited until King prepared some
+kind of a shelter, and then went wordlessly to it; she felt fir-boughs
+under her aching body and was, in pure animal fashion, conscious of
+blanket and canvas over her and of a grateful warmth. Through a tangle
+of bushes she saw the flicker of a small fire; she smelled coffee; she
+drank half of the hot cup which he brought to her. Then she let go her
+grip upon a wretched world and passed like a child into a heavy sleep.
+
+By his fire of little cheer Mark King sat, with his canvas drawn over
+his slumping shoulders, his head down, his heart as black as the night,
+his soul possessed by ravaging blue demons. At the end of a fool's day
+came a fool's night. He should have paid heed to the first threat of a
+thin film across the sky; he should have turned back with Gloria the
+first thing this morning; he should have done anything in the world save
+exactly what he had done. He should not have married her; he should not
+have brought her with him; it was even sheer idiocy to come after this
+blind fashion into the mountains in the late fall. Though the season was
+early the hour was ominous. The storm might pass before dawn. There
+remained the equal likelihood that it would not. Were he alone, or had
+he a man, or, yes, by heaven! a real woman with him, things would not be
+so bad. The wind jeered at him through the trees; the storm drenched his
+fire; he cursed back at both.
+
+"One thing," he thought when his pipe brought him a solitary instant of
+peace, "I won't be worried with Gratton and Brodie and his
+double-dealing crowd. If they ever started they would have sense enough
+to turn back long ago."
+
+After the cold, wet night came a sodden morning. King stood up and
+looked about him curiously; his first thought was to make sure that they
+had really camped upon the edge of that particular upland valley which
+he had striven for. And a glint of satisfaction came into his eyes; it
+is something to have followed such a trail aright upon such a night.
+Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which
+many miles further on flowed into the American. Rising abrupt beyond it
+were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the
+mountain tributaries of the American. The rocks, like the river, were
+black, and looked far colder than the white world which extended in all
+directions.
+
+If, in truth, there existed heaps of raw red gold somewhere in a cave in
+these mountains, and there had been any exactness in the description in
+Gus Ingle's Bible, then the spot was not more than three or four miles
+away. That was one consideration. It was still snowing. Here was a
+second consideration. King turned moody eyes to Gloria's canvas-and-fir
+shelter in the lee of a little bit of cliff. There lay the third. He
+prepared breakfast without delay but without enthusiasm. He felt a tired
+man with shackled limbs dragging a dead weight.
+
+When he went to wake Gloria he first stood over her, looking queerly
+down upon her sleep. She showed less trace of the hard day and wild
+night than he had expected to see; his preparations for her comfort,
+instinctive and thorough, had been made with the cunning skill of a man
+familiar with situations like the present. She had rested; she lay
+curled up, snug and warm, under the covers, upon which a thin layer of
+fluffy snow had gathered. Her face was against a curved arm, and the
+sweetness of it in its tranquil repose was a bitter sweet to him. Her
+lashes against her cheek stirred and flew apart under his steady gaze.
+He looked into Gloria's eyes, sweet and soft, heavy with sleep.
+
+"Time to be up," he said. He turned on his heel and went back in haste
+to his fire.
+
+Gloria, awake, was ravenously hungry. She came sooner than he had
+expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order.
+Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him. She shrugged
+her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands to the small,
+wind-blown blaze.
+
+"Are we going back?" she asked colourlessly.
+
+"No," he returned as indifferently. "It's about four miles to the caves.
+We'll be there in a couple of hours. Then we'll see what we see."
+
+Gloria sent a long, searching, and awe-struck look across the broken
+country. Yonder, then, she realized dismally, lay their destination;
+bleak, black, rocky heights, at so great an altitude and in a region so
+barren that but few wind-broken trees grew, and the brutal face of the
+world was unmasked. She saw bare peaks, steep slopes, a tremendous gorge
+like an ugly gash; on the far side of the gorge sheer cliffs. Toward
+them King looked. Was it there that Gus Ingle's caves awaited them? Was
+that journey's end? She shivered and drew closer to the fire, closer to
+her companion, shrinking from the menace of the mountains.
+
+"Is it going to keep on snowing?" she asked.
+
+This time he shrugged. That was his only answer. She stared at him, a
+slow flush came into her cheeks, her eyes hardened.
+
+"Oh, very well," she said coldly.
+
+That was the whole of their conversation save for one curt remark and an
+impudent laugh in answer at the end of the scanty meal. Gloria tossed a
+piece of bacon into the fire. King looked at her sternly and said:
+
+"Young lady, we may be up against the real thing right now. Nobody but a
+fool will do a trick like that."
+
+The laugh was Gloria's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once on their way they climbed almost steadily. The air grew rarer and
+colder. The snowflakes became smaller, at last a fine sifting like sand
+particles that cut at hands and face viciously. No longer were there
+groves to shelter them; on all sides bare, hostile rocks, and only
+occasionally a sparse growth of sprawling, earth-hugging dwarf pine and
+cedar, over which King strode as over so much low, tangled brush. Then
+came a long ridge, a spine from which the world dropped almost sheer on
+both sides, with the wind raging so that it seemed Buck must be blown
+off his feet, or the girl torn from the saddle and borne far out like a
+thistledown. With frightened eyes, which she strove vainly to keep
+closed, she saw long, broken slopes; occasionally when the air cleared,
+a frothing torrent; and once, at the end of a couple of hours, far down
+in a distant level land, a growth of giant timber. She thought that King
+was making his way down there. But his purpose soon became plain even to
+her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the
+ravine which lower down cut like a knife across the timbered tract,
+headed for what he took to be Gus Ingle's cave. A mile away she saw it;
+a great, ragged, black hole in a high mass of rock, close to the crest
+of the next ridge.
+
+She was wrapped warmly and yet here the icy breath of the wind pierced
+the fabric of her wrappings and hurt her to the bone. She watched King
+wonderingly as he hastened on; did the man have no sense of bodily
+discomfort? Certainly he gave no sign. He was like an animal; she found
+room for a flash of scorn in the thought. For so she was pleased to
+consider him lower in the scale than herself.
+
+At another time she might have seen the world about her clothed in
+grandeur; now its sublimity was lost I upon her. It was a ravening
+beast, an ugly thing, big and brutal, and ... like King. Oh, how she
+hated it and him!
+
+When at last he waited for her and told her to get down she had the
+suspicion that he had gone mad. Certainly here was no spot to tarry; it
+was on her lips to demur. But she looked at his face and slipped stiffly
+from the saddle. They were high up on the ridge; Gloria, on foot beside
+him, clutched at the wind-twisted branch of one of the sprawling cliff
+growths, in sudden panic that she was being swept from her feet. Just
+below them was the deepening cleft in the mountain-side which, further
+down, widened and descended into the steep-walled gorge. Through it
+shot a mad, frothy stream. A hundred yards further on, high up in the
+cliffs, was the yawning hole in the rocks. King, holding Buck's bridle,
+looked about him and at the sky. Gloria read in his manner a hint of
+uncertainty. Hoping to influence his decision, she said quickly:
+
+"Hadn't we better turn back now?"
+
+He looked at her steadily before answering.
+
+"In what," he replied in that impersonal way which maddened her, "have
+you so altered as to be worth a man's broken promise?" And then she knew
+that no thought of going back had had any part in his brief indecision.
+He was going forward, would go forward in anything he undertook; that
+was a part of his make-up. He was merely seeking the best place to
+unpack and a convenient spot to tether Buck. They were going to make
+camp either right here or nearer the cave, perhaps in it. She looked at
+the uninviting hole and shivered. She would know his decision when King
+saw fit to enlighten her.
+
+Now he merely dumped at her feet the roll from the horse's back, setting
+his rifle down against it. Then he led Buck away, zigzagging tediously,
+at last passing from sight beyond an out jutting monster crag. Gloria
+crouched, seeking to shield herself from the whiplashes of the wind. She
+listened to it as it shrieked about the slabs and boulders of granite;
+the sound was indescribably eerie, filled with unrest, eloquent of the
+brutal contempt of the eternal for the feeble and transient. The
+universe grew utterly lonely; the wind was a whining thing cutting
+through the silence. And King was so long in coming back....
+
+The terrifying thought electrified her: "What if he had deserted her?
+What if he had no intention of coming back?" She should have known
+better; perhaps, deep down within her, she did know better. But the
+suspicion brought its wild flutter; she sprang up and grew rigid in
+tense fright; she felt a strange, glad rush of joy as she saw his hat
+bobbing up and toward her along the mountain flank. When he rejoined
+her she was staring off at nothingness, her back to him.
+
+He lashed the two canvas rolls together, swung them up to his shoulders,
+took frying-pan, coffee-pot, and rifle in his free hand, and nodded
+toward the small pack of provisions which had been left over from lunch.
+"Better bring those," he advised briefly. "There's no telling what may
+be in the cards." He went on along the knife-edge of the ridge, down
+into a little depression, up beyond. She hesitated, saw that he had not
+looked, bit her lip angrily, and snatched up the parcel. Then she
+followed him, stooping against the wind.
+
+When she came up with him he had thrown down his pack at the very edge
+of the gorge. She came to his side, leaned forward, and looked down. Far
+below plunged the wildest torrent she had ever seen; it hurled itself in
+mad haste between boulders; it shot down over dizzy falls; it made for
+itself a white mantle of frothing waters; it looked as black as ebony in
+sections of smoother channel and as cold as death; it spun in
+whirlpools, it filled the air with its din. And King meant to go down to
+it; to cross it; to climb the dizzy cliff upon the further side! She
+knew from his look, without asking. For just across the chasm from them
+in the highest of the cliffs was the yawning black-mouthed place of
+horrors. If one slipped on those bare rocks, clambering down or climbing
+on the further side! She sat down suddenly; now when her lip was caught
+between her teeth it was to fight back the tears. The world was so cold
+and stern and brutal; this man was so much like the environment; she was
+so woefully, desperately heart-sick. On this lofty crest of a
+devil-tossed land she felt the insignificance of a fly clinging to the
+brow of an abyss.
+
+King went about his task methodically. Gloria watched him rather than
+look across the rocky gorges. Slowly and with difficulty he made his way
+down the steep wall of rocks, dragging and pulling the roll of bedding
+and provisions after him. It required perhaps twenty minutes for him to
+get to the bottom. She wondered where he would attempt a crossing; the
+water looked so black in the pools, so violent over the rapids. He went
+up-stream; there lay an old cedar log so that it spanned the current,
+its sturdy old trunk ten feet above the water. For a moment King
+disappeared under an out-thrust ledge; then she saw him again, the pack
+on his shoulders. He had climbed up to the top of the log; he was
+crossing. Where he went now she must follow!
+
+Fascinated, she watched him. Once she thought he was going to fall. But
+unerringly he trod the rude bridge underfoot, gained the other side
+without mishap, tossed down his bundle, and lowered himself from the log
+after it. Gloria marvelled at him; she could see his face and it was
+impassive. Could he not hear the hostile voices of the raging waters?
+Could he not feel the ominous threat of the bleak day and the monster
+cliffs? Was he a man without imagination as he seemed to be without
+fear?
+
+On he went, down-stream again, clinging to the steep pitch of the gorge,
+until he was almost under the mouth of the cavern. He put back his head
+and looked up; it was a hundred feet above him and the cliffs, from
+where Gloria sat numb with cold and dread, looked unsurmountable. Yet he
+was going up them!
+
+"And where he goes you will follow." It was as though the wild waters
+below were chanting it into her ears and thereafter filling the gorge
+with the mockery of derisive laughter.
+
+Slowly, tediously, but with never a sign of hesitation, King made his
+way up the cliff. He had been here before; he knew and remembered every
+foothold and handhold. Nor was the task the impossible one it looked
+from a distance. There were cracks and crevices; there were seams of a
+harder material which, better withstanding the attacks of time, were
+thrust out beyond the general level; on them a man might stand. There
+were spots of softer material, scooped out into pockets by wind and
+water; there were flinty splinters; there were places where the wall,
+looking from across the cañon to be sheer and perpendicular, sloped more
+gently, and a man might crawl up them.
+
+King had drawn up after him, stage after stage, the roll of bedding,
+using Blackie's tie-rope to haul it up and to moor it briefly. Gloria
+saw it swing at times like a huge, misshapen pendulum; watched it crawl
+up after him. She saw the wind snatch at it and set it scraping back and
+forth when he let it dangle at rope's end; she saw King's coat flap in
+the wind. Once she cried out aloud, thinking a second time that King was
+falling. If he fell from that height--if he were killed--what then would
+be the fate of Gloria Gaynor!
+
+But at length he came safely to the cave's mouth. He stood upright and
+looked about him. Then he drew up to his feet the dangling roll; with it
+in his arms he was gone into that yawning hole. She waited breathlessly
+for his return. She saw him come again into the light; he had the rope
+in his hand, was coiling it. He began to come down. He was returning for
+her.
+
+She did not stir while he made the slow descent, nor while he recrossed
+on the log and climbed the steep bank to her.
+
+"I am going to spend the day up there," he told her in his studied aloof
+manner. "I'll know soon enough now what truth there is in the story of
+Gus Ingle's gold. There's room in the cave to sleep, and there's shelter
+of a sort. To-morrow morning, if I find nothing, I'll start back with
+you. If you care to come up now I'll help you."
+
+"What else is there to do?" cried Gloria, with the first flash of
+passion. "What else do you leave me?"
+
+He slipped a loop of the rope about her waist, taking slow pains not to
+touch her with his hands, and turned downward again. She followed,
+filled with sudden fear when they had climbed down ten feet, obeying him
+hastily when he commanded her to stand still or to move on, feeling her
+fear grow mightily as they progressed. The wind, strengthening abruptly,
+tore at her in angry gusts. She was panting and shaking visibly when
+finally she reached the log spanning the stream. He was up before her,
+offering her his hand. How she hated to touch it! How she feared to
+follow him! But her hand went into his, her steps followed his, and
+without hesitation; for there was nothing left now to choice. She looked
+down and saw the water raging below; it was like a monster leaping at
+her, snatching at her. She wanted to look away and could not. Like one
+moving through the fearsome steps of a nightmare she went on, clinging
+to King's hand, his hand tight upon hers, cold hands which met because
+they must. At last the torrent was behind her; she came down into King's
+arms from the log; she was faint and would have sat down. But he urged
+her on.
+
+It was another nightmare climbing up the cliffs to the cave. He went
+ahead; he stopped and braced himself; he tautened the rope about her
+waist and said: "Come on. Slow and careful does it." She clutched with
+her cold, sore fingers at the rocks, felt the rope tighten, and went up
+and up. The wind, as though in a fury at losing its quarry, shrieked in
+her ears, and in mighty gusts strove to drag her hands from the rocks
+and to set her swinging as it had swung the roll of bedding. She climbed
+on. King ordered and she obeyed; she waited for him to go up, further
+ahead; for him to call to her and draw in on the rope. Stage by stage,
+weary stages fraught with terror, she toiled up and up and up. And so at
+last, when it seemed to her that no strength remained in her, she came
+to King's side at the gloomy entrance of Gus Ingle's cave. The formless
+black void before her which under other circumstances would have
+repelled, now invited. It offered shelter and rest and protection. She
+crept by King with never a backward glance, and threw herself face down
+on the uneven floor.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXI_
+
+
+A long time King stood at the mouth of the cave, looking forth upon the
+newly whitened world. The look of the thickening sky, the wintry sting
+of the rushing air, the businesslike way in which the snow swirled and
+fell created a condition upon which he had not counted and for which he
+had no relish. This was more like a mid-winter blizzard than any storm
+had any business being so early in the season. For many hours already
+the snow had been falling, piling up in the mountain passes; if it kept
+on at this rate through another day and night--well, he and Gloria had
+best be getting out without any loitering.
+
+He looked at his watch; not yet eleven o'clock. Need for haste; the day
+would be short. Before darkness shut down he had half a dozen hours,
+hours for methodical search. Here was one of Gus Ingle's caves; another,
+he knew, was directly below and at the base of the cliffs; the third
+should be near. It was the third that he was chiefly interested in. He
+recalled the words in the old Bible: "We come to the First Caive and
+then we come to Caive number three and two!" There lay significance in
+the order of Ingle's numerals; first, three, and two. Two of the caves
+were for any one to see; before now King had been in both of them. Hence
+it must be that Gus Ingle's treasure lay in the third. That one King
+must locate. And without too much delay. He looked down at Gloria. She
+lay motionless just as she had thrown herself down.
+
+Taking his rope with him King made what haste he could going down the
+cliffs. The sides of the ravine were littered with dead wood, drift and
+limbs that had broken off the few battered trees above. He gathered as
+heavy a load of dry branches as he could handle, bound them about with
+his rope, and, fighting his way all the way up, clambered again to the
+upper cave. Gloria had not stirred. He moved about her, went a dozen
+paces deeper into the great cavern, and threw down his wood. Breaking
+branches into short lengths he quickly got a fire going. The flames
+spurted up eagerly, bright and cheery, and threw dancing light among the
+wavering shadows. He brought the bedding-roll closer and opened it into
+a rough-and-ready bed. Then he called to Gloria.
+
+"You'd better lie here by the fire," he told her. "You're apt to catch
+cold there."
+
+She was sitting up, watching him. Now she rose listlessly and came
+forward, dropping down into a sitting position upon the blankets, her
+chilled hands out toward the blaze.
+
+"I don't like the look of this storm," he told her. "It is up to us to
+hurry. I am going to look around now. I think you had better rest all
+you can so as to be ready to make a start back as soon as I find out
+whether we are on a wild-goose chase or not."
+
+"You mean--we may start back to-day?"
+
+"I don't know what I am going to find, of course; whether I am going to
+find anything. But if we can get only a couple of hours on our way
+to-day, it's just that much gained."
+
+"You are going to leave me here?"
+
+"I won't be far." With that he set fire to a dry pine faggot, the best
+torch available, and left her, going deeper into the cave. She watched
+him, marvelling at the size of the cavern. He went on a score of paces;
+he seemed to be ascending a steepening slant floor and then to have gone
+over a sort of ridge and to be descending again. But still going further
+from her. Presently she knew that the tunnel had turned sharply to the
+right; she could hear the thud of his boots and for a little while could
+see the flare of his torch against a wall of rock; he himself had passed
+out of her sight.
+
+But she knew that he had not gone a great deal further. For he was not
+so far away that she could not hear him; he was going back and forth; at
+irregular intervals she saw a dim, ghostly light playing upon the dark
+cavern walls. And, despite the weary ache of a hardship-tortured body,
+she began to be interested in his search. If there were, in truth, such
+gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of--gold
+for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony
+Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his
+following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening
+wolves on the trail--gold in quantity to make even toughened old
+gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it--why, then, that gold was
+half Mark King's and half Ben Gaynor's! And it might be that now, at
+this very instant, Mark King was finding it; was standing over it,
+staring down at it by the ghostly flare of a smoking torch. She sat,
+tense and still, listening, trying to probe with tired but suddenly
+bright eyes through the dark.
+
+She started, realizing that no longer could she hear King searching back
+and forth. It was very silent about her, only the crackle of the flames
+making a sound to be heard against the rush of air outside. It seemed to
+her that King had been gone a long time. She rose to her feet, tempted
+to follow him. She was curious to know what he was doing; why he was so
+silent; where he had gone. But in the end pride restrained her and she
+sat down again to wait in an attitude of indifference.
+
+But the minutes dragged on and never a sound came back from the far,
+dark depths of the cavern; fifteen minutes, half an hour. She grew
+restless and walked up and down; she went to the mouth of the cave and
+stood looking out into the swirling snow-storm; she returned to the
+fire, throwing on more wood. She felt sure that an hour had passed--two
+hours--she began to grow alarmed. Always that dread thought was ready to
+spring out upon her: "If something had happened to him!" She went a
+little way in the direction he had taken; stood peering into the dark,
+listening breathless and rigid. Never a sound. She went back to the
+front of the cave, looking down, staring out into the grey sky, across
+the ridge....
+
+Gloria, trembling with a new excitement, was down on her knees before
+the pack when King returned. She sprang up to face him. And each, with
+the other's emotions and experiences of the past two or three hours
+unknown to him, marvelled at what was to be read in the other's face.
+Gloria was excited; King's excitement was no less. Where she had at
+least the clue to his altered expression, he had none to hers.
+
+"It's here!" he burst out. "And I've found it. Tons and tons of it, such
+knobs and nuggets of pure gold as never man laid eyes on! We have here
+the Magic Lamp to rub: a castle in Spain and an ocean-going yacht and
+the newest thing in motor-cars and a trip around the world and a
+presentation to royalty--a fragment of heaven and a very large slice of
+hell. Ambition fulfilled and love consumed and hate born. We have old
+Ben made whole and full of power again. And here we have all that is
+left of Gus Ingle and his friends--except for a pile of bones back
+yonder!"
+
+She saw that in each hand he carried what looked like a big rough stone;
+she saw from the way he carried them that they were heavy. The fires
+leaped higher, brighter in her eyes. Now she saw the way to make Mark
+King pay for all of his brutality to her; to pay to the uttermost!
+
+"I have nothing to say to you," she said as stiffly as she knew the way.
+"I care to hear nothing you have to say. I have tolerated all that I
+mean to tolerate from you."
+
+Her bearing, no less than her words, astonished him. For the first time
+he saw what it was that she held in her hands. She had been gathering up
+her own little personal effects; a tiny parcel of silken things, comb
+and brush, trifling feminine odds and ends. He stared at her
+wonderingly.
+
+"I don't understand----"
+
+Gloria treated him to cool laughter.
+
+"You will in a minute. I am going."
+
+"Going? You? In God's name, _where_?"
+
+Deep silence answered him. He frowned at her in puzzled fashion a
+moment; then, suspecting the truth, since his racing mind could hit on
+no other possible explanation of her manner, he dropped to the fireside
+the things in his hands and went swiftly to the cave's mouth. He looked
+out into the storm, his eyes questing in all directions. Nothing. Only
+the thickening storm, the ridges dim beyond the swirl of snow----
+
+Then he saw. For a long time he stood, studying it, seeking to make
+sure. What he saw was beaten down by the falling snow, dissipated by the
+wind, gone entirely over and again only to rise like a shapeless ghost
+of disaster. It was a column of smoke. Some one had encamped no great
+distance away; on the same stream, hidden only by the windings of the
+gorge. Some one? Why, then, Gratton and Brodie and their crowd, after
+all! He glowered angrily toward the faint smudge of smoke. Then he swung
+about and came back to Gloria's side.
+
+"You saw that smoke?" he demanded. "You plan on going to them?"
+
+"Yes," cried Gloria. She sprang up and confronted him angrily. "Yes to
+both questions."
+
+"You know who they are, then?"
+
+"No; but that doesn't matter."
+
+"Which means as plain as print," he said thoughtfully, "that you would
+go to any man to be rid of me." He laughed unpleasantly and Gloria's
+anger flared the higher.
+
+"Do you know," he said presently, "that they are probably Gratton and
+Swen Brodie and their outfit?"
+
+"What of it?" asked Gloria, erect and defiant.
+
+"You know that Gratton has set out to ruin your father? That he's a
+double-dealing scoundrel? That Brodie is worse? That neither is hardly
+the sort for a girl to trust herself to in a place like this?"
+
+"I am not given much choice," Gloria informed him with high insolence.
+
+"That's a fact," he conceded with a grunt.
+
+He'd give a thousand dollars right now to be well rid of her; yes, and
+have Gratton and Brodie and the rest of them come on looking for any
+sort of a row that suited their ilk. He told himself that with savage
+emphasis, but he asked: could he let her go?
+
+"Before I go," said Gloria when she thought that he had nothing further
+to add, "I want to say just one thing: father has always considered you
+his best friend. I shall lose no time in telling him what you really
+are."
+
+Gloria's remark, coming just when it did in King's perplexity, settled
+his decision firmly on him. The girl was a vicious little fool; so he
+was determined to think of her unequivocally. But she was, after all,
+Ben Gaynor's daughter and, furthermore, the apple of Ben's eye. She was
+in King's keeping; he had been eminently to blame for bringing her here,
+his was the responsibility. Gratton's eye was the sort that soils a
+woman.
+
+"You are _not_ going," he said suddenly, turning upon her. "I won't
+allow you to put yourself in Gratton's or Brodie's dirty hands."
+
+A quick light was in her eyes, a quick spurt of satisfaction in her
+heart. In King's decision she read the assurance that he was still madly
+in love with her, that now his jealousy stirred him. She lifted her chin
+and with her little bundle under her arm came forward, walking
+confidently.
+
+"Stand aside, please," she commanded. "I am going, I tell you."
+
+Again sensing the familiarity of the battlefield she felt an almost
+serene confidence, believing herself easily mistress of the situation.
+So much must have been plain to King from that "Stand aside, please,"
+which Miss Gloria Gaynor of last week might have addressed to a porter,
+were it not that just now King's thought was not bended to trifles. When
+she came to his side and he did not stir, she sought to brush by him.
+There was no hesitation in the way in which he put out his hand and held
+her back.
+
+"There can be only one captain to an expedition in adventure," he told
+her seriously. "I have been elected to the job. You'll pardon me if I
+put matters into one-syllable words? Until we are well out of this, if
+we are ever out at all, you will have to do what I tell you. You are not
+going to desert ship."
+
+She stared at him speechlessly. Then:
+
+"By what right do _you_ issue orders to _me_?" she cried.
+
+"Let us say," he returned in the coin of her own harshness, "by the old
+right of a husband. If that isn't sufficient you can add to it: by the
+time-honoured right of the lord and master! For that is just precisely
+what I intend being until I can turn you over to your dawdling set in
+the city again. Wait a minute," he added sternly, as he saw her lips
+opening to a rush of words. "I would be glad to have you go were
+conditions less exacting. Now I have thought matters over and it appears
+essential that certain of our marriage vows be remembered. You don't
+have to love or honour, but by thunder you are going to obey! Reversion
+to an ancient order of things, eh? Well, the world was better then,
+largely in that women were worth a man's while. Further, for my part, I
+fully intend to keep my obligation of protecting you against your own
+foolishness, the storm, Gratton, Brodie, and the devil himself. And,
+finally, I mean to keep my promise to your father. He sent me to get Gus
+Ingle's gold; it's here. So is Gratton with his cut-throat crowd. I will
+in all probability have my hands full. But, once and for all, you stick
+with me. Where," he concluded with the last jeer, "the wife's place
+should be!"
+
+Gloria tried to stare him down, to wither him with the fire of her
+scorn, to brave by him. But the man, all emotion having receded from his
+eyes, was once more like so much rock, but rock endowed with dormant
+power of aggression. She felt as though she had to do with a great
+poised boulder which offered no menace so long as she let it alone, but
+which needed but an unwary step of hers to destroy its equilibrium and
+thus bring it crashing down upon her, crushing her. She began by
+wondering if she had mistaken his look just now when she had leaped to
+the triumphant decision that he loved her; she ended by feeling hopeless
+and tired and uncertain of all things. To keep him from noting how she
+was trembling she went hastily back to the roll of bedding and dropped
+down to it. On the instant it became clear to her that physically King
+was the master. To her, before whom difficulties had heretofore
+invariably melted, it seemed equally clear that there must be a way out
+of an unbearable situation. So now, for the first time, she began a
+certain logical line of thought, seeking to shape her own plans.
+
+"Please listen to me seriously," King said quietly to her. "I won't talk
+long to you. Your father is on the edge of bankruptcy. He is temporarily
+out of the running--at the hands of the very men you want to go to. He
+counts on me for what is in Gus Ingle's caves. I have found at least a
+part of it and I honestly believe that it is in your hands and mine to
+pull Ben through and leave him a rich man on top of it. Gratton and
+Brodie are down there; they'll clean us out if they can. The stake is
+big enough for them to stop at nothing short of murder, and I am not
+oversure they'd stop there. Gus Ingle's crowd didn't, and I don't know
+that men have changed much in half a hundred years."
+
+"I am listening," said Gloria coolly when he paused.
+
+"Here's the point: this is treasure-trove; we got here first. It is up
+to us to hold it. Can I count on you? You don't happen to have any love
+for me; well, you shouldn't have any for Gratton or Brodie, either. And
+you know that you can trust yourself to me. Can I count on you sticking
+on the job, your father's and your own job as much as mine, until we
+make a go of it?"
+
+Gloria's logical thinking had barely begun, and as yet had not had time
+to progress. Her spite was lively and bitter. In her distorted vision,
+blurred by passionate anger, she cried out quickly:
+
+"So, now that the odds are against you, you come cringing to me, do
+you?" Again she was misled into fancying that she held a whip-hand over
+him. "Answering your question, I would trust Mr. Gratton any day rather
+than you. He, at least, is not quite the brute and bully that you are."
+
+King was hardly disappointed.
+
+"At least you have given a straight answer," he muttered. "That is
+something."
+
+Now he shaped his plans swiftly and carefully, knowing where she stood.
+It was characteristic of him that, once having seen clearly his own
+responsibility toward a foolish girl, he did not seek to simplify his
+own difficulty by ridding himself of her. Henceforth he would merely
+consider her his chief handicap, with him but against him. He consoled
+himself with the whimsical thought that there was never a proper
+treasure-hunt that did not carry traitorous mutineers on the questing
+ship.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXII_
+
+
+And so, after all, he and Gloria were not alone in the mountains; that
+other crowd was still to be reckoned with. King stood at the cave's
+mouth, frowning into the ever-thickening smother of the storm. Their
+smoke was gone again, beaten down, hidden behind the snow-curtain. But
+they were there, at no very great distance. Thus, then, they knew
+something. Just what? Here was the matter of his perplexity; did they
+know all that he did? Or had they merely such a hint as would lead them
+as close as this? Or had they followed his trail?
+
+He grew impatient with seeking to speculate. It struck him clearly and
+forcefully that he had but one thing to do: to trust that they did not
+have such full information as had fallen into his hands and to see to it
+that he gave them no help. Though they should come close, very close,
+still that which he had found might remain hidden from them. There lay
+his work; to do all that he could to hide Gus Ingle's gold. First he
+would bring with him more than the two nuggets; all that he felt he
+could manage to carry with the rest of his necessary load. Enough to
+help Ben Gaynor over a crisis; enough raw gold to slam down before some
+San Francisco capitalist, together with a tale which would make any man
+eager to stake the owner to what loan he asked. With that he'd seek to
+get back to the open. He would get provisions, snow-shoes, a dog-team,
+if necessary, a couple of trusted men to come with him; he would be back
+here within the week. But first, before he went, he would strive to make
+as sure as a man could that Brodie's crowd did not find the golden
+hoard.
+
+He went a second time far back into the darkness of the further cave,
+carrying a smoking torch as before, vanishing from Gloria's eyes. She
+was alone; nothing stood between her and the cave's mouth; she was free
+to go! He must have thought of that. He was giving her her chance. She
+had but to snatch up the few things she meant to take with her, to go
+out, to find her way down the cliffs----She shuddered. She was afraid!
+Did he know that, too? Had he thought of that? She moved back and forth
+restlessly; at one instant she was sure that she would go, only to be
+certain of nothing before another second passed. How soon would he
+return? Would he hurry after her, would he bring her back forcibly?...
+She went where she could look out; the column of smoke had disappeared;
+the wind tore at her in mighty gusts. She hesitated and time passed.
+
+How long he was gone she did not know. She only knew that she had done
+nothing when at length he returned. There was a look of grim
+satisfaction on his face; whatever he had gone to do he had done in a
+manner to please him. She noted that his coat was off; that in it, as in
+a bag, he carried something heavy.
+
+"This goes with us wherever we go," he announced triumphantly. "It's a
+big breathing spell for Ben Gaynor." He dumped it out; there were other
+lumps like the two he had brought back the first time. She wondered
+dully if that grimy stuff were gold! She watched him while he emptied a
+provision-bag and thereafter dropped into it the stuff he had brought in
+his coat. On top of it went the articles of food.
+
+"If you can whip up enough endurance for the work ahead of us," he
+announced impersonally, "we stand a good chance of getting out of this.
+Otherwise, we stand a whole lot better show of being caught here and
+freezing and starving to death."
+
+Gloria shook visibly. Nervousness and fear and the cold were combined
+and merciless. Her look sped from King's face to what she could see of
+the snow-storm.
+
+"But we'll wait," she asked in utter, weary meekness, "until this
+horrible storm is over?"
+
+"One never knows about a storm like this," he told her. "It may blow
+itself out soon and it may keep on for a long time. Now, it's beginning
+to pile up in the drifts, to hide the trails, to make going harder every
+minute. As it is we'll have our work cut out for us; if this keeps up
+all afternoon and all night ..." He shrugged.
+
+"You mean that then we couldn't get out at all?" she asked sharply.
+
+He looked down on her thoughtfully. "I don't know," he replied slowly,
+"whether you could make it then or not. I am more or less used to this
+sort of thing and you are not. I figure that we ought to take no more
+long shots than we have to. If we start right now and have any luck we
+can make several miles before night and camp in some of the thick
+timber. We'd be as well off there as we are here and just that much
+nearer the outside. If the weather allowed us to travel at all we could
+be back at your father's place in four or five days at the longest.
+And," he added significantly, "we have food to last us just about that
+long."
+
+Gloria sprang up hastily. "Quick," she cried. "Let's hurry."
+
+King nodded and began his preparations. Into the squares of canvas he
+rolled everything they were to take with them, and he took no single
+article which he judged was not absolutely necessary. One small
+frying-pan and one light aluminium pot, with single knife, fork, and
+spoon, constituted all in the way of cooking utensils. With jealous eye
+he judged the weight, bulk, and worth of every other article, whether it
+be a tin of fruit or a slab of bacon. Those delicacies, which his love
+for Gloria had prompted him to bring with them, he now placed at one
+side, to be left behind. Bacon, to the last small scrap and fat-lined
+rind, coffee, to the once-boiled dregs in the coffee-pot, he packed
+carefully. Then, his roll made and drawn tight, he took up the discarded
+articles and hid them under some loose dirt in a remote, black corner of
+the cave. Ten minutes later he had gotten first his pack, then Gloria,
+safely down the cliffs, and they started. Head down, silent, like two
+grotesque automatons, they trudged on. They crossed on the fallen cedar,
+they climbed out of the gorge on the far side, they fought their way on.
+
+Several times King turned. But she soon saw it was not to look at her;
+his glance passed down the long cañon toward the spot where they had
+seen the smudge of smoke. She had come near forgetting that other men
+were near; she had no interest in them now. King had brought her here;
+King must take her safely back to the world which she had forsaken so
+stupidly. The obligation was plainly his; the power seemed his no less.
+
+As Gloria fought her way along she was upborne at every step by the
+expectation of coming presently to their horse, of being placed in the
+saddle, and of having nothing to do from then on but hold to the pommel
+and have King lead her on to an ultimate safety. The progress would be
+long and the way little less than an adventure in hell to her; but at
+least hers would have become a slightly more passive part and she would
+be moving on toward the luxury of four walls and a maid and warm
+comforts. So when they came to the spot where King had tethered his
+horse, and there was no horse there, Gloria looked her blank, stupefied
+bewilderment, and then simply collapsed. She dropped down in the snow,
+her face in her hands, too weary and heartbroken to sob aloud. King
+stared about him with an almost equal consternation.
+
+Leaving Gloria where she lay inert in the snow, King put down rifle and
+pack and hurried down into the hollow where he had tethered his horse.
+Five minutes of reading the signs in the snow told him the story. He had
+been right; his venture from the beginning had been loaded to the guards
+with bad luck. There was the end of the broken tie-rope; there the
+tracks showing the way Buck had gone, in full, headlong flight. The rope
+was stout and would have broken only were the animal terrified. If
+frightened, then there had been something to cause fright. Again, since
+the horse fled straight down the slope, that something startling it
+would have been at some point directly above. King turned and mounted to
+the ridge top again. Here were other tracks, all but obliterated by the
+snow which had fallen since they were made. A bear had come up over the
+ridge; had frightened the horse into breaking its tether and running.
+And the equally startled bear had turned tail and raced off the other
+way. Both animals were probably a dozen miles off by now; the bear,
+perhaps, twice that distance.
+
+King came back slowly and sat down on his pack. From Gloria's dejected
+figure he looked to his watch, from his watch again to the four points
+of the compass. His lips tightened. The afternoon was passing and the
+dark would come early.
+
+"Are you up to crowding ahead on foot?" he called to Gloria. "If you
+have the nerve we can really make better time that way, anyhow, from now
+on. Can you do it?"
+
+At first she did not try to answer. But when he shouted to her again,
+his voice hard with anger, she moaned miserably:
+
+"I am sick; I am dying, I think. I can't go on."
+
+King grunted disgustedly.
+
+He let Gloria lie where she was until she had rested. Then he went to
+her and put his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. She was
+limp and pale, her eyes shut, her lashes looking unusually black against
+the pallor of her pinched cheeks.
+
+"We'll go back to the cave for the night, after all," he told her
+quietly. "It's the inevitable, and that's one thing there's no sense
+bucking against. Stand up!"
+
+But the slight figure in its boyish garb drooped against him; Gloria's
+head moved the slightest bit in sidewise negation; her pale lips stirred
+soundlessly.
+
+"What?" asked King.
+
+"I can't," came her whisper.
+
+He judged that here was no time for foolishness, but rather the time for
+each one to do his part if the two of them lived to make all of this an
+unpleasant memory.
+
+"You've got to," he informed her crisply. "I can't carry you and the
+pack and rifle and everything, can I? I am going back; the rest is up to
+you. Do you want to lie here and die to-night?"
+
+"I don't care," said Gloria listlessly.
+
+He looked at her curiously. As he drew his hands away she slipped down
+and lay as she had lain before. He turned away, took up his pack and
+gun, set his back square upon her, and trudged off toward the only
+shelter that was theirs. Along the ridge, buffeted by the wind, half
+blind with the flurries of stinging hail with which that wind lashed him
+as with countless bits of broken glass, he did not turn to look behind
+him; not until he had gone fully half of the way to the cave. Then he
+did turn. He could not see her following as he had pictured her. He
+dropped his burden and went back to her. She lay as he had left her, her
+face whiter than he had ever seen it, her eyes shut, certain small blue
+veins making a delicate tracery across the lids.
+
+He had meant to storm at her, to stir her into activity by the lashings
+of his rage. But instead he stooped and gathered her up into his arms
+and carried her through the storm, shielding her body all that he could.
+And as he stooped and as he moved off he was growling deep down in his
+throat like a disgruntled old bear. When it came to clambering down and
+then up the cliffs Gloria obeyed his commands listlessly and as in a
+dream, lending the certain small aid that was necessary. Even so, the
+climb was hard and slow, and more than ever before filled with danger.
+But in the end it was done; again they were in Gus Ingle's cave. King
+built a fire, left Gloria lying by it, and went back for his pack. When
+he returned she had not moved. He made a bed for her, placed her on it
+so that her feet were toward the fire, and covered her with his own
+blanket. Then he boiled some coffee and made her drink it. She obeyed
+again, neither thanked him nor upbraided him, and drooped back upon her
+hard bed and shut her eyes. Here was a new Gloria, a Gloria who did not
+care whether she lived or died. With a quickening alarm in his eyes he
+stood by the smoky fire, staring at her. Uninured to hardship, her
+delicate body was already beaten; with still further hardship to come
+might she not--die? And what would Mark King say to Ben Gaynor, even if
+he brought back much raw red gold, if it had cost the life of Ben
+Gaynor's daughter?
+
+She did not stir when he came to her and knelt and put his hand against
+her cheek. He was shocked to learn how cold she was. Lightly he set his
+fingers against her softly pulsing throat; it was cold, like ice.
+Plainly she was chilled through. As he began unlacing her boots a
+curiously bitter thought came to him. She was his; the marriage service
+had given her to him with her own willingness; his wife. And now he was
+doing for her the first intimate little thing. He drew off her boots and
+stockings and found that her feet were terribly cold. He wrapped them in
+a hot blanket and hastened to set a pot of water on the coals. While the
+water warmed he knelt and chafed her feet between his palms, afraid for
+a moment that they were frozen. Finally, while he bathed them in
+steaming water, the dead white began to give place to a faint pinkness,
+like a blush, and again he put the blanket about them.
+
+She had not moved. When a second time he laid his hand against her
+throat the cold of it alarmed him. He hesitated a moment; then, the
+urgent need being more than evident, he began swiftly to undo her outer
+garments. The boyish shirt he unbuttoned and managed to remove; it was
+wet through, and stiff with frost. He noted her under-garments, silken
+and foolish little things, with amazement; she had known no better than
+to wear such nonsensical affairs on a trip like this! Good God, what
+_did_ she know? But he did not pause in his labours until he had slipped
+off the wet clothing. Then he wrapped her in another warm blanket and
+placed her on her bed, her feet still to the blaze. All of the time she
+had seemed, and probably was, hardly conscious. Now only she opened her
+eyes.
+
+"I can't have you playing the fool and getting pneumonia," he growled at
+her. "We've got our hands full as it is. Don't you know enough to ..."
+
+But she was not listening. She stirred slightly, eased herself into a
+new position, cuddled her face against a bare arm, sighed, and went to
+sleep.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIII_
+
+
+All night King kept his fire blazing. With several long sticks and a
+piece of the canvas, drawing deeply upon his ingenuity and almost to the
+dregs of his patience, he contrived a rude barrier to the cold across
+the mouth of the cave. Countless times he rolled out of his own bunk,
+heavy-eyed and stiff, to readjust the screen when it had blown down, to
+put more wood on his fire, to make sure that Gloria was covered and
+warm, sleeping heavily, and not dead. His nerves were frayed. In the
+long night his fears grew, misshapen and grotesque. Within his soul he
+prayed mutely that when morning came Gloria would be alive. When with
+the first sickly streaks of dawn he went to put fresh fuel upon the
+dying embers he found that there was but a handful of wood left. He came
+to stoop over the girl and listen to her breathing. Then he descended
+the cliffs for more wood.
+
+During the night winter had set the white seal of his sovereignty upon
+the world. The snarling wind had died in its own fierceness, giving over
+to a still, calm air, through which steadily the big flakes fell. Now
+they clung to bush and tree everywhere; the limbs had grown thick and
+heavy, drooping like countless plumes. Fat mats of snow lay on the level
+spaces, upon flat rocks, curling over and down at the edges. Where he
+stood King sank ankle-deep in the fluffy stuff. As he moved along the
+cliffs and down the slope toward a dead tree he stepped now and then
+into drifts where the snow was gathering swiftly. As he looked up,
+seeking to penetrate the skies above him and judge their import, he saw
+only myriads of grey particles high up, swirling but slightly in some
+softly stirring air-current, for the most part dropping, floating,
+falling almost vertically. Nowhere was there a hint or hope of
+cessation. The winter, a full four weeks early, had come.
+
+In the noose of his rope he dragged up the cliff much dead wood, riven
+from a fallen pine. Throughout the noise of his comings and goings the
+girl slept heavily. He got a big fire blazing without waking her and set
+about getting breakfast. While he waited for the coffee to boil he took
+careful stock of provisions. For two people there was enough for some
+twenty meals, food for about a week. Time to conserve the grease from
+the frying-pan; to hoard the smallest bit of bacon rind. He even counted
+his rounds of ammunition; here alone he was affluent. He had in the
+neighbourhood of a hundred cartridges for the rifle. While he was
+setting the gun aside he felt Gloria's eyes upon him.
+
+During the night and now, during this inventory, he had been granted
+both ample time and cause for his decision. He addressed her with prompt
+frankness.
+
+"Inside fifteen minutes we've got to be on our way out. As we go we'll
+look for the horse. But, find it or not, we're going."
+
+She lay looking up at him thoughtfully. She had rested; she resented his
+coolly assumed mastery; she had not forgotten that there were other men
+near by. But she merely said, by way of beginning:
+
+"The storm is over, then?"
+
+"No. But we are not going to wait. We have food for only six or seven
+days, at the most."
+
+She let her eyes droop to the fire so that the lids hid them from him.
+It was not yet full day; it was still snowing. Gratton and the men with
+him would, of course, have ample supplies. She yearned feverishly to be
+rid of King and his intolerable domineering. She estimated swiftly that,
+paradoxically, her only power over him was that of powerlessness; while
+she lay here hers was, in a way, the advantage. On her feet, following
+him, he would be again to her the brute he had been coming in.
+
+"I am tired out," she said faintly, still not looking up. "I am sick. I
+have a pain here." She moved her hand to her side where, in reality, she
+was conscious of a troublesome soreness. "I can't go on."
+
+He stared at her. She was pale. Now that she lifted her eyes for a brief
+reading of his look, he remarked that they appeared unusually large and
+luminous. There was a flush on her cheeks. His old fear surged back on
+him: Gloria was going to die! So he did what Gloria had counted on
+having him do: put milk and sugar in her coffee and brought the cup to
+her; he hastened to serve her a piping-hot breakfast of crisp bacon, hot
+cakes and jam. He urged her to eat, and made his own meal of unsweetened
+black coffee and cakes without jam. Triumphantly and covertly Gloria
+observed all of this. Hers was the victory. Mark King was again waiting
+on her, hand and foot, sacrificing for her.
+
+He allowed himself half a pipe of tobacco--tobacco, like food, was going
+to run out soon--and smoked sombrely. Here already was the thing to be
+dreaded more than aught else: Gloria threatened with illness. As Ben
+Gaynor's daughter, never as his own beloved wife, she had become his
+responsibility. She was a parcel marked "Fragile--Handle with Care,"
+which he had undertaken to deliver safely to a friend.
+
+"I am going to look for the horse," he told her. He got to his feet and
+took up his rifle. "But don't count too much on my success. All the
+chances are that Buck is a long way on the trail back to his stable.
+Blackie has probably limped back home by now. Another thing: if I don't
+get Buck to-day he'll be of no use to us; that is, if the snow keeps on.
+But I'll do what I can."
+
+But, before leaving, he did what he could to make for her comfort during
+his absence. He brought up fir-boughs, making them into a bed for her.
+He readjusted his canvas screen, securing it more carefully, thereby
+making the cave somewhat more snug. And at the last he dropped a little,
+much-worn book at her side; she did not know he had it with him. She did
+not appear to note it until he had gone. Then she took it up curiously.
+A volume of Kipling's poems, compact and companionable, on India paper
+between worn covers. With a little sniff she put the book down; just the
+sort of thing for Mark King to read, she thought with fine scorn, and
+utterly stupid to Gloria. What had she to do with _The Explorer_ and
+_Snarleyow_ and _Boots_ and _The Feet of the Young Men_? Less than
+nothing, in sheer, regrettable fact. She knew he had one other book with
+him, Gus Ingle's Bible! The profaned volume of a murderous, long-dead
+scoundrel. What a library for a dainty lady! Gloria suddenly found that
+she could have screamed.
+
+She scrambled up and went to peer out around the canvas screen. No sound
+out there, for the wind was dead and the snow dropped noiselessly; the
+creek in the gorge, because what little draught there was in the air
+bore down the canon, sent no sound to her ears. The wilderness of crag
+and peak and distant forest was hostile, pitiless. She sought eagerly
+for some sign of Gratton. There was none; no smoke this morning denoted
+his camp, no longed-for figure toiled upward toward her. But he would
+come soon; he must. King had found the gold here; Gratton would know and
+come. She would wait, hoping for Gratton's coming before King's return.
+
+Meanwhile King, making his way down the mountain slope, found that his
+estimate of the storm was cheerlessly correct; the fluffy stuff
+underfoot was in places already knee-deep and mounting steadily higher.
+He shook himself and growled in his throat and ploughed through it
+vigorously.
+
+"A pair of webs would look like wings before long," he muttered. "Well,
+we'll make 'em, since we can't buy 'em."
+
+Making his way back to the point where Buck had broken his tether, King
+overlooked no precaution; since he did not care to have his and Gloria's
+hiding-place known unnecessarily to Gratton and his following, he
+forsook the natural pathway and made slower, hard progress along the
+gorge where others would be less likely to chance upon his tracks and
+where the tracks themselves would soonest fill with drifting snow.
+Passing about many a stunted grove he came at last to the place whence
+Buck had fled. He knew that in the general direction indicated by the
+line of flight, beyond two ridges, was the valley of the giant sequoias.
+There a horse would find water, shelter, and grass. If he failed to find
+the animal there--well, then, Buck was well on the trail or lost to King
+in any one of a hundred places.
+
+And always as he went, panting up and ploughing down, the steep slopes,
+his eyes were keen for meat, be it Douglas squirrel or bear. But the
+woods seemed deserted and empty; only those cheerful, impudent little
+bundles of feathers, the snowbirds, and an occasional, darting
+water-ouzel along the creeks. These he let alone, but with the mental
+reservation that the time might well be at hand when even such as they
+must be called on to keep life in him and Gloria.
+
+He had taken on a man's-sized contract for his morning's work and drove
+his big body at it relentlessly. And he took his own sort of joy from
+it, the joy of a fight against odds, the joy of action in the open. His
+body was wet with sweat, but neither his ardour nor optimism were
+dampened; his foot came perilously near frost-bite after he slipped into
+the hidden water of a small stream, but he considered the accident but a
+part of the day's work. So, prepared by common sense for
+disappointment, he looked hopefully to finding the horse. And as he
+pushed on he pondered other likely spots to seek this afternoon or
+to-morrow if he did not find the animal in the sequoias.
+
+When at last he came to the grove of big trees he was among old friends.
+But he knew almost as soon as he reached them that they had no word for
+him to-day. On his wedding morning he had planned how he would bring
+Gloria here, taking it for granted, in his blind infatuation, that they
+would mean to her what they had meant to him. Now he passed swiftly like
+a noiseless shadow between the gigantic boles; he did not lift his head
+to look at old Vulcan's lightning-blasted crest, two hundred feet in
+air, all but lost up there in the falling snow; he gave no thought to
+the thousands of years which were Majesty's and Thor's. He went with his
+eyes on the ground, seeking tracks of a horse. And as he had more than
+half expected, he found nothing. The magnificent vistas, carpeted in
+snow, gave him no view of anything but snow.
+
+Later he must cudgel his brains and seek elsewhere. Now, with other work
+to be done, he should go back the shortest, quickest way. So he set his
+feet into the trail which they had made, and turned his back upon the
+grove. Where he crossed streams he took stock of pools; there were trout
+there if a man could take them. This was another matter to see about.
+Oh, he would be busy enough. And yet he did not loiter, and stopped only
+briefly and infrequently to rest.
+
+Before returning to Gloria, King meant to look in on Brodie's camp, if
+only from a distance. As matters stood now there was no telling what
+bearing Gratton's and Brodie's actions might have later upon his own
+affairs. It would be well to note if the men were preparing to fight the
+storm out or to pack up and leave rather than take prolonged chances
+with the season. So, a mile below his own camp, he slipped into a grove
+of firs and made his unseen way toward the fringe whence he counted upon
+seeing what they were about. He was still moving on slowly and had had
+no glimpse of the men when he heard them. He stopped abruptly and
+listened.
+
+They were down there, against the cañon wall. Words came to him
+indistinctly, muffled by the thick air. The tones of the voices were
+unmistakable. Three voices there were, each with its own peculiarity,
+none of them Gratton's. First a big, booming voice; then a sharp,
+staccato-quick voice; thereafter a high-pitched, querulous utterance,
+nervous and irritable. Disagreement, if not out-and-out quarrel, had
+already come to camp. King moved a few paces nearer, pushed aside a low
+branch from which the snow dropped with little thuds, and saw the men.
+
+There were four of them in an excited group, and slightly drawn apart,
+one hand at his mouth, was Gratton. The four paid no attention to him,
+but formed a group exclusively self-centred. Of these four one now held
+his own counsel, his attitude alert, his hands in his pockets, his head
+turning swiftly, so that his eyes were now on one speaker, now on
+another. Across the brief distance King could see the puffs of smoke
+from the pipe in his teeth. The man wore a red handkerchief knotted
+about his throat; its colour was as bright as fresh-spilled blood. Swen
+Brodie.
+
+Now and then as a voice was lifted King caught a word; repeated several
+times he heard the word "bacon." Here, doubtless, was the matter under
+discussion. One man, he of the thin, querulous voice swung his nervous
+arm widely and fairly shrieked his message; it came in little puffs and
+was lost between. King heard him shout "bacon" and "snow" and "hell."
+The three expressions, so oddly connected and yet disjointed, were
+significant.
+
+Gratton stood apart and gnawed at his hand; though he could not see the
+prominent eyes, King could imagine the look in them. Swen Brodie puffed
+regularly at his pipe and watched and listened intently.
+
+Abruptly the wrangling knot of men resolved itself into two definite
+factions. His fellows had turned upon the shrill-voiced man, plainly in
+some sort of denunciation or accusation. He was the smallest of the
+lot, and drew back hastily, step after step, offering the knife-edge of
+his curses as the others clubbed their fists.
+
+"... a lie!" he shrieked. "Fools...."
+
+Gratton gnawed at his knuckles, Brodie puffed steadily, and the two
+aggressors accepted windy denial as sign of guilt. One of them sprang
+forward and struck; the little man whipped out a revolver and fired. The
+shot sounded dull and muffled; a puff of smoke hung for a moment like
+the smoke from the pipe, appearing methodically between the passive
+onlooker's teeth; the man who had struck stopped dead in his tracks.
+There came a second shot; then in sharp staccato succession four others,
+followed by the ugly little metallic click announcing that the gun had
+emptied itself. Before the last explosion the balancing body sagged
+limply and sprawled in the snow.
+
+King's first natural impulse was to break through the brush and run
+forward. But his caution of the day commanded by circumstance, though
+never a part of the man's headlong nature, remained with him,
+counselling cool thought instead of hot haste. The man down was dead or
+as good as dead; him King could not help. So he held back and watched.
+
+There fell a brief silence while the man who had done the shooting and
+the men about him, no less than the figure lying in the snow, were as
+motionless as so many carven statues. At last Brodie spoke heavily.
+
+"Benny's right. Bates had it coming to him. Times like this stealing a
+side of bacon is worse'n murder. Bates stole it; he was going to try to
+double-cross us and beat it out of here. Now he's dead, and good
+riddance." He spat into the snow when he had done.
+
+Benny, chattering wildly to himself now, began a hasty reloading of his
+revolver. The man whom he had shot, whom Brodie named Bates, lay not
+five steps from Benny's feet, his blood already congealing where it
+flushed the snow. Oddly enough, King knew personally or by repute each
+of the men before him with the single exception of the man who had paid
+in full for his own--or some one else's--crime of stealing food at a
+time when food meant a chance for life. To begin with, there was Swen
+Brodie and there was Gratton. There was Benny, who had done the killing,
+a degenerate, a morphine addict, and a thorough-going scoundrel. Beyond
+him stood the burly ruffian of the big, awkward, bony frame, who had
+brought the "judge" to the log house the other night at Gratton's
+bidding, Steve Jarrold. Through the trees, coming up now, were two more
+of the ill-featured party, a swart, squat Italian, and just at his heels
+a ragged scarecrow of a man named Brail. It was Brail who came close
+enough to stoop over the fallen man.
+
+"Dead, ain't he?" queried Benny, half-coughing over his words.
+
+His fellows had drawn closer so that they stood in a ring about the
+body. One man alone held apart. Gratton's eyes were wild, void of
+purpose; the dead, chalky-white of his face turned a sickly greenish
+tinge. After a little, while no one paid any attention to him, he began
+a slow withdrawal, moving jerkily step by step, his dragging heels
+making long furrows in the snow. Then King, too, began to draw back,
+slipping quietly and swiftly through the screen of tree and bush,
+stepping in the tracks he had made coming hither, praying suddenly for
+further fast-falling snow to hide or obliterate the trail he had made.
+And for the moment he was not thinking of the gold which they, too,
+sought, and which he had meant to snatch away from under their noses. He
+thought only of Gloria. If that crowd, in its present temper, found the
+way to his camp--if, in one way or another, Gloria fell into their
+hands--then could she thank God for a clean bullet and a swift end of
+things.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIV_
+
+
+The mere fact of being absolutely alone from midday to dark would have
+been for Gloria an experience at any time and in any environment. Of
+her friends in the city there were many who had never in a lifetime
+known what it was to spend half a dozen consecutive daytime, waking
+hours in perfect solitude, catching not so much as a fleeting glimpse of
+a servant, a policeman, a nurse, or a street-car conductor in the
+echoing street. Solitude rendered rippleless by an absence of any
+familiar sound; neither the whisk of a maid's broom, the clang of a
+telephone bell, the buzz of motors, or the slamming of doors. At those
+intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might
+quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied
+coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that
+the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness.
+
+She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone. Five
+minutes later she began to stir restlessly; another five minutes and
+already she was listening for his return. Never once during the day was
+there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning
+faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the
+flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude
+door through which she thought to see him returning.
+
+Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet. She
+drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances
+toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire
+between it and herself. When she peered out across the desolate world
+she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch
+miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black
+unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal,
+insensate wilderness. And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she
+saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the
+expressions of his own brutality.
+
+After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something
+to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped
+so readily. She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and
+forced herself to read. Pages eluded her, but here and there single
+lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks
+the garments of one going blindly through it. So she was arrested by the
+line: "_In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth_." And
+this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and
+walked back and forth impatiently. It was almost as though King had left
+the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told
+herself angrily that he was _not_ like that, had never been like that.
+He was a mere brute of a man, not "_such as fought and sailed and ruled
+and loved and made our world_." He was, rather, unthinkably crude and
+boorish and detestable.
+
+But, rebelling at utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to
+the only companion at hand. She read _The Explorer_, fascinated in a
+shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were
+whispering to her from the black corners of the cave: "_There's no sense
+in going further--it's the edge of cultivation._" And later: "_I faced
+the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down._" Others than she
+had gone into the last solitudes. Others who had joyed in it and sung of
+it! It was as though the dead shades of those others squatted at the
+edges of her fire and mocked at her. Then she could fancy that it was
+King himself jeering, and that he cried: "_Then He chose me for His
+Whisper, and I've found it, and it's yours!_"
+
+She snapped the book shut. Later she opened it to the tale of Tomlinson.
+She did not entirely grasp it, but she could not entirely miss what it
+said. She hurried on; she wondered vaguely at the call of the Red Gods;
+here again, seeking distraction, she was whipped back to reality. There
+were the lines, staring at her, as though King had rewritten Kipling:
+
+  "_Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight?
+    Who hath heard the birch log burning?
+    Who is quick to read the noises of the night?_"
+
+And the answer was: "Mark King." Even now it was a torturous twilight
+in the cave, even now she smelled wood-smoke; even now she was like one
+starting at the noises of the night....
+
+"Man-stuff," she thought contemptuously. She had heard such an
+expression used in connection with the verses of this uncouth scribe. It
+did not strike her that man-stuff might well enough be woman-stuff also,
+being one or the other, or both, for the sheer reason that it was human.
+She chose to consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental
+digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his
+emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers,
+unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and
+spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like
+Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like
+the explorer; the impact of a storm's buffeting and the low appreciation
+of a full stomach drew limits marking his possibilities of expansion. He
+was a beast, and she hated the whole sex sweepingly and superbly. In
+great surges of genuine sympathy her heart went out to herself.
+
+But, after all, the moments in which her thoughts were snared away from
+her fears and the oppression of loneliness were few and short. From
+wondering what kept King she passed to bitter anger that he should
+desert her so; she concluded that he was doing it with malicious intent.
+
+Repeatedly she was tempted to go forth and seek Gratton: to hunt up and
+down until at last she came to him. Again and again she went to the
+mouth of the cave and looked forth. But each time she drew back,
+terrified at the thought of making her way unaided down the sheer cliff
+wall. She sought to tell herself that she was not afraid of the snow, of
+being lost, of being unable to find Gratton. But she could not climb
+down the cliff; she knew that she would fall. Dizzy and sick, shivering
+with dread and cold, she turned back always.
+
+She let her fire die down, not noticing it. Then the cold reminded her,
+and she worked long building another. She knew where a block of matches
+was; she had seen King set it carefully away. In her excitement she
+struck dozens of matches, dropping the burnt ends about her.
+
+At last her fire blazed up and she warmed herself. Then she was
+conscious of a strange faintness and realized that she was hungry. She
+went to their food cache and ransacked it hastily. She opened a tin of
+sardines and came back to the fire with it in her hands. She had no
+clear conception of the deed when, half of the fish consumed, the smelly
+stuff revolted her and she hurled the remaining part into the bed of
+coals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King stamped the loose snow from his boots and came in. Gloria stood
+confronting him, tense, rigid, white-faced, her hands stiff at her
+sides. She wanted to cry out, to upbraid him, all of her fear of the day
+turned into molten anger, but at the moment her strength failed
+strangely, her heart seemed to be stopping, she choked up. The surge of
+her relief, like a suddenly released current, impacting with that other
+current of her unleashed anger, made of her consciousness a sort of
+wild, fuming whirlpool. Nothing was clear to her just then save that
+Mark King had come back and that, no doubt, his heart was filled with
+jeers; she could not read the expression of his shadowed face, but
+fancied it one of mockery.
+
+King was tired throughout every muscle of his body. He set down his
+rifle, tossed his hat aside, and slumped down by the fire. Coming in
+from the storm-cleansed open he sniffed at the closeness of the cave. It
+was not alone the smell of smoke; his first thought was that Gloria had
+been cooking something. Then he noted the sardine-can. With a stick he
+raked it out of the coals. And now Gloria could read his expression well
+enough as he jerked his head up.
+
+"In God's name," he demanded, "what do you mean by a thing like that?
+Are you stark, raving mad?"
+
+For a moment she was at a loss to understand what had enraged him. The
+act of tossing the distasteful food into the fire had been purely
+involuntary; her conscious mind had hardly taken cognizance of the fact.
+When it dawned upon her what he meant, her own anger was still greater
+than her sense of her act's folly. But she found no ready answer to his
+accusation. She was not without reason; in their present predicament she
+was a fool to have done a thing like that; she could hardly believe that
+she had done it. And so she stared impudently at him and held her
+silence, and finally, with an elaborate shrug of disdainful shoulders,
+she turned her back on him.
+
+But King flung to his feet and set his hands on her two shoulders and
+swung her about. Her eyes opened widely.
+
+"Listen to me," he said angrily. "I am going to talk plain to you. You
+are a fool, a downright, empty-headed silly fool. What you have
+destroyed in wanton carelessness would have kept the life in a man a
+whole day. Haven't you sense enough to see it's going to be nip and tuck
+if we ever get out of this? You've shown yourself, from start to finish,
+a miserable cheat; there's no trust to be put in either your judgment or
+your intentions. Be still," he commanded, as she sought to wriggle out
+of his grasp, to avoid the direct blaze of his eyes. "I am going to do
+what I can for you; to see you safe through this, if I can. Not because
+you are anything to me, but just because you are Ben Gaynor's, and he is
+my friend. Understand?"
+
+"You are hurting me," she said in defiance. "Take your dirty hands off."
+
+"When I am done," he returned curtly. "I am going to stick to you and
+see you through, I tell you. But I am not going to have you throw all of
+our chances away by dumping grub into the fire. If you do one other
+brainless thing like that, and I catch you at it, I am going to tie you
+up, hand and foot, and keep you out of mischief."
+
+"You wouldn't dare----"
+
+But she knew better; he would dare anything. He _was_ of the type that
+fought and sailed and ruled. Now, when having spoken his mind he turned
+away from her, she stared after him and watched him as he dropped back
+by the fire. Then she went slowly to her bed to hide her trembling, and
+lay down.
+
+Presently she heard him stirring. She did not turn her head to look at
+him. But she knew that he was busied with supper. She smelt coffee,
+heard the clash of tin cup and plate, and realized that he was eating.
+She wondered if he had forgotten her. After a while she moved just a
+trifle and furtively; he had put away his dishes and was filling his
+pipe. And he knew that she was watching him.
+
+"No," he said to her unspoken question. "I am not going to cook for you
+any more. I have had a hard day of it, doing the man's work. Had you
+done the woman's you would have had supper ready for me."
+
+He lighted his pipe with a splinter of burning pine. Then for the first
+time he saw the waste of scattered matches on the floor. From them he
+looked to her in an amazement so sheer that it left him no word of
+expostulation. The suspicion actually came to him that the girl was mad.
+It was scarcely conceivable that a perfectly sane individual could do
+the things which she had done.
+
+She saw him get up and begin gathering up all of the foodstuff. He
+carried it to the back of the cave, where he passed out of her sight in
+the dark. He was gone ten minutes and came back empty-handed. He made
+the second trip, after which there was left on a shelf of rock only half
+a dozen matches and enough food for one scanty meal. This Gloria
+ignored.
+
+"Do you think," she said contemptuously, "that what you have hidden back
+there I couldn't find?"
+
+"You could find it but you won't," he returned with quiet assurance that
+jerked the question from her:
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because," he grunted contemptuously, "you are too much of a coward to
+go back there to look for it."
+
+And in her heart she knew that here was but the mere truth. For, why
+was she not already in Gratton's camp? Her opportunity had come and
+gone--because she had been afraid.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXV_
+
+
+King awoke filled with resolve and definite purpose. It was pitch dark,
+but he sensed the coming of wintry dawn. He drew on his boots and went
+to look out. It was still snowing, heavily, steadily, implacably. He
+kicked the loose fluffy stuff underfoot.
+
+"The biggest storm in twenty years," he told himself. "And if any one of
+us in these mountains come out of them alive he'll have something to
+talk about. It's the real thing."
+
+He went grimly about his fire-making, fixed purpose crystallizing to the
+smallest detail. Again he must seek immediately to locate his horse; one
+could eat horseflesh if driven to it. He must try to get game of some
+sort. And every lost hour meant lessened chances of his killing forest
+meat; deer and bear and the smaller folk, if they had been caught
+napping, would be scurrying out of the mountains long before now; soon
+the solitudes would be utterly barren and empty. He went to Gloria's
+bed.
+
+"You'd better get up," he said briefly. "Time to start the day. While we
+eat I want to talk with you."
+
+She awoke slowly, blinked at him, and only drew her blanket higher about
+her chin.
+
+"I am tired," she answered petulantly. "Don't you realize that a
+girl..."
+
+"I realize," he cut into her sleepy expostulation, "that you are weak
+and frightened and useless. And that those are three of the many things
+you've got to get over the shortest way if you don't want to die here."
+
+"I don't know that I care to live," she began, turning with her old
+instinct toward an attitude which before now had robbed him of his
+harshness. But his plan was set in cold determination, and he cut her
+short again.
+
+"If you don't care, I do. And I am going to pull you through with me, if
+for no other reason simply because I have set out to do it, and am not
+going to lie down on the job. What's more, you've got to do your share.
+I have built the fire; will you get up?"
+
+"No," she flashed out at him, thoroughly awake now. "I won't!"
+
+He stooped, caught the corner of her blankets, and whipped them off.
+Instinctively, she sought to draw the under-bedding over her, forgetting
+that she had not undressed.
+
+"You brute!" she screamed at him.
+
+"Get up," he told her sternly, "or, by heaven, I'll make you!"
+
+She saw his face plainly now as his crackling fire burned higher. It was
+hard, his eyes were ominous. She hesitated and saw in his eyes and in a
+stir of his body that he was going to jerk her to her feet. She flung
+out of bed at that and upon the far side from him.
+
+"Get your boots on," he ordered. "I don't want you catching cold from
+idiotic carelessness, and I won't have you going sick on my hands. For
+the first and last time I'll admit that I don't enjoy driving you like a
+cursed galley-slave. But I'll do it, and do a thorough job of it, if you
+force me to it."
+
+She drew on her boots hastily and came to the fire and laced them. He
+was a new man this morning and relentless. She was afraid of him after a
+new, bewildered fashion.
+
+"I never saw a storm worse than this," he told her. He had cooked the
+breakfast because he was in a hurry, and did not care to trust her
+wasteful fingers with their already precious food. "There must be two or
+three feet on the level places by now; ploughing through snow like that
+is killing work for a man, and you wouldn't last at it ten minutes." He
+had no intention of speaking contemptuously; she knew that his thought
+was not trifling with such matters as her feelings. He was merely
+indulging in plain talk. "We have enough food for a few days. After
+that, if we stuck on here and did not find more somehow, we'd die like
+dogs. Therefore we are going to get ready to beat it out the first
+chance we get."
+
+"But if I wouldn't last ten minutes, as you so elegantly put it?"
+
+"Not as you are; not as the snow is. But I'm hoping that before it's too
+late we'll get clear weather, a sun, a thaw, and freezing nights. Then
+we could tackle it on the crust. And your job now is to get yourself
+ready for that one chance."
+
+Her anger at the indignity already done her whipped out the sarcasm:
+
+"By getting ready, I suppose you mean for me to pack my trunk and order
+the expressman at the door?"
+
+He looked at her with a long, impersonal stare which bewildered her; she
+was at utter loss to read its meaning until he spoke:
+
+"You are to pack what endurance you've got into your muscles. You are to
+make up your mind to call up all of the grit that's in you. You'll need
+both. And you are to quit lying around and getting weaker every day;
+you've got little enough time to harden yourself, so you are going to
+take on the job right now."
+
+She gasped, incredulous. He nodded sternly.
+
+"Gloria," he said tersely, "I am going to do all that I can for both of
+us. You are going to do all that you can. That is final."
+
+She bit her lips and gave him her scornful silence. The blood was red
+and hot in her cheeks.
+
+She ignored him when he called crisply that breakfast was ready. There
+were limits to her obedience, she thought rebelliously. To be told do
+this, do that, to arise when this man's body was rested, to eat when his
+stomach was empty, was intolerable. King looked at her and had the
+understanding to grasp something of her thought. So he explained:
+
+"I want you to come outside with me. You'll find it hard work. It would
+be a first-rate idea if you'd fortify your strength by the little bit
+of nourishment which we can afford to take. No? Well, I'm sorry.--Here."
+He offered her the pieces of a sack he had cut in two for her. "Tie
+those about your feet to keep them from freezing."
+
+"When I want your advice, I'll ask for it," she retorted icily.
+
+"Very well," he answered. "And I can't make you eat if you don't want
+to. After all, perhaps you are not hungry." He set aside her portion.
+"You'll have the appetite for that when we get back."
+
+She had the appetite now. But she would prefer to starve, she honestly
+thought at the moment, than eat when he told her to eat. Now he finished
+in silence. She saw him glance at his watch. Her heart seemed scarcely
+to stir in her breast; then slowly it began to beat, swifter and
+swifter, hammering wildly. He had said that she was going out with him;
+what he promised to do, she realized again, he would do, if it were
+humanly possible. She wanted to run, run anywhere, just to be lost to
+him. And yet she stood stock-still and rigid, while her heart hastened
+and leaped and her mind sought to grasp the thing to do. She must go
+with him, do what he told her like a slave, as he had said, or he would
+make her. Her reason said directly: "You will go without a word." And
+yet, when he arose to his feet and knocked his pipe out and looked at
+her, her reason fled before the flood of the passionate wilfulness of
+the old Gloria, and she cried shrilly:
+
+"I won't! I won't! I am not your slave and I am not going to jump at
+your bidding! You can't make me; you shan't make me. _I won't!_"
+
+He had hoped for better than this. He came closer and looked intently
+into her eyes, seeking to measure what endurance and steadfastness and
+stubbornness were hers. But her eyes showed him only glimpses of a
+storm-tossed soul.
+
+"I will make you," he said harshly. "So help me God, Gloria, I will make
+you. And I am through talking; I am sick of talk. Come with me."
+
+She drew back and back in white-lipped fury.
+
+"You don't _dare_...."
+
+"Listen to me! We are down to bare elementals now; can't you see it? It
+is no question of what we'd like to do or dislike. It is a question of
+life and death. If to let you have your way were anything other than
+suicide, I'd let you have it. If I thought that you would listen to
+reason, I'd stop to reason with you. But as things are, I've got nothing
+left me but tell you what to do; and you've got to do as I say."
+
+"My life is my own, to do with it as I please. I do not please to obey
+your commands."
+
+Her tortured heart surged up in wild triumph as he turned; it sank
+sickly as he came back. He had a piece of rope in his hand, the heavy
+half-inch rope which had served to tie a horse.
+
+"You would tie me!" she gasped. "Me!"
+
+"No," he said tersely. "As though you were any other fractious animal
+refusing discipline when refusal means death, I am going to whip you!"
+
+"God!" screamed Gloria. "Oh, my God!"
+
+For again he but said simply the thing which he meant to do. And she
+knew. Yet the consummation was monstrous, unthinkable. She would not
+believe it; at the last minute his lifted arm would fail him; God
+Himself would wither it; undreamed rescuers would come; the earth would
+open ... _something_ would save her from this humiliation which would
+kill her.
+
+"While I count three," said King. And steadily, though there was a
+pallor on his own face, which should have told her the terrible
+relentlessness of his intention, he counted: "One, two, three."
+
+She put her face into her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one
+under the flashing guillotine. She willed to move, to obey, at this
+tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her
+back. "_I won't!_" she screamed. The blow fell swiftly. The rope cut
+through the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped
+shoulders. The pain was immediate, hot and searing, and Gloria
+shrieked--once only--and grew still. She dropped her hands and looked at
+him, her face as white as a dead girl's, her eyes as unfathomable as a
+maniac's. She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose
+soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who
+had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess--to
+be beaten by a man! To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse's
+tie-rope. She, Gloria Gaynor, to have her bedding ripped off her, to be
+commanded to do a man's bidding--and to be whipped!
+
+She had known fear, blind, paralysing terror. She had suffered indignity
+and experienced an insulted resentment that seared through her like a
+hot iron. She had known pain, merciless bodily pain. Now she was plunged
+into stupor. But that stupor was of only the fraction of a second in
+duration. A flash as of white fire flared through her brain. In a soul
+in torment something had happened. Something had been killed within
+her--or something had been born. A blow at a man's hand had seemed to
+cut through her being; it had separated body and spirit. She was
+conscious of the body as though she stood apart and looked down at it.
+He could beat that; he was stronger. The spirit rose above it--a spirit
+bathed in floods of fire. She was in the sudden fierce grip of such
+anger as kills, of such defiance as suffers death and does not yield.
+
+"I won't go with you," she cried. "You may beat me; you may kill me if
+you like, unthinkable brute that you are. I will not follow you now; I
+will never follow one step ever. I have listened to you; now listen to
+me! I would rather die than be brought to safety by you. If I cannot
+find the way home without your help, I do not want ever to get home. I
+am not afraid of you or your rope. I had rather feel a clean rope across
+my shoulders until they were bloody than your vile hand on mine."
+
+"You will do what I tell you to do," he said thickly. "It is the only
+way. I will make you."
+
+Blazing eyes burning in a death-white face gave him his only answer.
+His own face now was no less white; iron-bodied as he was, he was
+trembling. Yet he lifted the rope. To strike the second blow. Not just
+to frighten her, but to strike. She read his purpose clearly, and she
+could not restrain a shudder of her flesh. But she did not draw back
+from him, and she did not cry out. She meant what she had said, or what
+some re-born Gloria had said for her; he might kill her, but she would
+not follow him.
+
+And then Mark King, as he was about to strike, stayed his hand at the
+last moment and hurled the rope far from him, and whirled about and left
+her.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVI_
+
+
+Someway he came to the base of the cliffs. He was outside; he was in the
+open. And yet he struggled blindly through a pit of gloom. He was
+conscious of but one fact in all the world; about it everything else
+turned and spun as sweep the bodies of the sky about the sun. He had
+lifted his hand against a woman. He, Mark King, had struck a woman. He
+had struck Gloria. His friend's daughter--Ben's daughter. He had struck
+her.... What had come over him? Had he gone mad? Stark, staring, raving
+mad? He knew all along that his nerves were on edge, raw and quivering.
+But no jangling nerves explained a thing like that. He, who had held
+himself a man, had struck a woman--a girl! A little, defenceless girl.
+
+"My God!" he groaned.
+
+He stumbled on. He did not know where he was going or why. He ran his
+hand across his eyes again and again. He didn't know why he did that;
+one couldn't thus wipe out a vision which persisted in his brain. He'd
+see her as she stood there every day and night until he died. In a
+sweeping revulsion of feeling he saw himself all that she had named him,
+a great, hulking brute. All along he had been brutal with her; he
+should have made due allowances; he should have been patient. He had
+plunged her into an existence of which she had no foreknowledge. He had
+looked to her for the sober sanity of maturity when he should have
+remembered how young she was, how little of real life she knew, how she
+had been driven to desperation by circumstances which crushed her; how
+she had gone sleepless, living on her nerves. He had held her weak and
+worthless and without spirit or character. And now he could only see her
+standing up before him, white but valiant, defying him, unafraid,
+welcoming death rather than yield to him. He would have given ten years
+off the span of his life to have the deed of one mad moment wiped clean.
+
+It was a long time before consecutive thought returned to him. And it
+brought him only increased bitterness. Gloria had said that she would
+die here rather than have him lead her to safety. Well, he did not blame
+her for that. Rather, he told himself grimly, he honoured her for it.
+And yet, now more than ever, his and his alone was the responsibility of
+seeing that she went clear of this wretched existence into which he had
+stubbornly led her. He could not take her away against her will; he
+could not pick her up in his arms and carry her over a two or three
+days' journey! Nor could he entrust her to the only other human beings
+who were near enough for her to go to. What could he do? She would
+perish without help; hence he must help her. But how?
+
+There was but one possible answer, and in due course of time he came to
+see it clearly. He must leave her, get back the shortest, quickest way
+to civilization, and send other men, trustworthy men, in for her. It
+could be done even though the storm continued. He could get a dog-team,
+Alaskan huskies, to be had in Truckee; he could load sledges with
+provisions; he could put the right man in charge and then lead the way.
+That would mean several days alone for Gloria; but what else was there?
+
+And even that solution depended upon the consideration which by now was
+the elemental, all-essential thing; first he must find some sort of
+provisions with which to eke out their small supply. There was not
+enough in camp to sustain him while he battled with the storm for a way
+out and to sustain strength in her while she waited. He must first
+replenish the larder; otherwise they died. He must get fish in plenty or
+a bear or a deer. He looked at the grey, ominous sky, at the piling
+snow, and the chill of the wilderness struck to his heart. But at last
+his eyes grew hard again with determination.
+
+In a distressed mental condition in which the only solid ground beneath
+him was his determination to do to the uttermost that lay within him for
+Gloria, he broke into mutterings, voicing aloud fragments of speech,
+forcing himself toward steadiness of forward-driving purpose.
+
+"I've got to leave her.... She won't go with me. That means I've got to
+leave with her every scrap of food we have between us. I can go two days
+without eating.... I can! A man, if he's half a man, can finish his work
+before he buckles under.... Her one danger is Brodie. Otherwise she
+would be safe enough for four or five days. She's got to stick close to
+the cave; she must not dare to set foot outside....
+
+"But that's not enough; they might come to the cave.... The way in is
+not overwide; would they see it from below? They don't know where it is
+or they would have done as I did; they would have come to it for
+shelter.... No, they don't know of it. Can I close up the entrance,
+somehow, so that they won't find it? There are loose rocks in there....
+If they _do_ come this way, up the gorge, it will be hard for them to
+see it from below.... Even if they should find it, I can show her where
+to hide. Way in the back. There's a place there.... I can get out in two
+days; back in two days. Somehow. Allow five days to cover accidents.
+Five days; she can stick it out five days. If I don't take a scrap of
+her food away from her.... Oh, I can make it; it is up to me to make
+it. I'll get a fish sooner or later--or a rabbit.... A man can eat his
+boots."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a long time he went back to the cave. He knew now just what he
+would do, since it had become clear to him that there was but one thing
+to be done. Gloria faced him as he came in; she marked how he walked,
+like a very tired man. Her head was up, there were spots of colour in
+her cheeks; in her eyes was a new look. She had found herself. Or she
+was finding herself? Her spirit had risen undaunted in a crisis; in a
+clash of wills hers had not gone down before his. Rather it had been
+hers that had triumphed. She might know fear again, but the time was
+past and dead when she would bow meekly before a man's bidding. So she
+told herself, while with head erect she awaited his speech.
+
+He began, saying very simply what he had decided must be said. He did
+not swerve for the useless words "I am sorry." He knew that she did not
+expect them, would not answer them. What he had done was monstrous and
+unpardonable; hence a man would not ask pardon. By his own act they were
+set as far apart as two beings inhabiting two widely separate worlds. It
+remained for him merely to instruct her concerning what she must do;
+then to find the way to bring her back safely to her father. Thereafter?
+There the haze crept in again; he would go away, far from the Sierra,
+far from California, to some corner of the world where no man who had
+ever known Mark King would see him again. At that moment he could have
+died very gladly, just to know that she was once more among her own
+people, and that so far as he was concerned life was a game played out
+and ended.
+
+Now that he spoke again, his voice was no longer harsh and stern, but
+gentle rather. Gentle after a steady and matter-of-fact fashion that was
+infinitely aloof. He could not know how impersonal his utterance sounded
+in her ears, since he did not fully realize how at the moment he held
+himself less an individual addressing another than as the mouthpiece of
+fate.
+
+"The first thing in the morning," he told her, "I am going over the
+ridge and to the headwaters of the other fork. I have been thinking of
+that country a good deal; it's a little far and hard going and I'll burn
+up a lot of fuel making the trip, but I've got a hunch a bear's in
+there. The one that stampeded Buck may have circled around that way. And
+I'm going to play every hunch I get, good and strong. It will probably
+be dark before I get back."
+
+She thought that he had finished. But presently, in the same strangely
+quiet voice, he continued: "I may even be gone all night. If I am it
+will be because I am playing the last card.... You have said that you
+would rather be dead than go with me. I believe you meant that." Again
+he paused. Gloria did not again lift her eyes from the fire; did not
+speak. King sighed and did not know that he had done so. "If I don't get
+back to-morrow night it will be because I am trying to break through to
+civilization. I'll outfit a party and send them in for you. I'll get
+through some way in two days; I'll get help back to you in another two
+or three at latest. You have food here to keep you alive a week, if you
+spin it out."
+
+Long before he had gotten to the end of his slow speech her heart was
+beating wildly. The old fears surged back on her, crushing her. To be
+left here alone four or five days--and nights! It was unendurable! She
+would be dead.
+
+"You have your choice," he went on, his voice grown still more gentle.
+"If you will let me help you--"
+
+But, even while in the silence that followed she heard the rapid beating
+of her own heart, something stronger, more stubborn, than the Gloria of
+another day kept her silent.
+
+And still he had not finished.
+
+"Before I go I am going to do all that I can to wall up the mouth of the
+cave. It will make it warmer in here and--and there will be less danger
+of any one finding the place. You threatened once to go to those other
+men; _no matter what happens, you must not do that_. You don't quite
+understand what some men are. These happen to be the worst of a bad
+crowd that ever got into these mountains. They respect neither God nor
+man--nor woman. They are in an ugly mood; they probably have more
+bootleg whiskey with them than food; I did not tell you, but I looked in
+on their camp and saw one of them, a dope fiend named Benny Rudge, shoot
+one of his own friends dead, suspecting him of having stolen a side of
+bacon. You would be better dead, too, than in their hands. Never forget
+that. They don't know if they'll ever get out of this alive; they are
+desperate devils.
+
+"But with the cave walled up, they won't find you. If the worst should
+happen and they came here, still you could hide. I'll show you the
+place, far back in the cave. You could run there with your blankets and
+food; you could stay there, never moving. No man could find you there.
+They would see where we had been here, but they would have to decide in
+the end that we had gone, both of us.
+
+"I'll bring you plenty of wood; I am going to make a pair of snow-shoes
+of a sort for me; I'll make a pair for you. I hope you won't need them."
+He ran his hand across his brow but continued in a moment, his voice
+unchanged: "I'll go out before daylight in the morning; it will take me
+all that is left of to-day to do what must be done first."
+
+He turned then and went about his work. She went back to the place by
+the fire, terribly moved, agitated to the depths of her soul, torn this
+way and that. But one steady fire burned in her bosom--the newly kindled
+white flame of her resentment. Just yonder, where he had hurled it, a
+grim reminder, lay the rope.
+
+He brought fragments of rock to the cave's mouth, the biggest he could
+find, boulders which he rolled from the further dark, and with which he
+struggled mightily as he piled them one on the other. Higher and higher
+he built his rude wall, placing the smaller stones at the top. And in
+time, after hours of labour, he had hidden the great hole as best he
+could, leaving only at the side a way to pass in and out which could
+hardly be seen from below. Across this he fixed the canvas; were that
+glimpsed, its grimy-white would appear but a lighter-hued streak of
+granite.
+
+"If you will come with me, I will show you your hiding-place."
+
+She lifted her head and looked at him. No word had passed between them
+during the back-breaking hours of his labouring. Again, she thought
+swiftly, he was seeking to command, to dictate. Doubtless, in the end
+she would have arisen and gone with him, since to refuse were madness.
+But he had not waited. He had gone alone into the depths of the cavern;
+she heard his slow, measured steps receding; she heard them again, slow
+and measured, as he came back.
+
+"It's only about thirty paces, straight back," he was saying. "My steps,
+remember, but shortened so that it would be about the same for you. Say
+thirty-five. There I have made a little pile of rocks; you can't miss
+it. That marks the place, just at the side of the rock pile. That's
+where I found the gold. There is a blind cave back there, just under
+this one; there's only a small entrance to it, straight down, a ragged
+hole in the floor, hardly more than big enough for a man to drop down
+through. I had it hidden by dragging a boulder over it. Now I have
+shoved the boulder just far enough to one side to let you go through.
+Also, I have set bits of stone under its outside edge so that it is
+fairly balanced; if you go through, a quick tug at it will topple it
+over to cover the hole again. There's air down there, that comes up from
+below. And it's a better place to be than here--if any one should come."
+
+She shuddered. But he had not seen. There remained much to do and the
+hours fled so swiftly. He set to work making the clumsy snow-shoes. He
+imitated a crude native shoe he had once seen in Alaska; he bent willow
+wands he had brought from along the edge of the stream, whipping them
+about with narrow strips of canvas, binding other wands crosswise,
+making, also of canvas strips, a sort of stirrup for each foot. The last
+of the weak daylight passed and died gloomily and he was still at his
+task, bending now by his fire, working on with infinite care. The
+sticks, brittle with the cold weather, broke under his strong fingers;
+patiently he inserted others or strengthened the cracking pieces with
+string. His face, ruddy in the firelight, was impassive; Gloria, looking
+at him, saw no mere man but a senseless thing of machine levers and
+steel coils; something tireless and hard and as determined as fate
+itself.
+
+They had made their scanty suppers; after it both were hungry. They had
+been hungry thus for four days. There remained coffee and sugar enough
+for another half-dozen meagre meals; here the affluence ended. The bacon
+was down to a piece of fat two inches thick and seven inches long; there
+was bacon grease a couple of inches deep in a tomato-can; there was a
+teacup of flour; there was one small tin of sardines and a smaller one
+of devilled meat. To-day they were hungry, to-morrow they would be a
+great deal hungrier, the next day they would begin to starve.... King
+got up and went out, down the cliffs in the dark, for a last load of
+wood. When he came back she was lying on her bed, her face from the
+light. He stood a moment looking at her. Then for the last time he spoke
+to her:
+
+"If I am long gone, you understand why. It would be best to save food
+all you can; not to stir about much, since exercise means burning up
+more strength, which must be renewed and by still more food.... There is
+not a chance in a thousand now that those men will find this place; if
+they do, there is not a chance in another thousand that they will find
+the middle cave. You will be safe enough.... And, if I do not get back
+to-morrow, you will know that within three days more, or four at most,
+there will be a party in here to bring you out."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVII_
+
+
+Gloria awoke with a start. She had not heard King go, yet she knew that
+she was alone in the cave. Alone! She sat up, clutching her blankets
+about her. Objects all around her were plunged into darkness, but where
+the canvas let in the morning she saw a patch of drear, chill light.
+Full morning. Then by now Mark King was far away.
+
+Oh, the pitiless loneliness of the world as she sat there in the gloom
+of the cavern, her heart as cheerless as the drear light creeping in, as
+cold as the dead charred sticks where last night's fire had burnt itself
+out. And, oh, the terrible, merciless silence about her. She sat plunged
+into a despondency beyond the bourne of tears, a slim, white-bodied,
+gaunt-eyed girl crushed, beaten by a relentless destiny, lost to the
+world, shut in between two terrors--the black unknown of the deeper
+cavern, the white menace of a waste wilderness. And far more than pinch
+of cold or bite of hunger was her utter solitude unbearable.
+
+She sprang up and built a fire. Less for the warmth, though she was cold
+to the bone, than for the sense of companionship. The homely flames were
+like flames in remembered fireplaces; their voices were as the voices of
+those other fires; their light, though showing only cold rock walls and
+rude camp equipment, was the closest thing she had to companionship. She
+came close to the fire and for a long time would not move from it.
+
+She went to the wall King had built, moving the canvas aside just enough
+to look out, and stood there a long time. A dead hush lay over the
+world. There was no wind; the snow in great unbroken, feathery crystals
+fell softly, thick in the sky, dropping ceaselessly and soundlessly. It
+clung to the limbs of trees, making of each branch a thick white arm,
+stilling the pine-needles, binding them together in the sheath which
+forbade them to shiver and rustle. It lay in sludgy messes in the pools
+of the stream and curled over the edges of the steep banks and coated
+the boulders; it lay its white command for silence upon the racing
+water. A world dead-white and dead-still. That unbroken silence which
+exists nowhere else as it does in the wastes of snow and which lies upon
+the soul like a positive inhibition against the slightest human-made
+sound. No wind to stir a dry twig; no dry twig but was manacled and
+muffled; no dead leaves to rustle, since all dead leaves lay deeper than
+death under the snow. Gloria's sensation as she stood as still as the
+wilderness all about her and stared out across the ridges was that of
+one who had suddenly and without warning gone stone-deaf. The stillness
+was so absolute that it seemed to crush the soul within her. She went
+back hastily to her fire, glad to hear the crackle of the flames,
+grateful to have the emptiness made somewhat less the yawning void by
+the small sound of a bit of wood rolling apart on the rock floor.
+
+She was hungry, but she had no heart for cooking. She ate little scraps
+of cold food left over from last night; she nibbled at a last bit of the
+slab chocolate; she filled a pot with snow gathered at the cave mouth
+and set it on the coals to get water to drink. And again, having nothing
+else to do and urged restlessly to some form of activity, she hurried
+back to the canvas flap and watched the falling snow, hearkening to the
+stillness. For in the spell of the snow country one is forced to the
+attitude of one who listens and who hears the great hush, and who, like
+the enchanted world about it, heeds and obeys, and when he moves goes
+with quiet footfalls.
+
+Endlessly long were the minutes. Hours were eternities. She stood by the
+rock wall until she was chilled; as noiselessly as a creeping shadow she
+went back to her fire and shivered before it and warmed herself, turning
+her head quickly to peer into the dark of the hidden tunnel, turning
+again as quickly to glance toward her rude door, her heart leaping at
+every crackle of her fire; she thawed some of the cold out of her and
+went to look out again. A hundred times she made the brief journey.
+
+From being lightning-swift, thought became a laborious, drugged process;
+her excited mind had harboured throngs of vivid visions; she had known a
+period of over-active mental stimulation; she had seen, as in the actual
+flesh, Mark King ploughing through the snow, going over ridges, pushing
+on and on and on. Always further away, driving on through limitless
+distances. She had seen him fall, his body crashing down a sheer
+precipice; she had seen him lying, his face turned up, the snowflakes
+falling, falling, falling, covering it.... She had seen him going on
+again; she had seen him breaking his way to the open, getting back among
+other men, falling exhausted, but calling upon them to go back to her.
+She had seen men hurrying; dog-sleds harnessed; packs of provisions; men
+on snow-shoes. She had seen them coming toward her across the miles.
+Some one else was coming, too. It was big Swen Brodie, his face
+horrible. There was a rabble at his back. It was a race between these
+men and those other men. She had felt that Brodie was putting out a
+terrible hand toward her; she had seen other men leap upon him, dragging
+him back.... King had returned; King and Brodie were struggling.... Then
+again she saw King, fighting his way through the snow, going for help.
+She had tried to reason; he could be only a few miles away....
+
+But at last a tired brain refused to create more of these swift
+pictures. She stared out and did not think. She merely felt the weight
+of the silence, the weight of utter loneliness. With dragging feet she
+returned to her fire and looked into the coals, and from them to the
+further dark, and from it back to the pale light about her canvas. She
+sank into a condition of lethargy. The silence had worked a sort of
+hypnosis in her. Briefly, in her wide-opened eyes there was no light of
+interest. Vaguely, as though she had no great personal concern in the
+matter, she wondered how long it would be before one left alone here
+would go mad. And would the mad one shout shrieking defiance at the
+silence?--or go about on tip-toe, finger laid across his lips?
+
+The morning wore on. At one moment she was plunged into a deep, chaotic
+abyss that was neither unconsciousness nor reverie, and yet which
+strangely partook of both. A moment later she was vaguely aware of a
+difference; it was as though a presence, though what sort she could not
+tell, had approached, were near her, all about her. That instant of
+uncertainty was brief, gone in a flash. She turned and a little glad cry
+broke from her lips. A streak of sunshine lay across the rocks at the
+cave's mouth.
+
+It was like the visit of an angel. More than that, like the face of a
+beloved friend. She ran to her canvas and looked out. There was a rift
+in the sombre roofing of clouds; she saw a strip of clean blue sky
+through which a splendid sun shone. And yet the snow was falling on all
+hands, snow bright with a new shining whiteness. She watched that little
+strip of heaven's blue eagerly and anxiously; was it widening? Or were
+the clouds crowding over it again?
+
+But though this seemed the one consideration of importance in all the
+world for her just now, in another instant it was swept from her mind,
+forgotten. Far below her, down in the gorge, she saw something moving!
+And that something, ploughing laboriously through depths and drifts of
+loose fluffy snow, was a man. Now her thoughts raced again. It was King.
+He was coming back to her.... No; it was not King; it was Swen Brodie!
+She began to tremble violently. She had barely strength to draw back, to
+pull the canvas closer to the rocks, to strive to hide. If Brodie came
+now, if Brodie found her here, alone----That fear which is in all
+female hearts, that boundless terror of the one creature who is her
+greatest protector, her vilest enemy, more dreaded than a wild beast,
+gripped her and shook her and swiftly beat the strength out of her. But,
+fascinated, she clung to the rocks and watched.
+
+The man struggling weakly against the pitiless wilderness, wallowing in
+the snow, seemed to make his way along the gorge inch by inch. He
+carried something on his back, something white under the falling snow
+which whitened his hat and labouring shoulders. A sack with something in
+it, something to which he clung tenaciously. How he floundered and
+battled against the high-heaped white stuff about him which held him
+back, which mounted about his legs, up to his waist; at times, when he
+floundered he was all but lost in it. He lay still like a dead man; he
+struggled, and began crawling on again. He stopped and looked about him
+--how her heart pounded then! He was looking for something, seeking
+something! Her!
+
+She was so certain it must be Brodie. Yet she remained motionless,
+powerless to move though she remembered King's word of the hiding-place
+where she would be safe; she peered out, fascinated.
+
+In time the man came closer and the first suspicion entered her mind
+that, after all, it might not be Brodie. He stopped; he was exhausted;
+he pulled off his hat and ran his hand across his face. Then, still
+bareheaded, he looked up. It was Gratton!
+
+Gratton alone; Gratton looking back over his shoulder more often than he
+quested far ahead; Gratton in a mad attempt to make haste where haste
+was impossible. Now his every gesture bespoke a frantic haste. He was
+escaping from something. Then, what? He had left the other men; he was
+running away from them. She knew it as well as if he had screamed it
+into her ears. A sudden spurt of pity for him entered her heart; he
+seemed so beaten and bewildered and frantic and terrified; who, better
+than she, could sympathize with one in Gratton's predicament? She looked
+far down the gorge; she could see, like a bluish crooked shadow, the
+trail which he had made after him. No one else in sight! Then she forgot
+everything saving that she and Gratton were alone, that they had been
+friends, that they were bound in a common fate. She leaned as far out as
+she could; he was just below now; she called to him.
+
+He stopped dead in his tracks; he jerked his head up and stared wildly;
+his mouth dropped open, and in the shock of the moment speech was denied
+him. She called again.
+
+"You!" Had not the silence been so complete his gasping voice would have
+failed to reach her; as it was she barely heard it. "You, Gloria? Here?
+My God--have I gone mad?"
+
+The man's villainy of so few days ago appeared now, in the biassed light
+of circumstance, a pardonable, a forgettable offence. He had loved her;
+he had wanted to marry her; he had, with that in mind, tricked her. He
+had taken advantage of the universal admission that in love as in war
+all things were fair. The ugliness of what he had done was chiefly ugly
+because it had lain against a background of commonplace and convention;
+here, at the time when no considerations existed save the eternal and
+vital ones, all of Gratton's futile trickery was as though it had never
+been. She was calling to him again, urging him to clamber up the cliff,
+bidding him hurry before he was seen.
+
+"How came you here?" was all that he could find words for. "You! And
+_here_!"
+
+She would tell him everything! But he must not tarry down there. He must
+make haste----
+
+Her words cleared his bewilderment away; he glanced again over his
+shoulder. The gorge was empty of other human presence. He looked back up
+at her. And then, before her eager eyes, he slumped down where he stood,
+lying in the snow.
+
+"I can't." She heard his voice as across a distance ten times that which
+separated them. In it was bleak despair. "I've gone through hell
+already. I am--nearly dead. I couldn't climb up there. I----Oh, my God,
+why did I ever come into this inferno!"
+
+She begged, she urged. But he only turned a white face up to her and lay
+where he had fallen, his body shaking visibly, what with the strain he
+had put upon it and the emotions which only his own soul knew.
+
+"But it is so easy," she cried to him, forgetful of her now terror at
+mounting up here. "I have done it. Twice. I will show you just which
+way, where to set your feet."
+
+"I can't," he said miserably. "It was all I could do to get this far.
+I--I think I am dying----"
+
+Again and again she pleaded with him. But he had either reached the
+limit of his physical endurance or, shaken and unnerved, he had not the
+courage to attempt the steep climb. He lay still; his eyes were shut,
+and to Gloria, too, came the swift fear that the man might be dying.
+
+"I am coming to you!" she called.
+
+She began making the hazardous descent. She did not take time to ask
+herself if she could make it; she knew only that she must. She set foot
+on the narrow, sloping ledge outside, brushing off the snow with her
+boot, clinging with her hands to a splinter of granite, feeling her way
+cautiously, careful to move inch by inch along the way down which she
+had gone twice with Mark King. Her fingers, already cold when she
+started, went numb; they were at all times either in pits and pockets of
+snow or gripping the rough stone that was ice-cold. Painfully but
+steadily she climbed down and down. She strove not to look down; she had
+no eyes for Gratton, who now sat upright, his jaw still sagging, and
+marvelled at her. A dozen times he was prepared to see her slip and
+fall.
+
+After a weary time she came to the base of the cliffs. Gratton was not a
+dozen paces from her. He looked to her like a sick man, gaunt,
+hollow-eyed; unkempt, unshaven, as she had never seen him before, he was
+like some caricature of the immaculate Gratton of San Francisco. He did
+not move but looked at her in a strange, bewildered fashion. Plainly he
+had had no knowledge of her being here; he could not explain her
+presence; he was every whit as dumbfounded as he would have been had she
+dropped down upon him out of the sky. Seeing that he made no attempt to
+move, she started to come to him. She was standing upon a rock; she
+stepped off into the snow, and in a flash had sunk to her breast. A cry
+broke from her as thus, for the first time in her life, she learned
+what it was to seek to force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow.
+Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste
+impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen
+paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him
+flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with
+every effort, at last reached his side.
+
+"It's you--Gloria Gaynor!" he muttered. "But I don't understand."
+
+"I came with Mark King. The storm caught us. Just as it caught you. But
+you must come with me; if you lie here you will be chilled; you will
+freeze. Later we can tell each other everything."
+
+He shook his head. "I can't," he groaned. "I am more dead than alive, I
+tell you. I have been living through days and nights of hell; hell
+populated by raging demons. I have been since before dawn getting here."
+He cast a bleak look up along the cliffs and shuddered. "I'd rather lie
+here and die than attempt it."
+
+Once more Gloria was urging and pleading. But in the end she gave over
+hopelessly, seeing that Gratton would not budge. And it was so clear to
+her that he would perish if he lay here.
+
+"There's a hole in the cliffs just yonder," Gratton said drearily. "God
+knows what wild beasts may be in it. But I was going to crawl in there
+when you called."
+
+Then Gloria saw for the first time the opening to that cave which in Gus
+Ingle's Bible had been set down as Caive number one. It was almost
+directly under King's cave, at the base of the cliffs. The snow came
+close to concealing it entirely; as it was, just a ragged black hole
+showed a couple of feet above the snow-line.
+
+"Come, then," she said. "Let's see if it's big enough for a shelter. It
+may do as well as the other."
+
+Gratton heaved himself up with a groan. Gloria did not wait for him, but
+began the tedious breaking of a path the few feet to the hole, too
+earnest in the endeavour even to note how Gratton came along behind
+without suggesting that it was the man's place to break trail. Thus
+Gloria came first to the lower cave. She hesitated and listened, her
+fancies stimulated by his suggestion of storm-driven animals, and sought
+to peer into the dark. She could see nothing; she heard nothing. Nothing
+save Gratton's hard breathing close behind her. She got a grip upon
+herself and made a step forward, paused, extended her arms to grope for
+a wall, and made another step. There was still no sound; she breathed
+more freely, assuring herself that save for herself the cavern was
+empty. She stumbled over a rock, stopped again and called to Gratton.
+Only now was he entering.
+
+"Light a match," she commanded.
+
+"My hands are dead with cold," he muttered. "I don't know if I have a
+match. Wait a minute."
+
+He began a slow search. Finally she knew that he had found a match; she
+heard it scratch against a rock. Then she heard Gratton curse nervously;
+the match had broken and his knuckles had scraped along the rock.
+
+The second match he gave to her. She struck it carefully, cupped the
+tiny flame with her hands, and strove to see what lay about her. The
+little light gave but poor assistance to her straining eyes; but she did
+see that there was a litter of dead limbs about her feet. She began
+gathering up some of the smaller branches, groping for others as her
+match burned out. Again Gratton searched his pockets; he found more
+matches and some scraps of paper. It was Gloria's hands which started
+the fire and placed the bits of dry wood upon it. The flames crackled;
+the wood caught like tinder; the flickering light retrieved much of the
+cavern about them from the utter dark.
+
+"Here I stay," said Gratton. He dropped down and began warming his
+shaking hands. A more abjectly miserable specimen of humanity Gloria had
+never looked upon. He was jaded, spiritless, cowed.
+
+But he was a human being, and she was no longer alone! Across the empty
+desolation he had come to her, one who had lived as she had lived, who
+knew another world than this, who could understand what she suffered
+because he, too, suffered. There came a space of time, all too brief,
+during which her heart sang within her. She was lifted from despair to a
+realm bright with hope. King had gone for succour; she had a companion
+to share with her the dread hours of waiting. She began a swift
+planning; she caught up a burning brand as she had seen Mark King do,
+and holding it high made a quick survey, going timidly step by step
+further from the entrance, deeper into the cavern. It was much like the
+one so high above, of what shape she could hardly guess, so many were
+the hollows in floor, roof, and walls, so many were the tunnel-like arms
+reaching further than she dared go. Gratton could not, or would not,
+climb to the higher cave; then why should they not make this their
+shelter? She would have to climb the cliffs again; but she would have to
+do that in any case. Once up there it would be so simple a matter to
+toss down blankets and food and cooking utensils; a half-hour would see
+her camp moved from one cave to the other. Eager and excited, she began
+to tell Gratton what she meant to do.
+
+"Wait a while," he urged her. "I am terribly shaken, Gloria. I have
+lived through experiences which a week ago I would have thought
+unbearable." He shuddered; she saw that when he said he was "terribly
+shaken" he had not exaggerated. And in the glare of his eyes she read
+that, utterly unnerved, he dreaded to be left alone even while she went
+up the cliffs. "I would say that a man would have died--or gone
+mad--with the strain that I have lived through."
+
+"I know," she said gently. "I can guess. But when you get good and
+warm--and rest--I will make you a hot cup of coffee----"
+
+"I have this. It's better than coffee for me now." He untied the mouth
+of the bag with shaking fingers, groped through its contents, and at
+last brought out a flask nearly full of an amber liquid. "It's the
+stuff Brodie's crowd makes," he explained, unstoppering the flask.
+"They've got more of it than food with them, curse their bestial hearts.
+Stuff which, way back in ancient history, ... which means a week ago!...
+I'd no more have thought of drinking than I'd drink poison. But it has
+saved the life in me."
+
+He put the bottle to his lips and swallowed three or four times. He sat
+afterward making a wry face, his full eyes blinking. But gradually a
+faint bit of colour made his pasty cheeks something less dead-white, and
+the powerful raw corn whiskey injected into his blood a little
+reassurance.
+
+"Let me rest a bit and get warm?" he asked of her. "I--I'd rather you
+didn't leave me just yet, Gloria."
+
+Knowing so well what it was to have raw, quivering nerves, she tried to
+smile at him, and saying as lightly as she could, "Why, of course;
+there's no hurry," began to gather what bits of wood lay about, piling
+them on the fire. Thus she noted where, evidently long ago, there had
+been another fire kindled against the wall of rock; some one else had
+camped here, perhaps during summer-time, and this explained the fuel
+wood so conveniently placed.
+
+Meanwhile Gratton took a second pull at his flask, set it carefully
+aside and stood up, swinging his arms to get the blood running, beating
+his hands against his thighs, stamping gingerly. He began looking at her
+curiously. Presently he said: "Do you think we are ever going to get out
+of this alive?"
+
+"Yes." Her voice rang with assurance. "Mark King has gone for help. All
+we have to do is wait for a few days."
+
+His pale brows flew up.
+
+"King? He has gone? He has left you alone here?"
+
+Again she said: "Yes." Gratton began plucking at his lip, striding up
+and down now. It became obvious to her that there had been nothing wrong
+within him beyond what his frantic terror had done to him. Perhaps, left
+alone, he would have died out there in the snow; now, having already
+leaned on her, having her company and the hope she held out, he began to
+look his old self.
+
+"Now I'll go for the things in the other cave," she suggested. And as an
+afterthought: "Now that you are feeling better, perhaps you will go up
+with me and help?"
+
+"Why," he said, "why--of course. Yes, we'll both go."
+
+For in his new mood, warmed by the fire and the raw whiskey, and,
+further, having seen that she had done the thing with no mishap, he was
+willing to do what before he could not do.
+
+"Come," he said. "Let's hurry."
+
+Along the paths they had already made it was a much easier matter to
+make the return trip. At the cliffs Gratton allowed Gloria to go ahead,
+since she knew the way up and he did not. He followed her closely, and
+at first with little difficulty or hesitation. The higher they climbed,
+however, the slower he went; once he hesitated so long that she began to
+believe that dizziness had overcome him and that he was coming no
+further. But at length she came to the ledge and the wall King had made,
+and Gratton, looking up and seeing her above him, began climbing again.
+
+Gloria held aside the canvas flap; he followed her into the cave. Her
+fire, though low, still burned. For the sake of more light she put on
+more dry wood from the great heap King had left for her. She began to
+look about, planning swiftly just how easiest to move the few belongings
+which must go with her. She could pile odds and ends into a blanket; she
+could remake the canvas roll as King had done so often; she and Gratton
+could drag the bundles to the front of the cave and push them over, down
+the cliffs.
+
+"First, we'll get things together, all in a heap," she said aloud.
+
+He came forward and stood warming his nervous hands at her fire, his
+eyes everywhere at once. He marked the shipshape air of the cavern, the
+parcels which were to-night's supper and to-morrow's three poor little
+meals, each set carefully apart from the others on the rock shelf. He
+saw how the firewood was piled in its place, not scattered; how Gloria's
+bed and King's looked almost comfortable because of the fir-boughs; how
+the clean pots and pans were in their places. Then he turned his full
+eyes like searchlights upon the girl.
+
+"And you," he said, marvelling, "_you_ actually came with a man like
+King into a place like this!"
+
+"I was a fool," cried Gloria. "A pitiful little fool. Oh!"
+
+Had she been thinking less of Gloria and more of this other man with
+whom she was now to cope she must have marked a certain swift change in
+his attitude. It became less furtive, more assured. His eyes left her to
+rove again, lingered with the two couches, and returned to her.
+
+"You found King wasn't your kind," he announced. "You have quarrelled!"
+
+"From the very beginning," she replied quickly. "He is unthinkable. I
+would have left him long ago, only ..."
+
+"Only there was no place to go," Gratton finished it for her. "And now,"
+he continued slowly, studying her, "you are willing to come with me."
+
+"Yes," she told him unhesitatingly.
+
+"But," he offered musingly, "you refused me once and turned to him."
+
+"Haven't I told you I was a fool? I didn't know then quite what men
+were ... some men."
+
+She was not measuring every word now. She meant simply that she was
+determined to have done with Mark King, holding bitterly that she hated
+him; that she would go to any one to be definitely through with King.
+Yet he had time to weigh her words and draw from each one his own
+significance.
+
+His eyes followed her as she gathered up her few personal and intimate
+possessions, comb, brush, little silken things of pale pink and blue. A
+faint colour seeped into the usually colourless lips at which his
+dead-white teeth were suddenly gnawing. When she saw the look in his
+eyes, she stared at him wonderingly.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, her voice puzzled.
+
+"What is what?" Gratton laughed, but the look was still there. His eyes
+did not laugh.
+
+"What makes you look like that? What are you thinking?"
+
+Now it was he who was vaguely puzzled. Then he shrugged.
+
+"I was just thinking how superb you are," he replied, not entirely
+untruthfully. For his ulterior thought had been reared upon the vital
+fact of her triumphant beauty.
+
+The compliment was too much like hundreds she had received in her life
+to alarm her. Rather, it pleased; what word of praise had she heard
+during these latter days?
+
+His voice sounded queerly, as though his breath came with difficulty.
+Maybe it did, since he was no outdoors man, and to him the climb up the
+rocks and the brief journey along the mountain flank was a painful
+labour. Certain it was that the faint flush was still in the sallow
+cheeks. Suddenly he lifted his hands, putting them out toward her. She
+saw again the strange look in his eyes.
+
+"Gloria!" he said hoarsely, "you are wonderful! And you have come to
+me!"
+
+Gloria met his rather too ardent admiration with that cool little laugh
+which had been her weapon in other days. She was not afraid of Gratton.
+To-day she had led and he had followed. She had commanded and he had
+obeyed. Here was a pleasant change from King's masterfulness, and she
+fully intended to hold Gratton well in hand.
+
+"I came to you," she said frankly, "because I was a woman in distress
+and had no alternative. That there has ever been any unpleasantness
+between us does not alter that fact. You understand me, don't you?"
+
+He hardly heard her. To his mind the situation was clearness itself.
+Gloria had come alone into the forest with Mark King. She had been with
+him all these days and nights. But she and King had quarrelled; tired of
+each other already, perhaps. Gratton did not care what the reason was;
+he was gloatingly satisfied with the outcome. He had always coveted her;
+it took much to stir his pale blood, and only the superb beauty of
+Gloria Gaynor had ever fully done so. King had stolen her away, but she
+had left him and had come straight to Gratton!
+
+He came a step closer and the firelight showed how the muscles of his
+throat were working. Gloria's eyes widened. But not yet did she fully
+understand and not yet did she fear.
+
+"Mr. Gratton," she began.
+
+"Gloria!" he cried out. "Gloria!"
+
+His hands, suddenly flung out, were upon her. She tore them away,
+wrenched herself free from him, and started back. As she did so her
+little silken bundle dropped at her feet. Gratton caught it up and
+buried his face in it. Now as he looked up at her his eyes and all that
+she could see of his face were stamped with that which lay in his heart.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, shrinking not so much from him as from the thing she
+read so plainly at last. "Surely, you do not think ... you do not
+misinterpret ... my being here at all, my being with Mr. King...."
+
+"No," cried Gratton wildly. "I misinterpret nothing. You came alone with
+him into the mountains. What chance is there for two interpretations
+there? You gave yourself to him; you saw your mistake; you hated him.
+You have come to me. I have always loved you; I want you."
+
+Her cheeks flamed red with hot anger. There was a flutter in her heart,
+a wild tremor in her blood. She drew back from him. He followed, his
+arms out. She was amazed, for the moment shocked into consternation. And
+yet she knew no such terror as had been hers when King had advanced on
+her, rope in hand. Her new contempt of Gratton was too high for that.
+Now she marked the small stature, little taller, little stronger, than
+her own; the pale face, the narrow chest, the slender body.
+
+"You know what I mean, what I want," he was muttering. "That sweet
+young-thing innocence is all right in its place but that place is not
+here alone in the mountains with a man."
+
+"Man!" she burst out scathingly. "You, _a man_! Why, you wretched little
+beast!"
+
+But Gratton, his brain reeling with hot fancy, came on.
+
+"You were afraid of King. You said that he made you do what he wanted.
+What about me? You are going to do what I tell you. I ...By God, I will
+make you! Beast, you call me? No more beast than any other man. I have
+wanted you all these years. You have wanted me, or you would not have
+been so glad to see me. Only a few days ago you were ready to marry me!
+And now ..."
+
+His arms groped for her. Gloria swept up a dead pine limb that lay by
+the fire and swung it in both hands and struck him full across the face.
+He reeled back and stood, half in the shadow, his shoulders to the rock
+wall, his hands to his face.
+
+"You beast!" she panted. "You cowardly, contemptible beast."
+
+From the way in which he brought his hand down and looked at it and laid
+it back upon his lips she knew that his mouth was bleeding. And she read
+in the gesture and in the man's whole cringing attitude that the danger
+of any physical violence from him was past and done with. In the grip of
+his passion, ugly as it was, he had risen somewhat from his essential
+weakness; in the moment he had at least thought of himself as a
+conqueror. Now he was again what he always really was at heart, a
+contemptible coward.
+
+An absolutely new sense of elation sang through Gloria's blood. She was
+fully mistress of the situation, and had found within her an unguessed
+strength. Physically superb at all times because nature had richly
+gifted her, now she was magnificent.
+
+"Mr. Gratton," she said swiftly, "you have made a mistake. Mr. King has
+never offered me violence of that sort. Remember that, though we are
+alone, and in the mountains, I am the same Gloria Gaynor that you have
+known. And be sure that you treat me as such."
+
+He nursed his battered lips and stared at her. The blow had dazed him.
+Slowly, as his mind cleared, there dawned in it the realization that he
+_had_ made a mistake. The stick was still in her hands; a shiver ran
+through him. His desire went out of him.
+
+"I wish to God I had never seen you," he groaned.
+
+She had meant from the first to take the upper hand. Now she was almost
+glad that this had happened. For now she was very sure of herself;
+Gratton had merely been bold like other young men who had sought to
+presume; he had been cruder simply because the situation seemed to his
+mind to offer the opportunity; now a blow from her had accomplished the
+work of a haughty look in drawing-room encounters with those other young
+men. She dropped the stick and wiped her hands.
+
+"We have other things to think of," she said. She might have been a
+young queen who had punished a subject and now from her exalted place
+condescended to consider that the indignity offered her royal person had
+never occurred. She began dragging the blankets from her bed, tumbling
+them to the floor. "Take these," she commanded.
+
+"I was a fool for ever leaving San Francisco," he muttered bitterly.
+"You let me think that you cared for me, and now you treat me like a
+dog. I spent time and money trying to be the one to find gold in these
+infernal mountains, and I find nothing but storm and starvation. I don't
+believe there ever was gold here."
+
+_Gold!_ He stopped at his own words, his eyes flying wide open. During
+these later hours, fleeing from Brodie's men, stumbling upon Gloria,
+swirled away by mad longings, he had not thought of gold. But here was
+King's camp; straight here had King come after Gloria had brought him
+her father's message and old Honeycutt's secret. Then the gold was here!
+The cupidity which in the man never slept long was awake on the instant.
+He began looking about him eagerly. King was gone? Then not for men to
+bring help to Gloria but to aid him in carrying off the gold. Having
+brought Gloria here so that she could not tell others what she knew, he
+left her here with the same purpose; so Gratton would have done! King
+would have hidden it here; at least some of it. He began questing
+feverishly, shuffling about in the shadows while Gloria, busy with her
+plans for moving, wondered at him. He was striking matches, running back
+and forth; she could hear his mutterings. And presently, when Gloria had
+called and he had not heard, he came upon the bag which King had meant
+to take out with him that day the horse was lost. He hovered over it; he
+struck other matches, he came hastening back dragging it after him.
+
+He went down on his knees by the sack, got a heavy lump in his hands,
+rubbed at it, held it closer to the firelight, rubbed again more
+excitedly, and finally sat back, staring up at her with new flames of
+another sort leaping in his eyes.
+
+"It's next thing to solid gold!" he gasped. "There are
+thousands--thousands----Millions!"
+
+She looked at him and marvelled. In his shallow soul no emotion lived
+long; greed of gold now obliterated the little ripples that another
+greed had fleetingly made. How had she thought well of him down in the
+city? How had she so much as tolerated him? On the instant it struck her
+that there was small justice in Gratton reaping any reward, having done
+nothing to earn it. "We have the things to move. Come; hurry."
+
+"Why should we move, after all?" he demanded sharply. "Now that I have
+got up here, why not stay? There's wood here; everything is fixed up
+after a fashion. King would know where to send for us, and--and those
+cursed dogs of Brodie's would never think of looking up here, even if
+chance did lead them along the gorge."
+
+Gloria, recalling King's warning, remembering Brodie's brute face, said
+hastily:
+
+"Do you think there is any real danger that they will come this way?"
+
+"I hope not," he groaned. "They couldn't follow my trail if they tried
+to. You see, I left them last night, as early as I dared; I struck out
+in a straight line down the slope; then I made a turn off to the side
+and along the ridge where there was but little snow. By now all those
+tracks are wiped out, what with wind and new snow. There's nothing to
+lead them this way."
+
+"Then, if we go down quickly, if we get your bag of food and put out the
+fire down there, and come right back up, it won't be very long before
+our tracks will be gone. And we'll not budge from here until help comes.
+Come; let's hurry."
+
+"Coming," said Gratton. "Yes; we must hurry."
+
+She went ahead and began to clamber down the cliffs. Half-way down she
+wondered why he was not following. She found a place where she could
+cling and look up. Thus she was just in time to see him, standing at the
+mouth of the cave, clutching a heavy bag; he had been tying the mouth of
+it. Now he cast it outward so that it fell, striking against the
+cliff-side, and then rolling and dropping to disappear at last in the
+snow-bank below. And then he began, though hesitantly, to follow her.
+
+"That's one thing Mark King won't get," he announced with emphasis. At
+last he stood beside her in the snow. "No matter how the game breaks,
+whether he comes back or not, and no matter who gets away with the rest,
+that bagful is mine! There's a fortune in it, and it's mine." He began
+tossing double handfuls of loose snow into the hole which the bag of
+gold had made. "When I get a chance," he muttered, "I'll move it
+somewhere else."
+
+His avarice disgusted her. Just now the thought of gold sickened.
+
+"We are wasting time," she reminded him.
+
+He followed her again, casting a last look behind him, then looking up
+at the sky, grey everywhere except for a long patch of blue.
+
+"What we want is another three or four hours of steady snowing," he was
+saying when they slipped into the mouth of the lower cave. "Enough to
+hide that and to cover up our paths."
+
+Gloria was already trying to put out the fire; if ill fortune should
+lead Brodie's crowd here, it would be just as well if they found no
+smouldering sticks to tell them that the fugitives had been here so
+short a time ago and could not be far off. She called to Gratton to help
+her. He stamped out burning brands while she hastened back and forth,
+bringing handfuls of snow with which to extinguish the last glowing
+coals. She worked vigorously and swiftly; he only half-heartedly, since
+his thoughts were elsewhere.
+
+"Maybe," he said thoughtfully, "I'd better bring that bag in here and
+hide it somewhere--far back in the dark."
+
+"No," she said. "Leave it where it is. We must hurry back to the other
+cave."
+
+But he grew stubborn over it. The storm might end at any time; the sun
+might melt all this fluffy snow; the bag then would be for any one to
+see. Heedless of her expostulations, he left her extinguishing the fire
+and went back for the gold. He was gone several minutes, digging after
+it. She had finished her task when he reappeared, dragging the heavy
+sack after him. He disappeared swiftly, going into the deeper dark of
+the further end of the cave; she heard him moving with shuffling feet.
+What a treacherous, thieving, petty animal he was----
+
+She started and whirled about. There was a new sound in the air, a low
+mumble, a vague murmur. Men's voices. Outside, coming nearer swiftly,
+were men. Her first thought was of King; then she knew that it was too
+soon for him to have gotten out of the mountains, found assistance, and
+returned. A deep, heavy bass voice drowned out the others; it was like a
+low-throated growl, ominous, sinister.
+
+Gloria whirled again, this time toward the dark into which Gratton had
+gone. Blindly she hurried after him; she stumbled but kept on. She could
+hear him at work, hiding his gold. At last she was at his side; she
+clutched at his sleeve.
+
+"Listen!" she whispered. "They are outside. They have followed you!"
+
+She felt his arm stiffen as from head to foot he grew rigid. She heard
+his breath whistling through his nostrils. She could hear the beating of
+his heart--or was it her own? The voices came nearer, rose higher.
+Gratton began to shake as with a terrible chill.
+
+"If they find me--oh, my God, if they find me--Benny killed a man he
+thought had the bacon--I had it all the time! My God, Gloria, if they
+find me----"
+
+"Sh!" she commanded. "Be still! Maybe they will go by----"
+
+The voices came nearer--passed on. Two or three men out there were
+speaking at once; then all were silent. The silence lasted so long that
+Gloria began to breathe again. Surely, surely Brodie and his men had
+gone----
+
+Then again came Brodie's deep, sinister voice:
+
+"Back this way, boys," he shouted. "He's gone in here. We've trapped the
+dirty white rat."
+
+Gloria and Gratton clung to each other, too terrified to move.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVIII_
+
+
+Gratton, had he been left to his own devices, would have stood
+stock-still where he was, frozen to the ground in terror. Gloria tugged
+at him, whispering over and over: "They are coming! Don't you hear them?
+Quick! We must try to hide."
+
+At last he seemed to awaken from a trance; he started and began hurrying
+with her, crowding by her, stumbling on ahead in the darkness, seeking
+the cave's unfathomed depths of darkness. She heard him stumble and
+fall; she ran blindly and caught him by the arm again, whispering
+fiercely:
+
+"You must be silent! If they once hear us we have no chance. If we are
+still, maybe they won't find us."
+
+After that he moved more guardedly. But still he crowded ahead; once in
+his excitement, when she brushed against him and he thought that she was
+going to get in his way, he shoved her violently aside. It was then
+that Gloria, looking back, saw Brodie's great bulk outlined against the
+snow outside. He came in; she saw his rifle; his figure was absorbed in
+the shadows. She saw other men following him; how many she did not know.
+One by one they bulked black against the daylight; one by one, as they
+entered, they were lost among the shadows. She had bumped into a wall of
+rock. Gratton was there, groping in all directions with his hands; she
+could hear his quick, dry breathing.
+
+They could go no further. This was the end. Brodie called out loudly,
+his speech dripping with his habitual vileness; he shouted: "Gratton!
+Better step out lively like a man now. We got you anyway." Then he began
+to gather the scattered firewood; a match flared in his hand; his face
+leaped out of the dark like a devil's. Or a madman's, a man's mad with a
+rage which lusted for the killing of another man. Gloria's heart sank in
+despair; she felt as though she were going to faint.
+
+But all the time her hands, like Gratton's, had been groping. At the
+moment when she felt that her knees were giving way under her, she found
+where an arm of the cave continued, narrow, slanting upward steeply,
+cluttered with blocks of stone. She tugged at Gratton's sleeve; she
+crept into this place and felt him close behind her, crowding, trying to
+press by her. She gave way briefly, felt him scrape past, and began
+crawling, following. Again only a few feet further on she came up with
+him again; once more he had come to the end of the tunnel. He was
+crouching, flattened against the rock wall. They were in a pocket with
+no outlet save the way they had come. She stood, turned toward the front
+of the cave, and waited.
+
+"Get a fire going, boys," Brodie's rumbling bass was calling. Assured
+now of having run his quarry to earth, he took a wolfish joy from the
+moment. There was a horrible note in his laughter, booming out suddenly.
+"The little skunk's run to a hole; we'll smoke him out."
+
+He spoke of Gratton as though he were a frightened animal, and like a
+frightened animal Gloria felt. She stooped and looked toward the
+pursuers; thus only could she see them, since when she stood erect the
+irregularities of the rocks above hid them from her.
+
+Brodie lighted his fire. The other men--dully she counted them now;
+there were five of them all told--were gathering wood, heaping it on.
+The flames leaped, crackled, lifted their voices into a roar; volumes of
+white smoke shot out, thinned, were gone. The light flared higher,
+brighter. Dark corners and crevices were made palely fight. She could
+see the faces of the men now, their eyes reflecting the fire, looking
+like the eyes of wolves. Brodie carried his rifle as though he fully
+intended using it. At his side Benny Rudge fidgeted and blinked. By
+Benny stood that scarecrow of a man, Brail. Close by, interested
+spectators, were the squat Italian and the man who had brought the
+"judge" to marry her to Gratton, the leering Steve Jarrold.
+
+"More fire, boys," called Brodie. Again his ugly laughter boomed out. "I
+think I see where he is."
+
+Whether or not Brodie already saw them, it appeared clear that immediate
+discovery was inevitable. For there was no further hiding-place here to
+creep into; no such refuge as King had urged Gloria to hasten to if
+Brodie came. She remembered the caution all too late; she thought of
+King with wild longing, while Gratton cringed and pulled back and tried
+to screen his body with hers.
+
+"Here's the grub he stole!" It was Benny's cracked, nervous voice, full
+of wrath.
+
+She could feel Gratton shiver as he crouched against her. Sudden disgust
+filled her. They knew that he was here; they would take him in a minute;
+his seeking further to hide was so futile. And yet he was not man enough
+to stand forth at the end; he was the type who must be dragged
+whimpering and pulling back, pleading for mercy even when he knew so
+well that he deserved no mercy, and would have none meted out to him.
+Gratton had his one last chance to show if there was the spark of
+manhood in him; they did not yet know of Gloria's presence, and had he
+stepped out now, he might have given her a chance to remain unseen. But
+no such heroism suggested itself to Gratton.
+
+"Come on, Gratton," shouted Brodie. "Or do you want me to begin shooting
+from here?"
+
+The light of the fire flared higher, brighter. The eyes of the men who
+had just entered from the outside were growing accustomed to this place
+of shadows. Suddenly the man Jarrold called sharply:
+
+"There's some one with him. There's two of 'em, Brodie. Go easy!"
+
+Brodie cursed him for a fool.
+
+"I don't care how many's with him or who they are," he bellowed. "The
+grub-stealing thief has got his coming to him. Step out, you
+lily-livered sneak, and take your medicine."
+
+"That's all right," muttered Jarrold. "But it won't hurt to see who they
+are first, Brodie."
+
+"Gratton's got no gun with him," cackled Benny Rudge. "Neither's that
+other guy. Come ahead, Steve. Me an' you'll pull 'em out."
+
+Gloria pressed back against the rock, her flesh quivering. She saw two
+men and then another two coming toward her. The first sound broke from
+Gratton's lips now, a little gurgling moan. The men came on; one had
+heard and laughed. Then Gloria, with more shuddersome thought of rough
+hands upon her than of a rifle-ball, broke away from her cowering
+companion and came hastily to meet them.
+
+"I'm coming out," she cried out to them.
+
+It was all that she could do to hold herself erect and come back into
+the more open cave. Jarrold and Benny and the men after them came to a
+dead halt and stared at her. In the flickering half-light she looked a
+slim frightened boy.
+
+"All of a sudden the woods is gettin' all cluttered up with folks,"
+grunted Benny. "Who in blazes are you, kid? An' where's your mamma?"
+
+His companions laughed; they laughed at anything. One of them, Steve
+Jarrold, came closer to look into her face. She saw that his steps were
+uncertain; she had heard how thick was his vocal utterance; now she
+smelled the whiskey with which he reeked.
+
+A shout broke from Jarrold. He clutched her shoulder with a great claw
+of a hand and drew her closer to him, his face thrust down to hers.
+
+"Let me go!" she cried, trying to jerk away from him.
+
+"Easy does it," said Jarrold. "Easy--_kid_! I'm of a notion I've seen
+that face of yours somewheres."
+
+"Never mind the kid," Brodie was growling savagely. "It's Gratton first.
+Out with him, Benny."
+
+The others bore down upon Gratton. He had found his voice now; he
+shrieked at them; he begged shrilly; he battered them with his fists,
+striking weak, vain blows. Benny, though the smaller man, had him by the
+collar. The Italian caught an arm, and as they dragged him half-fainting
+toward the fire, Brail struck at him with a heavy boot.
+
+"So," said Brodie heavily.
+
+Gratton began an incoherent pleading, arrested impatiently by Brodie's
+great voice.
+
+"Shut up! You've had your innings; it's mine now. You swiped grub when
+it's the same thing as slitting a man's gullet. You let another man be
+killed for what you done. Now you get yours!"
+
+He jerked up his rifle. Benny and the Italian let Gratton go and jumped
+nimbly aside. Gratton stumbled and sagged, staggering like a drunken
+man. Brodie, with his rifle-barrel not six feet from Gratton's
+terror-stricken body, laughed again.
+
+"Stop!" Gloria shrilled. She broke away from Jarrold's grasp and ran
+toward Brodie. "You don't know what you are doing. You----"
+
+"Close your trap, kid," Brodie thundered at her. "Unless you want the
+second bullet."
+
+Jarrold's big boots came clumping noisily across the rock floor.
+
+"Easy does it, Brodie," he shouted. "She ain't no kid, I tell you. She's
+a girl. That's Ben Gaynor's girl, the one Gratton wanted to marry, the
+one King took away from him. Keep your eye peeled; King would be around
+somewhere!"
+
+"Hidin' back there in the dark somewhere," muttered Benny.
+
+Brodie, though his rifle had not swerved, was listening.
+
+"No, not hiding in the dark corners," he said ponderously. "Not Mark
+King, rot him.... Ben Gaynor's girl, you say? Then we're red hot on the
+right trail, boys! You know what her and King would be after!"
+
+Gratton's stunned brain began to function wildly.
+
+"The gold is here, Brodie!" he cried out wildly. "King had got to it
+before us, but I've found it. I was coming back to tell you----"
+
+Brodie had small liking for a coward and now his bull's voice cut
+Gratton's chatter short.
+
+"No solid mountain of gold is going to save your hide----"
+
+Benny began to jig up and down in a frenzy of excitement.
+
+"Hold your hand, Brodie, you big fool," he shouted. He even jumped to
+Brodie's side and caught the rifle-barrel, shoving it downward. "If he
+does know where it is, give him a show to lead us to it. Ain't you got
+any sense? Before King gets back. If you popped him off now, how would
+we know where to look?"
+
+Brodie snarled at Benny and whipped the rifle clear of the nervous
+clutch. But he understood what Benny had in mind and saw wisdom in
+obeying the command to hold his hand. His gross, heavy-muscled face,
+half in light, half in darkness, showed a look of hesitation. Gratton
+began a rapid, vehement talking, explaining, arguing, pleading; he had
+not meant to steal the food; he could lead them to the gold; he wanted
+none of it; all that he asked was to be allowed to live----
+
+"Shut up!" Brodie cried again disgustedly. "You ain't dead yet, are you?
+So's you keep your lying face closed I'll give you one show. Step
+lively; _where is it_?"
+
+Gratton, like a hound in leash suddenly freed, turned and sped toward
+the spot where he had hid the gold. Brodie, his rifle shifting in his
+hands, leaped after him, keeping close to him. Gratton was down on his
+hands and knees, scratching among the loose stones like a dog digging
+for a buried bone. Brodie put a heavy hand on his shoulder and jerked
+him back, hurling him to one side. Thus it was Brodie who found the bag
+and dragged it forward to the fire, dumping its contents on the ground.
+Benny was with him now, pawing over the heavy lumps. Brail, the Italian,
+Steve Jarrold--all rushed forward and snatched up bits of the ore that
+had rolled from the sack; one of them shouted in wonder; another seized
+the nugget from his hands; they all talked at once; Benny squealed in
+high rage as Jarrold shoved him backward; the Italian trod in the fire
+and cursed and kicked at it savagely, sending burning brands in all
+directions.
+
+Gloria had stood powerless to move. Now she saw that in their flush of
+excitement no one was looking toward her. She began slowly, silently,
+edging toward the side of the cave, toward the way out. Her one thought
+was to slip away while none noted her; to dart out and hurry up the
+cliff to come to the hiding-place of which Mark King had told her.
+
+"I never see such gold, and me an old-timer in the mines." It was Steve
+Jarrold muttering. "It's like they'd took clean gold down to the mint
+and rolled it and lumped it into nuggets. _This was broke off the mother
+lode_. Oh, my Gawd!"
+
+Gloria made another quiet step--and another. Still no one saw her. If
+she could only make half a dozen more steps before these men awoke from
+the first moments of a spell that had made them oblivious of everything
+on earth except that little heap of rock! Another step; she went
+quicker; their backs were toward her. And still no one saw. Yes, Gratton
+alone had seen. She made a quick frightened gesture. His jaw sagged
+open; he watched her with bulging eyes. She could read his thought so
+plainly: he was thinking of his own ultimate chances for life, he was
+screwing up his courage to make a dash for the open himself. His eyes
+followed her step by step. Oh, if only he would look in some other
+direction! If any one of them saw Gratton's tell-tale face----
+
+Then Gratton began a slow withdrawal from the others; he meant to do as
+he saw her doing.
+
+"Heavy laka hell," the Italian was saying. "Justa da gold do that!"
+
+"Give me that, Tony," snarled Brodie. He snatched the mass from the
+other's hands. "That's the biggest nugget any man living ever saw."
+
+Gloria tasted the clean fresh outside air; she was within three paces of
+the line of snow. Then there was a sudden noise; Gratton, inching off
+backward, had stumbled over a dead stick. The men by the fire were
+startled out of their oblivion. Steve Jarrold, the one nearest Gloria,
+swung about, saw her, dropped what was in his hands, and lunged towards
+her. She made a dash for the exit. In two great strides Jarrold was upon
+her and had caught her by the shoulders, dragging her back. And Gratton
+stood again, his feet glued to the ground; she could see the flash of
+his teeth gnawing at his fingers.
+
+"Trying to make a sneak for it!" boomed Brodie. "I'll show you----"
+
+"Not yet, Brodie, you big fool!" yelled Benny. "This is only a sackful,
+and not full at that. It's the rest of it we're after--the whole lousy
+mess. He's got to show us where this come from."
+
+"I am not trying to get away," said Gratton, though his tone did not
+convince. "Haven't I made good already? Haven't I kept my promise? Am I
+not ready to do whatever I can?"
+
+"Talk's cheap," retorted Brodie. "Get busy, then."
+
+Gratton, struggling already in the meshes of the net drawing ever
+tighter about him, pointed to Gloria with shaking finger. He swallowed
+twice and moistened his lips to speak.
+
+"King found it first. She was with him. I made her show me the sack of
+gold. I was going to go back to your camp, to tell you----"
+
+"Cut it," commanded Brodie. "Leave out the lies and talk straight and
+fast. Where is the rest of it? Where did this come from?"
+
+"I'm trying to tell you," said Gratton hurriedly. "There--there's
+another cave; up above. That's where King had his camp; that where's I
+got the sack. It's up there----"
+
+"No wonder she wanted to skip out," jeered Steve Jarrold, his great
+bony hand locked about Gloria's shrinking shoulder. His ill-featured
+face, the small, pig eyes, always jeering, the black bristle of beard,
+not unlike a hog's bristles, were thrust close to her face. "Where's
+King all this time?" he demanded. "Up in the other cave, maybe?"
+
+"No," she said dismally, seeking to jerk away from his evil glance and
+whiskey-laden breath. "He has gone----"
+
+"That's good; let him go. We don't care, do we? Eh, girlie?" But again
+his hand tightened until the hard fingers hurt her. "But gone where?"
+
+"We were short of food--he is hunting--maybe he has gone for help----"
+
+"And you showed Gratton where he hid his gold? That's a nice little
+she-trick, ain't it? Well, while the showing's good, lead us to the rest
+of it."
+
+"That's the eye, Steve," said Brodie. He stepped forward, shoved his
+rifle-muzzle against Gratton's body, and commanded: "You, too. Go ahead,
+you and her, and show us the way. And no monkey business, either of you,
+or I'll blow a hole square through you."
+
+Gratton, grown nimble, darted ahead with Brodie always close at his
+heels. Gloria, forced on by Jarrold, came next, and after them the
+others. Benny was the last; he had taken time to put the gold back into
+the sack and set it aside among the shadows. For Benny believed in
+making sure of what they had, even while they quested better things.
+Then he caught up his rifle, the only other gun besides Brodie's, and
+came hurrying after them.
+
+They went up the cliff in a long file, clawing their way, cursing the
+steepness, now and then one or another of them fumbling uncertainly,
+close to a slip and a fall. It was clear that, with the possible
+exception of Swen Brodie, not a man of them was entirely sober. But they
+made the climb safely and hastened into the upper cave eagerly.
+
+"It's somewhere back there," said Gratton.
+
+"More fire," shouted Brodie. His voice exulted; his blood would be
+running now with the gold fever. He tossed on an armful of dry wood; the
+flames caught and roared; shadows quivered and danced. Already Benny was
+at the far end of the cave; the others ran after him. Even Jarrold
+relinquished Gloria's arm, eager to be in at the finding. But he called
+to her as he went:
+
+"You stick where you are. I'm not forgetting you this time."
+
+Fascinated, she watched them. They ran like blood-lusting dogs that had
+briefly lost their quarry, that were seeking everywhere, in every
+cranny, with slavering jaws. They turned aside into side-pockets of the
+main cavern; they got torches and looked high and low; they went back
+and forth, up and down; they stumbled against one another and cursed
+angrily; they caught up bits of stone, ran back to the fire to see if
+the fragments were shot with gold; cursed and hurled the useless things
+from them, and ran back again, to jostle and seek and be first; they
+were not so much like dogs now as human hogs, fighting to get first into
+the trough.
+
+But they did not forget Gratton, and they did not forget Gloria. All the
+time both Brodie and Benny kept their guns in their hands; two
+significant looks had been all that was needed to keep their two
+prisoners in mind of the fact that no escape now was possible.
+
+To Gloria it seemed inevitable that in this quest which overlooked
+nothing, and which as time wore on grew less frenzied and more
+systematic, they would find what King had found before them. She tried
+to think consecutively; she recalled all that King had told her of these
+men, all that Gratton had hinted at. She recalled with a shudder the
+look in the moist eyes of Steve Jarrold. It seemed to her that her only
+slim chance for safety lay in their finding the gold. For only gold,
+gold unlimited, could cause them to forget her.
+
+For an hour they sought tirelessly. It appeared that there were many
+fingers to the further end of the cave, narrow, irregular channels into
+which they pressed. Their faggots burned out; the smoke choked them;
+they coughed and cursed, came out for fresh air, dived into the dark
+again. The short day was passing; the entering light, where they had
+torn the canvas aside, grew dimmer. And still they searched.
+
+At last Brodie returned and stood looking from Gloria to Gratton.
+
+"One of you knows," he said shortly. "Which one?"
+
+"I swear to God----" began Gratton.
+
+"Shut up! Then it's you?" The little, shiny blue eyes, never so coldly
+evil, drew her own frightened eyes, fascinated and held them. "You know"
+
+"I don't know! All I know----"
+
+"Don't lie to me! It'll do you no good." He lifted a hand and held it
+over her, the enormous fingers apart and rigid. "I'll make you tell!"
+
+"Listen to me," she managed to cry out. "I don't know, I tell you. But I
+know where it might be. In a place you would never think of looking. Not
+in a thousand years----"
+
+Blue fire sprang up in the gleaming eyes. The other men, drawn close,
+watched and listened, their eyes alive with many lights.
+
+"What you know I'll know. I'll choke it out of you----"
+
+"I'll tell you--if you will keep your hands off me! I'll make a bargain
+with you. I'll show you the place; if there's gold there, I don't care
+what happens to it--if you'll only agree to let me alone--to let me
+go----"
+
+Brodie laughed at her. But Benny cried out:
+
+"Of course we'll let you go! What do you suppose we want of you? Once we
+get our hands on it she can go, Brodie. Tell her so, you big----"
+
+"Sure," said Brodie, with a wide grin. "It ain't women we're after this
+trick; it's something better. And--and it would be very nice of you to
+show us--Miss Gaynor." He treated her to a grinning mock respect, so
+obviously spurious that her fear of him rose higher, choking her. "Very
+nice, ain't it, boys?"
+
+"I--I am not sure what you'll find," whispered Gloria. "I only know
+that----Oh, dear God, I hope you find all the gold in the world!"
+
+Hastily she ran by Brodie toward the dark end of the cave. Then she
+stopped and tried to think; how many paces had King said? She came back
+to the fire; thirty, thirty-five? She began counting as she walked while
+they watched her wondering and following slowly after her. She found
+several boulders in her path; but she had not gone far enough. She kept
+on; thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three----She could hardly see about her.
+She stumbled against a rock in her way.
+
+"Try here," she said. Already Brodie and Steve Jarrold were at her side.
+"This rock. See if it will move----"
+
+They thrust her roughly aside. Brodie set down his rifle, laid his big
+hands on the boulder, and as if it had weighed only ten pounds, tossed
+it out of the way. He knelt, feeling along the ground. A sudden shout
+burst from him:
+
+"Down here! There's a big hole; there's a dark cave underneath. That's
+where it is?"
+
+They brought faggots; at the edge of the hole they hastily built another
+fire. They crowded round, peering down. Brodie tossed a brand through;
+it dropped a short distance, a few feet only, struck, and began to roll;
+it caught against a rock, smoked and smouldered, and went out. Brodie
+set his legs over the opening, called to the Italian to grab his rifle
+and keep an eye on Gloria and Gratton, and went down. The others crowded
+about the hole, waiting impatiently for him to go through, and then
+began piling down after him. Gloria could see their figures dimly; they
+went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had
+smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit.
+She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still
+downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see
+them. Suddenly they were silent. Then there were swift mutterings. And
+then a great, triumphant, many-voiced shout. In Gus Ingle's
+treasure-cache they had at last come to Gus Ingle's treasure. And, among
+other things, to the skeleton of Gus Ingle himself, sprawling here for
+sixty years in the dark over a great heap of gold.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIX_
+
+
+Swen Brodie, whose will had at all times directed, was now absolute
+dictator. Big and brutal and fearless, drunken with gold, he loomed
+above his companions, driving them, commanding them, swearing violently
+that they would do what he told them to do or he'd dash their brains
+out.
+
+"I led you to it," he reminded them in a great shouting voice. "But for
+me never a man of you would of smelled it. There's enough here to make a
+thousand men rich, and that's lucky for you! But we've got to hold what
+we got, and we got to get out of here with it--somehow. That somehow is
+for me to figure out. And, being as one man's got to run any job and the
+rest has got to take orders and take 'em on the jump, you're doing what
+I say! If any man jack of you don't like that, let him open his head
+right now!"
+
+"There's no sense scrappin'," muttered Benny. "An' we're all satisfied,
+I'd say. But there's no call to start wavin' a red flag."
+
+"We're going down to the lower cave," said Brodie. "Everything we can
+pry loose is going down with us. We'll pitch the loose chunks of gold
+over the cliff and we'll stow 'em away somewhere else--where King, if
+things break some way we don't look for, won't find 'em! We start right
+now, while there's daylight. What's more, we move our camp from down the
+canon to the cave below. Steve Jarrold, you and Tony are elected to that
+job, and you'd better get a move on. Bring up what grub's left, and the
+blankets and stuff. The rest of us will start in firing gold overboard
+and putting it somewhere more safe--all that's loose. And at that, think
+of the great, big, wide, yellow, rotten-soft seam of it down below!"
+
+"Where are you goin' to put it?" demanded Jarrold.
+
+"Not hiding it from you and Tony, Steve," cried Brodie sharply. "Put
+your suspicious ways in your pocket. And, if you're on the jump, you'll
+have our camp truck moved before we're done. Look alive, will you? A
+man never knows what's going to happen."
+
+"Why not leave it here until we know----?"
+
+"For one thing, because Mark King knows this place. Now, move! Come
+ahead, you other fellows. You, too, Gratton; we ain't forgot you." An
+uglier note crept into the harsh voice. "You can help. And so can you,"
+whirling on Gloria. "Woman or no woman, you got hands and feet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Night, pitch-black, had come when they had done. Gloria, scarcely able
+to stand from exhaustion, her body bruised, her hands and arms wounded
+from many a jagged rock as she had gone back and forth carrying heavy
+loads, went with the others into the lowest cave in which already the
+gold had been stowed away. She sank down wearily; she closed her eyes
+rather than watch the men about their fire, eating noisily, drinking
+noisily from the bottles which Steve and Tony had brought from their
+other camp. Trying to remain unnoticed in the shadows was Gratton.
+Brodie, having commanded that a rude rock wall like King's be built
+across the mouth of the cave to shut out the cold, and having laboured
+with the others at the task, came back to the fire. He took a long pull
+at a bottle, emptying it and smashing it to tinkling fragments as he
+hurled it behind him. He caught up a big piece of dried beef and gnawed
+at it like a dog; though Gloria kept her eyes away from him she could
+hear the tearing and grinding of the monstrous teeth.
+
+"It's been a day's work, at that," he said with a full mouth. "But we
+ain't done. I noticed how no man has said a word about how we split what
+we found."
+
+"There's five of us," said Benny quickly. "We split it five ways, even,
+like pardners."
+
+Brodie turned on him slowly, still rending at his meat, still clutching
+his rifle and holding it so that no man might forget that he held it.
+
+"Think so, Benny?" he said ponderously. "Being as I've worked on this
+lay a long time, since I let you others in on it, since I led you to
+it--think that's the fair way to split it? Now suppose you listen to
+me. You boys ain't mentioned a split because it was none of your say and
+you knew it. Say, in round numbers--but there's ten times that--that
+there's a million dollars tucked away here. Why, there's mines all
+through these mountains that never thought of stopping at a million;
+that was just a fair start! Well, to get going, say there's an even
+million. I get just half that; that leaves half a million, don't it?
+Now, shut up a minute!" he commanded truculently as more than one man
+stirred. "Listen to me. That's five hundred thousand to split between
+four of you; that's over a hundred thousand for every man jack of you.
+And that's what I call a fair split."
+
+They growled in their throats at that, but no man took it upon himself
+to speak out definitely, though they glanced sidewise among themselves.
+Benny, who always had a thought of his own, said quietly:
+
+"What are you doin' about Gratton? He'll claim his share, won't he? And,
+if you say him no, he'll shoot his face off, won't he?"
+
+"No," said Brodie. "He won't." He paused, swallowed the last of his
+beef, caught up a bottle from Benny's side, and drank deeply. Benny,
+afraid that this bottle, too, still nearly full, would be broken,
+hastily snatched it back when Brodie had done.
+
+"No," said Brodie heavily. "Gratton won't talk." He grew suddenly
+quick-spoken--he broke into a volley of accusation; his tongue lent
+itself to such a rush of vileness that Gloria, shrinking back, covered
+her ears with her hands. "Gratton stole grub. When grub-stealing was the
+same as slitting a man's throat. And what next does he plan? Why, to
+make trouble; to swear that Benny killed a man; that we was all in it;
+to get us all hung, if he can, or in the pen; then to grab what's ours.
+Look at him. You can see it in his frog eyes! He's done, that's what he
+is!" With a swift gesture his gun was at his shoulder.
+
+Gratton scrambled to his feet with a choking cry. Gloria, too, had
+sprung up, sick with horror. She looked from Brodie to Gratton, who was
+not two feet from her. She saw that he was panic-stricken; his fear was
+choking him, stopping his heart, paralysing his muscles. He wanted to
+run and could not; he tried to speak but now not even a whisper came
+from between his writhing lips.
+
+Slowly, an unshaken, senseless piece of machinery, Brodie raised his
+rifle. Now Gratton's voice returned to him; a strangling cry broke from
+his agonized soul. A hand, wildly outthrown, caught at Gloria's sleeve.
+
+"You, there," called Brodie, "stand aside. Unless you're wanting yours
+too!"
+
+Her own heart was stopping, her feet were leaded. She understood what he
+said--she knew that it was to her that he spoke--but she wouldn't
+believe, couldn't believe that he meant--_that_!
+
+Gratton was pressing tight to Gloria, seeking futilely to get behind
+her. He began to articulate--to beg--to promise----
+
+Brodie fired. A great reverberating roar filled the cavern. Gloria, her
+brain gone suddenly numb, felt the grip on her arm tighten convulsively.
+Then it relaxed--slowly. Gratton, his eyes bulging, his mouth wide open,
+was sinking----
+
+Gloria put her hands over her eyes and screamed. Again and again her
+scream broke from her. She tried to draw back, to run. But all her
+strength was gone. She crumpled and settled down almost as Gratton had
+done, and so close to him that she brushed him with her knee. She felt
+the body twitch. She leaped to her feet and ran blindly, screaming. She
+struck against the rock wall and sank down again.
+
+The wonder was that she did not swoon outright. As it was, her soul
+seemed to float dizzily out of her body and through an utter dark. She
+thought that she was dying. As though across a vast distance she heard
+voices.
+
+"Well?" It was the man who had done the shooting, his voice truculent.
+"Anybody got anything to say? Say it quick, if you have."
+
+There was a silence. Then a shuffling of feet. Then an answering voice,
+thin and querulous. It was Benny; he, too, had killed his man.
+
+"He had it coming," he said eagerly. "Any judge would say so. Stole
+every bit of grub when stealing grub is the same as cutting a man's
+throat, just like you said, Brodie. He had it coming. You done right."
+
+"You, Jarrold," demanded Brodie. "Got anything to say?"
+
+Again silence. Then again a voice, Jarrold's, saying hurriedly:
+
+"No. Benny's right. He had it coming. Damn fool."
+
+"And you, Brail? And you, Tony? Got anything to say? Talk lively!"
+
+Brail and Tony, like the others before them, were quick to excuse
+Brodie's act. They spoke briefly and relapsed into silence. Then,
+beginning far away and coming closer with the speed of an onrushing
+hurricane, Gloria heard heavy feet crunching in the dirt and gravel. A
+hard hand gripped her shoulder, jerking her to her feet.
+
+"You, friend," said Brodie. "What have you got to say about it?"
+
+She hung limp in his powerful hand, speechless.
+
+He dragged her closer to the firelight, peering at her with his
+red-flecked eyes.
+
+"Don't forget who she is," another voice was saying. Steve Jarrold's.
+"Remember what I told you."
+
+It was as though he prided himself on the fact that he alone knew her
+for Gaynor's daughter, and from it derived a sort of ownership of her;
+for while the others had never caught a glimpse of her until now, he had
+filled his eyes with her before. "We got to think this out. She came
+along with King. Got enough of him and switched to Gratton. That's like
+a woman."
+
+Brodie let her slip down and turned away from her. His mood was not so
+soon for a woman.
+
+"See she keeps her mouth shut," he said threateningly. "If she ain't got
+sense enough for that she ain't got sense to go on living."
+
+Benny stooped and feasted his eyes on her. Then, straightening up, he
+turned to Jarrold with nodding approval.
+
+"She skins anything _I_ ever saw," he admitted.
+
+In some strange way it seemed to Gloria that both Benny and Brodie had
+consigned her to Jarrold as though they admitted his prior claim; as
+though, among these three, she was looked upon as the property of one.
+She struggled to her feet.
+
+"Don't let her go," said Brodie. "That's all I got to say about her
+right now."
+
+She made an uncertain step toward the mouth of the cave. Jarrold moved
+at her side. She went faster. He put his hand on her.
+
+"Didn't you hear what he said?" he asked.
+
+She tried to break away and run. He held her One clear thought and only
+one formed in her mind. As she had never longed for anything in her
+life, she yearned for Mark King.
+
+"Mark!" she screamed, "Mark King! Save me."
+
+Jarrold clapped a big dirty hand over her mouth. He put a wiry arm about
+her and lifted her and carried her back to the fireside.
+
+"None of that," he growled in her ear. She shrank away as she felt the
+tensing of his arm and was conscious of the contact of his rag-clothed
+body. She grew silent, cowering. She heard a sound of something dragging
+and could not hide her fascinated eyes. Thus she watched as Brodie
+gripped the slack of Gratton's coat shoulders and shoved the body out
+into the snow. She even marked how the living man spat after the dead.
+
+"Go to the coyotes," he muttered. "They're your kind."
+
+Gloria knew that if she took a step Jarrold would clutch her again. So
+she stood very still. Brodie came back and threw some wood on the fire
+and squatted down over the provisions, seeming to be taking stock of
+them. Perhaps he was but strengthening his heart, digesting the evidence
+of the case, assuring himself again after the accomplished fact that the
+deed was just. Still squatting, he drank again, this time from the
+bottle which had been Gratton's. As he tilted it up she saw that it was
+two-thirds full. When he put it down with a long sigh and wiped his wet
+mouth it was not over half-full. He brooded over the fire, he gave no
+sign of noticing her.
+
+"Let me go," she said to Jarrold. "I am sick. I'd die here. Please let
+me go."
+
+Jarrold shifted and looked to his companions. Benny shook his head.
+
+"There ain't no hurry," he stated judicially. "What sort is she, Steve?"
+
+"She come up to Gaynor's place along with Gratton," answered Jarrold as
+though he knew all about her. "He was crazy gone on her, crazy enough to
+want to marry her, even. Sent me for the judge. Then Mark King showed
+up. She fell for him and gave Gratton the go-by. Then she comes into the
+mountains with King, I guess. Next she gets tired of him and goes back
+to Gratton."
+
+"'Frisco woman?" asked Benny.
+
+Jarrold nodded. Benny clacked his tongue. Brodie still brooded at his
+fire, his eyes sullen upon the fitful flame and red embers.
+
+"Where is King?" asked Brodie.
+
+"Where is King?" repeated Jarrold to Gloria.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, speaking with difficulty. "I ... Oh, for
+God's sake, let me go. I won't say anything about what I saw; I promise.
+If you will only let me go."
+
+"They promise easy and break promises easier," said Jarrold.
+
+Benny came up and touched Brodie on the shoulder. The squatting man
+started and scowled. Benny stooped and whispered. Brodie got up heavily
+and together the two withdrew, going further back in the cave. They
+talked, but Gloria could not catch the words. She saw the flare of one
+match after the other as they fell to smoking; the smell of strong
+tobacco came to her. She looked appealingly to Jarrold. He sidled
+closer, standing between her and the open.
+
+"I'll pay you a thousand dollars when I get back to San Francisco," she
+whispered eagerly. "Ten thousand! If you'll let me go now."
+
+Jarrold pondered, his stupid little eyes steady and unwinking on her.
+
+"A thousand dollars," he returned slowly, "wouldn't do me any good if I
+never got it: as I wouldn't if none of us got clear of this damn' snow;
+neither would ten I And it wouldn't do me any good if Benny and Brodie
+shot me full of lead. And it wouldn't be much, anyhow, if we got away
+with what we found to-day! Everything being as it is, I ain't half as
+strong for a thousand dollars, nor yet ten, right now as I am for you!
+And you know it, don't you?"
+
+He tried to ogle her, and her sick dread nearly overwhelmed her.
+
+"And you got sense, too," went on Jarrold, leering meaningly. "It won't
+be bad to have a man stuck on you that's got all kind of kale, will it,
+girlie?"
+
+As he poured out his wretched insinuations she was trembling; in her
+heart she thought that she had spoken truly and would die if they kept
+her here.
+
+"I am married. To Mr. King," she said as steadily as she could. "I want
+to go to him. You have no right to keep me here."
+
+"But you don't even know where he is," Jarrold reminded her slyly.
+
+Brodie and Benny had given over their whispering and came back to the
+fire, where Brail and the Italian looked up at them sharply. Here was
+another guarded conference among the four; Gloria, though she could
+watch them, was unable to hear what they were saying. Jarrold began to
+grow uneasy, so soon is distrust bred amongst those who have found
+treasure.
+
+Brodie made a last remark and laughed; the others laughed after him, and
+the four looked toward Jarrold and Gloria. Brodie, leaning back, caught
+up a bottle and drank, and thereafter passed the bottle to the man
+nearest him. Gloria was quick to see that he had set his rifle away
+somewhere against the rock wall in the shadows. Only Brail still clung
+to his gun; if he should set it aside--if there should come a moment
+when she could slip to the cave's mouth--in the outside dark, despite
+the deep snow, she would at least have a chance to escape from them.
+Even though she had nowhere to go, she longed wildly to be away from
+them. When their eyes roved toward her she thought that she would rather
+be dead, out in the clean, white snow, than here.
+
+She wondered if these men were as utterly callous as they seemed.
+Gratton, so newly dead, appeared forgotten. They laughed and drank, they
+smoked and spat, they soiled her with their eyes and their talk, quite
+as though they had neither knowledge nor memory of manslaughter done.
+Benny alone, for a brief period, appeared nervous. She wondered what he
+was doing; he had rolled back his coat-sleeve; he was jabbing at his
+bare forearm with something which now and then caught and reflected the
+firelight. After a long time she heard a long sigh from Benny; he pulled
+down his coat-sleeve. The others laughed again.
+
+"It's time we had a little talk," said Brodie out of a short silence.
+"Without anybody's skirt listening in. Leave her back there, further
+from the front door, Jarrold. Where she can't get an earful, and where
+she can't make a getaway; you come on over here a minute."
+
+Gloria made no resistance but sank down limply where Jarrold left her
+and watched him as he slouched over to the fire. She sought to hear
+their words, to read the looks on their faces. But she caught only a
+monotonous mutter, unintelligible but evil, and saw only the bottle
+passing from one to the other. Brodie finished it and hurled it from him
+so that it broke noisily. A few times she heard them laugh; she could
+distinguish Brodie's throaty, bull tone and Benny's nervous cackle.
+Jarrold did not appear made for mirth, and him she feared most of all;
+yes, even more than Brodie, whom she had seen do murder, and Benny who,
+she knew, had done murder. Brail and the Italian said little; they were
+men to follow where other men led. She fancied that several times Steve
+Jarrold's little eyes left the bottle, the faces of his companions, and
+even the pile of gold to quest for her face in the dark.
+
+"Come here," commanded Brodie.
+
+She started. He was calling to her! She got up and moved forward slowly.
+It was obey or be dragged to him. In the pale light by the fire,
+standing so that the blaze was between the five men and herself, she
+stopped. Until now she had been very white; suddenly she knew that her
+face must be flooded with bright red; she could feel the burn of it.
+The eyes of the men seemed veritably to disregard her clothes, to make
+her feel another Lady Godiva.
+
+"Gratton's, then King's, then Gratton's again?" Brodie chuckled. "I
+don't care whose before Gratton's the first time; but whose after
+Gratton's the last time, that's it! Who are you for, Bright-Eyes? Me or
+Steve?"
+
+"No!" she cried, her hands at her breast. "No! I am not like that! I was
+not Gratton's; I am ... I am Mark King's wife!"
+
+"So?" admitted Brodie good-humouredly. "Well, that cuts no ice; it's
+open and shut you'd gone back to Gratton. Now, come over here. Closer."
+
+"I won't," she shuddered. "You don't dare make me! I ... Oh, won't you
+let me go? You have your gold there; you have gold and whiskey; you
+don't want me...."
+
+"Whiskey, gold, and women," muttered Brodie. "They go together fine. And
+quit that little schoolgirl dodge; you make me sick. If you wasn't what
+you are, you wouldn't be where you are. Come over here and give us a
+kiss." He jerked from his pocket a dull lump, one of the smaller, richer
+nuggets. "I'm no pincher; come across and I'll give you a whole handful
+of gold!" His tone was playful.
+
+But Jarrold cut in less playfully:
+
+"Leave her alone, Brodie," he advised. "She don't cotton to you, and,
+what's more, whose gold is it, anyhow? We ain't divided yet. And
+she.... Well, if she belongs to anybody, she's mine!"
+
+"So?" Brodie's monosyllable was expressionless. "Well, I was asking
+_her_. And she ain't answered yet."
+
+Fast as the girl's heart beat, her thoughts sought to fly faster. These
+men were brutes; here she began, and, alas, here she ended. She had
+never known what brute meant; she had called Mark King that! And now, if
+only Mark King could hear her call, could come to her.... But that was
+less thought than prayer. These were brute beasts; their bestiality when
+they had first come upon her was terrifying; now, as the alcohol burned
+in their half-starved stomachs and the further intoxication of gold
+crept into their blood, her terror was boundless. In a moment she would
+feel upon her either the hands of Brodie or the hands of Jarrold. And
+she was helpless and hopeless. Until, since life connotes hope, there
+came a faint flicker of light. And with it came a sudden, compelling,
+swift longing. If she might set them to quarrelling over her, to send a
+snarling man at a snarling man's throat.... Her hands dropped to her
+sides, and were clenched; she lifted her chin; with all that strength
+that lay in the innermost soul of Gloria King she strove to drive her
+great fear out of her eyes, to hide it from their wolfish regard, to
+summon up in its stead a mocking inscrutability. There was but one thing
+left to do, but one part to play----Oh, God, if she could play the
+part! She stood motionless, silent; she battled with herself; she
+struggled mightily for a calm utterance. And in the end she said in a
+tone which she managed to make full of challenge:
+
+"Which of you is the better man?"
+
+They stared at her, all of them puzzled by her change of attitude as by
+her words. Then Brodie, with a noisy explosion of laughter, smote his
+thigh and, after him, Benny giggled foolishly.
+
+"The better man!" Brodie shouted. "Hear her, Steve, old horse? The
+better man!" He lunged to his feet; he stood solidly, unswerving though
+more than ever slow and ponderous. "I'll go you, Steve. The lady's
+right; she goes to the man who's man enough to get her. That's big Swen
+Brodie, the best man in these mountains! I'll go you for her, Steve. By
+God, she's worth it, too."
+
+But Steve Jarrold sat where he was, glaring.
+
+"She's sly," he grunted, cursing before and after. "Can't you see what
+she's up to? She wants us to fight one another; she'd be glad if we both
+killed one another. You don't understand women, Brodie; they're sly like
+cats."
+
+"Make a auction out'n it!" was Benny's mirthful suggestion. "Why just
+you two guys, anyway? Where do you get that stuff? Free for all, that's
+what I say!" He waved his bottle. "Auction her off, that's what I say!
+I'll give a bottle of whiskey for her; hey, Brodie?"
+
+Brodie had laughed when Jarrold spoke; he laughed now. But he looked to
+Jarrold and not Benny as he spoke; he extended his great hands, the
+fingers crooked, curving slowly inward, like steel hooks.
+
+"I can eat you alive, and you know it, Steve," he mocked. "What's more,
+_she_ knows it! That's what she wants; she's picked me, Steve! That's
+just her way of letting you down easy; she don't aim to hurt your
+feelings. Will you come on and take a fall for her? Or is the lady mine?
+What's the word? Speak up, man!"
+
+Gloria saw that Jarrold, though he sent a black, scowling look at the
+bigger man, was afraid. And yet they must fight--they must be driven to
+blows--she must somehow set them at each others' throats. It was so hard
+to think at all! Yet she could think forward to one occurrence only that
+could give her respite and a frail chance for freedom: if they would
+only fight as, in some dim instinctive way, it was given her to
+understand that such men would fight once a wrathful blow had been given
+and taken--if the others would only watch them and not her, if she could
+come to one of the rifles--or outside----
+
+She turned to Jarrold. She gathered herself for the final supreme
+effort. She made her eyes grow bright through sheer force of will; she
+made her lips cease trembling and curve to a smile at the man; she even
+concealed her loathing and put a ringing note, almost of laughter, into
+her voice as she said softly:
+
+"I know you are not afraid--and I think--yes, I am sure, that you could
+whip him!"
+
+Steve Jarrold's eyes flashed. Then they left hers lingeringly; Brodie
+was stamping impatiently, calling to him.
+
+"Take her!" snapped Jarrold. "Hell take both of you."
+
+The laughter and challenge went out of Swen Brodie's bloodshot eyes; a
+new red surged all of a sudden into them. He turned and came slowly
+about the fire, his arms still uplifted, the crooking fingers toward
+Gloria.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXX_
+
+
+Scream after scream burst from Gloria's lips; taut nerves seemed to snap
+all through her body like over-stressed violin strings. She ran, ran
+anywhere, ran blindly. She ran into Benny, who clutched at her; she fled
+away from him, back toward the darker end of the cave. The low rumble of
+a man's laughter answered her; drunken laughter from Brodie. Whether
+drunk with whiskey or with gold or with lust did not matter; drunk he
+was. Gloria's shriek rose like a madwoman's; Brodie's thick laughter was
+its sinister echo. Another man called out something; the slow, heavy
+feet of Swen Brodie were following, following. Boots scuffling, Brodie
+pursuing with a wide, patient grin; he was in no hurry, he was so sure
+of her!
+
+His hands were almost on her. Gloria whipped aside and ran again. He
+kept between her and the front of the cave; with all of his grinning
+patience he was as watchful as a cat. She was driven back and back,
+deeper and deeper into the narrowing tunnel. He came on. He would be
+upon her in another half-dozen slow, ponderous strides. She could not
+pass him; she could not dart forward and out; his arms were widely
+extended on either side. He was expecting that. She could only save
+herself from him second by second--and the seconds were running out
+swiftly.
+
+She prayed to God in wild passionate supplication. She prayed for sudden
+death, death before those horrid, crooked fingers touched her. But while
+she prayed to God it was of Mark King that she thought. And Mark King,
+because of her usage of him, was miles and miles away, so far that her
+despairing shrieks died without penetrating one-millionth part of the
+empty wastes across which he had trudged. And still she drew back and
+back and still she prayed for the miracle as she had done that day when
+she had seen King coming toward her with a rope in his hand, prayed for
+the earth to split asunder, for a flame to leap out and consume the
+beast crowding closer upon her--to consume him or herself.
+
+At last she was at the end. The end of the passage-way, the end of hope.
+Brodie came on, his arms out. She could hear him breathing. She could
+smell the whiskey he reeked with.... Beyond him she saw Jarrold
+squatting by the fire; Brail leaning on his rifle, guarding the
+entrance; Benny and the Italian lounging in the shadows. Figures of
+hell, watching Brodie's actions with aloof interest ...Brodie made the
+last step; she felt his hand on her arm, closing, drawing her forward;
+the last agonized shriek burst from her....
+
+"Oh, God--oh, dear God----"
+
+She did not hear and Brodie did not hearken to a sudden new sound in the
+cave grown suddenly still; the sound of a cascade of loose stones. They
+came with a rush, they piled up near the middle of the open cave,
+dropping from the shadowy rock roof above. But Benny, always on nerve
+edge, shrilled:
+
+"Look out! A cave-in"
+
+She heard--God had heard----Better crushed under a falling mountain
+than in those brute arms.
+
+And then she saw. From ten feet above, straight down dropped something
+else. Taut nerves of those who saw fancied it a great boulder falling.
+But no boulder this, which, striking the little pile of rocks, became
+animated, rose, whirled, and----
+
+"Mark!" screamed Gloria. "Mark!"
+
+Turned to stone, incredulous of their eyes, bewildered beyond the power
+to move, were those who saw. It was Brail who first understood, Brail
+the one man with a gun in his hands. He whipped it up and began firing,
+nervous and excited. It was after the second shot that King's rifle
+answered him; it roared out like the crash of doom in Gloria's ears; she
+saw the stabbing spurt of fire. Brail sagged where he stood, crumpled
+and pitched forward, his rifle clattering loudly against the rocks.
+
+But by now the brief stupor that had locked the other men in staring
+inaction was gone. Gloria saw figures leaping forward; she knew that
+Brodie's hands had relinquished her; she saw Brodie bearing down on
+King, roaring inarticulately as he went; she saw Benny and Jarrold and
+the Italian bearing down upon him; King was in the midst of all that.
+They were upon him before Brail's head had struck the ground. They gave
+him no time, no space for another shot. He swept his clubbed rifle high
+over his head; she heard the blow when he struck, the hideous sound of a
+crushing skull. A man went down, she did not know which one. Only it was
+not Mark--thank God it was not Mark King!
+
+And now King had a little room and an instant of his own as two other
+men swerved widely about the falling figure. He fired again, not putting
+the rifle to his shoulder. Another man fell, lay screaming, rolled
+aside--was forgotten.
+
+"Where's my rifle?" Brodie was yelling.
+
+He couldn't find it in the dark; he couldn't stop to grope for it. But
+Gloria knew; she remembered. She ran for it, found it, straightened up
+with it in her shaking hands.
+
+Again King was using his weapon as a club, since they pressed him so
+closely. Again came that terrible sound; Steve Jarrold it was who went
+down. And with it another sound, that of hard wood splintering. The
+rifle was broken over his head, the stock whirled close to Gloria, King
+had only the short heavy steel barrel in his hands.
+
+Benny had circled to the far side; Brodie had caught up a great thick
+limb of wood. They were coming at King from two sides at once.... Gloria
+tried to aim, pulled the trigger, tugging frantically. Only then she
+remembered to draw the hammer back; it was Brodie's ancient rifle and
+she struggled to get it cocked. She shuddered at the report. The bullet
+sang in front of Benny, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He was near
+the cave's mouth. Gloria pointed, forgot the hammer remembered, got the
+gun cocked and fired again. Benny plunged wildly forward; she did not
+know if she had hit him. He hurled himself headlong toward the narrow
+exit and through.
+
+She had forgotten Brodie and King! She turned toward them. She did not
+dare shoot now; King was in the way. He moved aside as if he understood
+her trouble; Brodie, grown unthinkably quick of foot, moved with him.
+Brodie, too, understood. She saw him leap in and strike. The blow
+landed, a glancing blow. King seemed to have grown tired; he moved so
+slowly. But he did move and toward Brodie; he swung his clubbed
+rifle-barrel and beat at Brodie's great face with it. Beat and missed
+and almost fell forward. Again Brodie struck; again King beat at him.
+They moved up and down, back and forth; Brodie was cursing under his
+breath, and at last jeering. King was moving more and more slowly; his
+left arm swung as if it were useless; Brodie swept up his club in both
+hands, grunting audibly with every blow.... Oh, if she could only
+shoot ... if she only dared shoot! But Brodie, nimble on his feet that
+had been so patiently slow just now, kept King always in front of him,
+between him and Gloria's rifle.
+
+"I'll get you, King. I'll get you," shouted Brodie, his voice exulting.
+"I always wanted to get you--right!"
+
+There was a crash, the splintering of wood against steel. Both men had
+struck together; Brodie's club had broken to splinters. And the
+rifle-barrel in King's hands flew out of his grip and across the cave,
+ringing out as it struck. The two men, their hands empty, stood a moment
+staring at each other. Then Brodie shouted, a great shout of triumph,
+and sprang forward. And Mark King, steadying himself, ignoring the hot
+trickle of blood down his side where Benny's second bullet had torn his
+flesh, met him with a cry that was like Brodie's own. In his hot brain
+there was no thought of handicap, of odds, of Brodie's advantage. There
+was only the mad rage which had hurled him here, one man against five in
+a girl's defence, that and a raving, unleashed blood lust, the desire,
+overshadowing all else, to have Brodie's brute throat in his hands, to
+batter Brodie's brute face into the rocks. They met in their onrush like
+two bodies hurled from catapults; they struck and grappled and fell and
+rolled together, one now as they strove, locked in the embrace of death.
+An embrace in which Brodie's was the greater weight, the greater girth,
+the greater strength--and Mark King's the greater sheer, clean manhood.
+
+Gloria ran toward them, the rifle shaking in her hands. Brodie feared
+her and strove to turn and twist so that she could not shoot. King saw
+her and shouted in a terrible voice which was not like Mark King's
+voice:
+
+"Don't shoot--let me--"
+
+She did not heed; she would shoot--if ever she could be sure that she
+would not shoot him. But she did not dare--they thrashed about so madly.
+They were like octopuses in mortal combat; their arms flailing seemed
+more than four arms----
+
+Brodie had his hands at King's throat--King's hands were at Brodie's
+throat. She saw Brodie's bestial face gloating. He was so confident now.
+She saw his great hands shut down, sinking into the flesh. King's face,
+when she got one swift glimpse of it, was set, void of expression.
+King's hands, with tendons bursting, sank deeper and deeper. Then she
+understood that each man had the grip that he wanted; that it was a mere
+matter now of strength and endurance and will--and that glorious thing,
+sheer, clean manhood.
+
+They were breathing terribly; they lay stiller, stiller. They did not
+thrash about so much. Their eyes were starting out of their sockets;
+their faces were turning purple--or was it the firelight? Men's faces
+could not look like that--not while the men lived. They gasped now; they
+did not breathe.
+
+One of Brodie's hands came away hastily. He began battering at King's
+face, battering like a steam-piston. The blows sounded loudly; blood
+broke out under the terrific pounding. King's grip did not alter, did
+not shift. His eyes were shut but he clung on, grim, looking a dead man,
+but a man whose will lasted on after death. Brodie wrenched; they rolled
+over. Still King's hands did not leave their grip.
+
+They were on their feet, staggering up and down, two men moulded
+together like one man. Brodie struck blow after blow, and with every
+thud Gloria winced and felt a pain through her own body. And still King
+held his grip, both hands sunk deep into the thick throat.
+
+They were apart, two blind, staggering men. What parted them they did
+not know and Gloria could not see. Thus they stood for a second only.
+Brodie lifted his hands--weak hands rising slowly, slowly--uncertainly.
+King saw him through a gathering mist; Brodie opened his mouth to draw
+in great sobbing breaths of air. King, the primal rage upon him, saw the
+great double teeth bared, and thought that his enemy was laughing at
+him. It was King who gathered himself first and struck first. All of the
+will he had, all of the endurance left in his battered body, all of the
+strength God gave him, he put into that blow. He struck Brodie full in
+the face, between the little battered blue eyes. And Brodie fell. He
+rose; he got to his knees and sagged up and forward. King's shout then
+was to ring through Gloria's memory for days to come; he bore down on
+Swen Brodie, caught him about the great body, lifted him clear of the
+floor and hurled him downward. Brodie struck heavily, his head against
+the rocks. And where he fell he lay--stunned or dead.
+
+"Come," said King to Gloria. "Come quick."
+
+He turned toward the cave's mouth and with one hand began to drag away
+the stones so that they could go out. His other hand was pressed to his
+side. His work done, he picked up the rifle at his feet and went out.
+Gloria, swaying and stumbling, came after him. Neither spoke a word as
+they made a slow way through the snow. King went unsteadily with
+dragging feet. They climbed the cliff laboriously. They were in their
+cave--it was like home. She dropped down on the fir-boughs, stumbling to
+them in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXI_
+
+
+Gloria did not know if she had slept or fainted. When she regained
+consciousness, though it was pitch dark and dead still, there was no
+first puzzled moment of uncertainty. That last wonderfully glad thought
+which had filled brain and heart when she sank down on her fir-boughs
+had persisted throughout her moments or hours of unconsciousness,
+pervading her subconscious self gloriously, flowering spontaneously in
+an awakening mind: Mark King had come back to her in her moment of
+peril; he had battled for her like the great-hearted hero that he was,
+he had saved her and had brought her home. Back home! She had prayed to
+God when utter undoing seemed inevitable, when death had seemed more
+desirable than life, and He had answered. He had sent Mark King to her!
+
+She was saved, and though it was cold and dark and still, she felt her
+heart singing within her. Having lived through all that she had endured,
+having been brought safely through it, she was as confident of the
+future as though never had evil menaced her. She felt new strength
+coursing through her blood, new hope rising within her, new certainty
+that all was right with her and Mark King, that all would be right
+eternally. Terror and anguish and despair that had surged over her in so
+many great flooding waves now receded and were gone; in their place
+shone the great flame of life triumphant; she thrilled through with the
+largeness of life.
+
+Never, thank God, would she forget how Mark King, forgetful of self,
+contemptuous of the frightful odds against him, had hurled himself into
+the midst of those drunken brutes; never would she forget how godlike he
+had stood forth in her eyes as those others leaped upon him and he beat
+them back. Forgetful of self--he had always been forgetful of self! She
+could not think of him as she had ever thought of any other man she had
+ever known--for what other man would have come to her as he had done,
+courting death gladly if only he could stand between her and the hideous
+thing that attacked her? The rush of great events had swept her mind
+clear of pettiness and prejudice; they bore her on from familiar
+view-points and to new levels; like roaring winds out of a tempestuous
+north they cleared away the wretched fogs that had enwrapped a
+self-centred girl; they made her see a man in the naked glory of his
+sheer, clean manhood.
+
+To her now he stood forth clothed in magnificence. She could think upon
+him only in superlatives. He was fearless and he was unselfish; he was
+kind and generous and as honest-hearted as God's own clear sunshine.
+She knew now, suddenly and for the first time, because he had shown her,
+what the simple word _man_ meant. How far apart he stood from such as
+Brodie, the beast! How high above such as Gratton!--And once, in the
+city, she had been ashamed of him and had turned to Gratton! Because he
+had appeared to her without just so much black cloth upon his back cut
+in just such a style! And now how bitterly she was ashamed of her shame.
+But for only an instant. Thereafter she forgot shame of any sort and
+exulted in her pride of him and in her pride that she was proud.
+
+Yes, in glad defiance of a Gloria that had been, she was proud of the
+manhood of a man who had beaten her! He had been right; he had done that
+as the last argument with an empty-headed, selfish girl who deserved no
+better at his hands, a girl who had been like the Gratton whom she so
+abhorred and despised--despised even in death. She had been like Gratton
+the cowardly, contemptible, petty, selfish--dishonourable! All along
+Mark King had been right and she had been wrong, at every step. He had
+been gentle and patient after a fashion which now set her wondering and,
+in the end, lifted him to new heights in her esteem. When, without
+loving him, she had lied with her eyes and married him, that had been a
+Gratton sort of trick--like stealing his partners' food----
+
+_Without loving him_! No, thank God; not that! She had always loved him;
+she loved him now with her whole heart and soul, with an adoration she
+had saved for him. When in the springtime she had ridden with him
+through the forest-lands, when their hands had touched, when he had held
+her in his arms--when she had seen him that first time from the stairway
+and had looked down into his clear eyes and through them into his
+heart--she had always loved him! She wanted suddenly to go to him, to
+slip into his arms, to make herself humble in pleading for his
+forgiveness. She was not afraid that he would not forgive; he was so big
+of heart that he would understand.
+
+"Mark!" she called softly.
+
+In the utter dark she could see nothing. The absolute stillness was
+unbroken. She called anxiously: "Mark, where are you?" There was no
+answer. She sprang up and called to him over and over. When still there
+was no reply she began a hurried search for a match; there were still
+some upon the rock shelf. Then it was that she stumbled over something
+sprawling on the floor.
+
+"Mark!" she cried again. "Oh--Mark----"
+
+She found a match; she got some dry twigs blazing. In their light she
+saw him. He lay on his back like a dead man, his arms outflung, his
+white face turned up toward hers. There was a great smear of blood
+across his brow, the track of a bloody hand as it had sought to wipe a
+gathering dimness out of his eyes. The fire burned brighter; she saw it
+glisten upon a little pool of blood at her side. She knelt and bent over
+him, scarcely breathing. If he were dead--if, after all this, Mark King
+were dead----His eyes were closed; his face was deathly white, looking
+the more ghastly from the dark stain across it. She lifted her own hand
+that had touched his side and looked at it with wide frightened eyes;
+it, too, was red. At that moment King's face was no ghastlier than hers.
+
+For a little while she sat motionless, her brain reeling. But almost
+immediately her brain cleared and there stood forth as in a white light
+the one thought: _Mark King was about to die, and he must not die_! For
+he was Mark King, valiant and full of vigour and vitality, a man strong
+and hardy and lusty, a man who would not be beaten! He was the victor,
+not the vanquished. And, further, she, Gloria King, Mark King's wife,
+would not let him die! He was hers, her own; she would hold him back to
+her. Had he not come to her when she needed him, and done his uttermost
+for her? If now she was filled with life and the pulsating love of life,
+it was his doing. And now it was her task--her glorious, God-given
+privilege!--to do for him, to fight for him, ignoring the odds against
+her, to save him. She sprang up filled with stubborn, confident
+determination. He was hers and she would not let him die. She had
+learned to fight; she had fought against Gratton, against Brodie; she
+would fight as she had never done until now against death itself.
+
+He was big and she little, yet she dragged his bed close to his side and
+got her arms about him and lifted him enough to get him upon the
+blankets. She ran to her fire and piled and piled wood on it until the
+flames roared noisily and brightened everything about her. She ran back
+to him and knelt again and slipped her hand inside his shirt, seeking
+his heart. The deep chest was barely warmer than death; the heart
+stirred only faintly. But it did beat. She sought the wound Brail's
+bullet had made and found it in his side. There was blood on her hands
+but she did not notice it now. She found where the bullet had entered
+and where it had torn its way out through his flesh. She did not know if
+any vital organ lay in that narrow span or if any major artery had been
+severed or if the rifle-ball had merely glanced along the ribs and been
+deflected by them; she only knew that he had lost much blood, that it
+must have gushed freely while he strove with Swen Brodie, and that now
+it must be stopped utterly. There seemed to be so little blood left in
+the pale, battered body! She did see how in the intense cold it had
+coagulated over the wounds, checking its own flow. But she did not mean
+for him to lose another precious drop. And then it was that Gloria's
+hands achieved the first really important work they had ever done in her
+life. She tore bits away from her own under-garments and made soft pads
+over each wound; with their butcher-knife she cut a long strip from a
+blanket. This she wound about his limp body, making a long, tight
+bandage. All this time he had not moved; she had to bend close to be
+sure that he still breathed. She got snow and wiped his face clean of
+blood, touching the closed eyelids gently.
+
+When still the eyes remained shut and he looked like one already dead,
+she longed wildly for some stimulant. There was coffee; she would make
+hot coffee do. She got the coffee-pot among the coals, filled it with
+snow to melt, recklessly poured coffee into it. Then, while she awaited
+the slow heating, she returned to him and for the first time saw how wet
+his boots were.
+
+She got the boots off and felt his feet; she stooped over them until
+for an instant she laid her cheek against a bare foot. It was like ice.
+She recalled how he had ministered to her. She heated a blanket and
+wrapped it about his feet and ankles. She heated other blankets and put
+them about him. The canvas at the cave's mouth had been torn down; she
+got it back into place to make it warmer for him. She put fresh wood on
+the fire. She hastened the coffee boiling all that she could by placing
+bits of dry wood close all about the pot.
+
+She knelt at King's side; she got an arm under his shoulders and managed
+to lift him a little; she rolled up a blanket and put it under his head.
+Then she brought the cup of black coffee and with a spoon got some of it
+between his teeth. She spilled more than went into his mouth but she was
+rewarded by seeing the throat muscles contract as involuntarily he
+swallowed. Thus, patient and determined and very, very gentle with him,
+she got several spoonfuls of coffee down him. Thereafter she let him lie
+back again while she sought to plan cool-thoughtedly just how she must
+care for him, just what she could do for him. She knew little of nursing
+and yet knew instinctively that his condition was precarious, that he
+must be kept warm and still, that what strength remained in him must be
+saved by proper nourishment. _Proper nourishment_!
+
+There were scraps of food left; Brodie and his men, in their gold fever,
+had not so much as thought to gather up the few bits of scanty
+provisions. She began taking careful stock; she found a scrap of bread
+that had been knocked to the floor and kicked aside; she picked it up
+and, carrying a torch with her, began seeking any other fallen morsels.
+In this search she came once to the hole in the floor through which
+Brodie and the others had gone down into Gus Ingle's treasure-chamber.
+And at its side she found something which at this moment was a thousand
+times more precious in her staring eyes than if it had been so much
+solid gold. It was a great hunk of fresh meat. Instantly she knew how it
+had come here. King had killed his bear! That was why he had returned
+to-night. He had brought it here; had missed her; had dropped it here.
+And then? She understood now, too, how he had come so unexpectedly into
+the lowest cave. He had gone down through this hole and had known a
+passage-way which led on down. She stood by the hole, bending over it,
+listening, wondering if any man stirred down there. But that was but for
+a moment. She caught up the bear meat, carrying it in both arms, and
+hurried back to her fire.
+
+Though she knew little more of cookery than of nursing, she set about
+the very sensible task of making a strong broth. The proper nourishment
+that had seemed so impossible a moment ago was now ready at hand.
+
+"God is good," she whispered, a sudden new gush of love and reverence in
+her heart. "He will help me now."
+
+For herself, since her own strength must be kept up, she cooked a strip
+of the meat on the coals. Then she went to King and for a long time sat
+at his side, her eyes upon his white face, her hand clasping his. Again
+and again she stooped and laid her cheek against the strong but now lax
+fingers; once she put her lips to his forehead; when she sat back her
+eyes were wet and the slow tears welled up and trickled unnoticed down
+her cheeks. But they were tears which left the heart sweetened, tears of
+tenderness, of gratitude, of sympathy and love.
+
+As the night wore on, since she was determined that King should not be
+chilled, her fire consumed a great part of the wood. More wood must be
+brought; to-night or in the morning. She went to the canvas flap and
+looked out. There were clouds, but also there were wide rifts through
+which the stars blazed in all of that glorious crystalline beauty of the
+stars of the winter Sierra. While she stood looking out the moon, almost
+at the full, gilded a cloud edge, and after a moment broke through like
+an augury of joy. Stars and moon made the wilderness over into a land of
+fairy; at ten million points the snow caught the light, flashing it back
+as though the white robe spread over the solitudes were sewn with gems.
+Never had the world looked so white as now with a rare light shining
+upon its smooth purity; it was clean and fresh, gloriously spotless.
+Where black shadows lay they but accentuated the whiteness across which
+they fell.
+
+Out of this sleeping, enchanted land, rising above it, sweeping across
+it, a low voice like a whisper came to her, a whisper in her ears that
+became a song in her heart. The snow that had, clung to the pines,
+muting their needles and stilling their branches, had dropped on during
+the day. Now the night wind which drove the clouds lingered through the
+pine tops and set them swaying gently in the vast, harmonic rhythm which
+is like the surging of a distant ocean. The everlasting whisper of the
+pines, that ancient hushed voice which through the countless centuries
+has never been still save when briefly silenced by the snow; which had
+borne its message to Gloria when on that first day she went with Mark
+King into the mountains; which many a time had mingled with her fancies,
+tingeing them, leading her to dream of another life than that of city
+streets; which now, suddenly, set chords vibrating softly in her own
+bosom. All these days it had been stilled; had it called her ears would
+have been deaf to it. But now insistently it bore a message to her, such
+a message as from now on she would hear in the quiet voices of her
+little camp-fire. To her, attuned by those varying emotions which
+latterly had had their wills with her, it was the ancient call; the
+summons back to the real things of his, to the bigness and the true
+meaning of life. Rising in response to it, awakening in her own breast,
+were the old human, instinctive influences, sprouting seeds in the blood
+of her forbears. It was the eternal call of the mother earth that one
+like Gloria must hear and hearken to and understand before she could set
+firm feet upon the ashes of a vanquished self to rise to the true things
+of womanhood. It was the
+
+  "... one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated--so:
+  Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
+  Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"
+
+Gloria understood. In her heart, lifting her eyes from the white glory
+of the earth to the bright glory of the sky, she thanked God that she
+understood.
+
+Benny and the Italian were still alive and might be near? That did not
+in any way affect the fact that there must be wood brought for King's
+fire. She turned back for the rifle and the rope. She saw that King had
+not stirred; that he seemed plunged in a deep, quiet sleep. She stood
+over him, looking down at him with her love for him softening her eyes.
+He was going to get well--_if she did her part_. And her part was so
+clearly indicated; to give him broth and to keep his fire going. She did
+not hesitate and she was not afraid as she went down the cliffs. She
+meant to be Mark King's mate; she meant to be worthy of being his mate.
+He had not hesitated, he had not been afraid, when one man against five
+he dropped down into the lowest cave. She, like him, was of pioneer
+stock. She remembered that impressive monument to pioneer fortitude
+which stands in the mountains where the highway runs by Donner Lake; as
+in a vision she saw the little group that crowns the rugged pile. The
+woman, the pioneer mother, holding her baby to her breast, pressing on
+with her own mate, looking fearlessly ahead, daring what might come, not
+lagging behind the man, rather ready to lead the way should he falter.
+It was a glorious thing to have blood like that in her veins; it was the
+finest thing in the world to be a woman like that woman.
+
+She stepped down into the packed snow at the base of the cliffs. Here
+she stood looking up and down the gorge for any sign of Benny or of the
+Italian or of any other of Brodie's crowd who might be alive and astir.
+But she saw no one; even Gratton's body, where it had been tumbled out
+into the snow, was hidden. She heard the deep, quiet breathing of the
+pines; the canon stream rushed and gurgled and babbled, shouting as it
+leaped over fails, flinging spray which the moonlight and starlight made
+over into jewels.
+
+Gloria worked at her fuel-gathering, working in the snow until her hands
+and feet were nearly frozen. But her heart was warm. Though she made
+haste and was ever watchful and on the alert, her mind filled with such
+thoughts as had never come trooping into it before. Fragmentary, they
+were like bright bits spinning about a common centre. She looked up at
+the wide sky and it was borne in upon her that the universe was mighty
+and wonderful and infinite; she looked into her own heart and saw where
+she had been small and silly and finite. She saw that the snow-covered
+ridges stretching endlessly were like a concrete symbol of that infinity
+which extended above and about her; that they were clothed in beauty.
+She knew that when Mark King was made whole again and had forgiven her
+and they stood together, hand locked in hand, she would have no fear any
+more for his mountains, but rather a great, abiding love. She saw that
+her life had been empty; that only love could fill it, love and service
+such as she was rendering to-night. Pretty clothes, dress suits, did not
+matter, and strong, loyal hearts did matter. To-night she would rather
+have Mark King hold her in his arms and say "I love you" than to have
+all of the red gold in all of the world.
+
+Three times that night she made the trip up and down the cliffs,
+bringing wood. At the end, though near exhaustion, she sank down by the
+fire for but a few minutes. The bear meat was boiling and bubbling; she
+poured off a little of the broth, cooled it, and then, as she had given
+King the coffee, she forced some of the strong soup between his teeth.
+She touched his cheek and dared hope that it was not so icy cold; she
+chafed his feet and wrapped them again in a not blanket. And then, with
+all of her covers given to him, she drew a coat about her shoulders and
+sat down at his side, on the edge of his blankets. And here, throughout
+the night, she sat, dozing and waking, rising again and again to keep
+the fire burning.
+
+She started up to find it full day; she had been asleep, her head
+against his knee. The fire was dying down; she jumped up and replenished
+it, setting the broth back among the coals. King lay as he had lain last
+night; his continued coma was like a profound quiet sleep. He was very
+pale, and yet certainly not paler than when she had first looked upon
+his blood-smeared face.
+
+She went to the canvas screen and looked out. The sun was shining. And
+oh, the glory of the sun after these long dark days! The sky was a deep,
+serene, perfect blue. The snow shone and glittered and sparkled
+everywhere. Down in the gorge she saw a little bird in quick flight. It
+skimmed the water; it Lighted on a rock in the spray; it put back its
+head and seemed to be bursting with a joy of song. A water-ouzel! A
+friend from out a happy past----To Gloria it seemed that the world was
+full of promise.
+
+All day long she ministered to King, going back and forth tirelessly,
+since love and hope inspired every step she made. None of Brodie's men
+had come; she felt a strange confidence that they would not come. They
+were afraid of King as jackals are afraid of a lion; further, they did
+not know that he was wounded. She thought little of them, having much
+else to think of. She wound King's watch, guessing at the time; she
+judged it sensible to force a little nourishment upon him at regular
+intervals and brought him his broth every two hours.
+
+At a little before noon Gloria, stooping over the fire, started erect
+and whirled about. King's eyes were open! She ran to him, dropping on
+her knees beside him, catching up his hand, whispering:
+
+"Mark! Oh, Mark--thank God!"
+
+He looked at her strangely. There was a puzzled, bewildered expression
+in his eyes. He strove to move and again looked at her with that strange
+bewilderment. She saw his lips move--he wanted to say something, to ask
+something and, deserted now by all of that magnificent strength on which
+he had always leaned, was as weak as a baby.
+
+"Don't try to talk, Mark," she cried softly. "Please; not yet. You are
+better; everything is all right."
+
+She gave his hand a last squeeze and hurried back to the fire; his eyes,
+still shadow-filled, followed her curiously. She came back to him with
+cup and spoon. This he could understand; he opened his lips for the
+spoon, he accepted what she gave him and when she had finished lay
+looking up at her wonderingly.
+
+"You mustn't talk, Mark," she commanded him gently as, again, she knelt
+by him. "You are getting so much stronger! I'll tell you everything. It
+was last night; you have been unconscious ever since. None of the other
+men have been near; I haven't even seen one of them."
+
+She saw his eyes clear.
+
+"Mark," she whispered, "we are safe here because--because you are so
+wonderful! You were like a god--the bravest, noblest, best man in, all
+the world! You came in time; you saved me, Mark; they had not put hand
+upon me. And I am well and strong now; I am going to take care of you;
+you must just lie still and get well--_Oh, Mark_----"
+
+His eyes closed again; he seemed very faint, very weary. Hushed, she sat
+tense, her eyes never moving from his face. After a long time he opened
+his eyes again; he tried again to speak; when the words did not come he
+managed a strange, shadowy smile with his bloodless lips and in another
+moment had sunk again into that heavy sleep that was so like death.
+
+When next, two hours later, she again brought his broth, he stirred at
+her touch and awoke. This time his eyes cleared swiftly; he remembered
+the other awakening and her words. He looked at her long and searchingly
+and she understood what lay back of that look; he was wondering how she
+managed, how she endured to care for them both, how without his active
+aid she withstood hardship. And this time she smiled at him.
+
+"I have been dining sumptuously on bear steaks," she told him lightly.
+"And I have slept and kept warm. There has been no one near. And the
+days are fine again. It was clear last night; the sun has been shining
+all day. Now, when you've had your own lunch, I'll tell you anything you
+want to know. Only you must not try to talk yet, Mark; not until
+to-morrow. I want you strong and well again, you know; it's lonesome
+without you."
+
+She gave him, for the first time, a whole cup of broth, glorying in the
+certainty that already he was stronger. But even yet his weakness was so
+great that, before she had spoken a dozen sentences, he was asleep
+again. Clearly, even to Gloria, if but a little more blood had ebbed
+out of the wounded side, he would never have awakened; clearly to
+Gloria, triumphant, it had been she who had held him back from death.
+She, Gloria King, alone, had fought the great grim battle; hers was the
+victory. For at last she knew with her brain, as all along she had known
+in her heart, that it was to be victory.
+
+So the hours passed. For the most part King slept, lapsing into the deep
+stupor of a drugged man. But at times he stirred restlessly; with slowly
+returning strength his wounds pained him; in his sleep he muttered;
+Gloria, watching him, winced as she saw his brow contract and saw how he
+tried to shift his body as though to pull away from something that hurt
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King was awake. Awakening, he tried to move. His utter weakness, like a
+great weight bearing down upon him, held him powerless. But his mind,
+slowly freeing itself from the shadows of sleep, was suddenly very
+clear. He could turn his head a little. It was late afternoon; outside
+the sun was still shining, for a patch of light lay at the side of the
+canvas flap. At first he did not see Gloria; but his eyes quested until
+at last they found her. She lay by the fire, her head upon her arm,
+sleeping. The little huddled body looked weary beyond expression.
+
+For a long time his haggard eyes remained with her. She lay on the
+rocks, without a blanket. His hand moved weakly; there were blankets
+under him, blankets covering him; his feet were wrapped in a blanket. He
+remembered that a long, long time ago she had said to him: "It was last
+night." All this long, long time he had had all the blankets.... He
+looked again at Gloria, at the fire; he saw wood piled near by. For many
+minutes he puzzled the matter; in the end it was obvious, even to a man
+as sick as King, that she must have gone for wood. Perhaps more than
+once. He closed his eyes and lay very still. He knew now that he had
+been desperately hurt; that, wounded, his fight with Brodie had brought
+him very near a weakness from blood loss that was pale twin to death.
+And yet he was alive and warm; he had had broth and blankets and the
+fire had been kept blazing. He managed to slip a hand inside his shirt;
+before his fingers found it he knew that the bandage was there. Gloria
+had done all this ... Gloria, whom he had struck ...
+
+Ever since that blow, the one act of his life which he would have given
+so much to have undone, he had been ashamed. He had rejoiced in his
+battle with the men who had threatened Gloria with worse than death,
+rejoiced that in some way he might make reparation. But now, beginning
+to understand all that Gloria had done for him, how great were the
+sacrifices she had made for him, lying unconscious of all she did, it
+seemed to him that the thing that he had done was a very small thing set
+in the scales against her own acts. He wanted to get up and go to her;
+to put his blankets about her; to play the man's part and protect and
+shelter. But he could not so much as raise his voice to call her to
+him.... Ever since that blow, upbraiding himself, he had said: "She was
+only a little, terrified girl and you were a brute to her." And now he
+thought wonderingly: "After that, she has worked for you, has nursed
+you, has saved the worthless life in you when she should have let you
+die." Again his eyes flew open; now they clung to her with a strange
+look in them, born of many emotions.
+
+Gloria, as though she felt his eyes upon her, stirred, rose, pushed the
+hair back from her eyes and came quickly to him. And as she came, she
+smiled. She went down on her knees beside him and took his hand in her
+two and held it tight. She had never seen in his eyes a look like the
+one now burning in them. She could not understand its mute message, but
+she spoke softly:
+
+"Everything is all right, Mark. And you are better every time you wake."
+
+His lips strove to frame words. She bent close to them and heard his
+wondering whisper:
+
+"Every--thing--all right?"
+
+"Yes, thank God," she whispered back to him. "Everything in all the
+wide, wide world!"
+
+No, he could not understand that. She saw perplexity in his eyes now.
+But she did not mean to let him talk yet and it was time for broth
+again. But again he was whispering:
+
+"Blankets--yours----"
+
+"Yes, Mark. After you have had your nourishment. When I need them."
+
+But when he had taken his cup of hot broth he slipped off to sleep again
+and Gloria, smiling a tender smile, sat by her fire watching him as a
+mother watches a sick baby who, the doctor has just told her, will live.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXII_
+
+
+That night Gloria, listening now to King's breathing, now to the
+crackling of her fire, grew restless, restless. Again and again she went
+to look out into the quiet moonlight night, across the glittering
+expanses of pure white glistening snow. It was the restlessness of one
+who had taken a giant determination; who but awaited impatiently for the
+time to do what she was bent upon doing. In her heart was still that
+new-born gladness; in her bosom there was still something singing like
+the liquid voice of a bird. It had sung for the first time when first
+she had ministered to King, when she had understood what love's service
+was, when she had gone down the cliffs for firewood, when, because of
+her tireless nursing, she had been rewarded by his opening eyes; as the
+hours wore on it had grown into a chant triumphant. She, Gloria, had
+lived to do something that was noble and unselfish and brave; she,
+Gloria, had been unafraid and unswerving; she had saved a man's life.
+And that life was Mark King's! She had made amends; she had set her feet
+unfalteringly in a new trail; throughout her being she was aglow with
+the consciousness of one who had gladly done love's labour.
+
+Now she waited only for the hour when again King must have his broth.
+She gave it to him, smiled at him, commanded him to go back to sleep,
+promising to talk with him in the morning. And then, when again he
+breathed with the quiet regularity of one sleeping, she went eagerly
+about her task.
+
+Now, at her hour of need, she was buoyed up by a great and wonderful
+confidence that she could not fail. Thus far she had accomplished each
+duty as it had stood before her, and from successes achieved grew the
+new faith that in to-night's task, perhaps the supreme and final labour,
+she would succeed again. They must have more meat; to-morrow or the next
+day, at latest, for the steaks which she had eaten and the strong broths
+to maintain and rebuild strength in. King had cut deeply into their
+supply. And she knew Mark King well enough to be very certain that, the
+moment he could summon strength enough to command his tottering body to
+stand on two legs, he would go. Now, while he was still too weak to
+observe greatly what went on about him and while he slept most of the
+time, it was for her to be before him. Fortunately--and were not all
+omens bright with hope?--it had not snowed since King made his kill; she
+could follow in the trail he had made and it would lead her unerringly
+to the spot where he had left the rest of the meat. She had everything
+ready, rifle, small packet of food, knife, even matches and strips torn
+from the sack for her feet. Down in the gorge, clutching her rifle, she
+stood looking, listening. Always the thought of Benny and the other man
+was on the rim of her consciousness, and fear is a basic and elemental
+emotion. But, though the moon set forth all details in clear relief
+against the snow, there was no man in sight, and, in the intense
+determination possessing her, she throttled down all fear-thoughts. She
+clung with a deep fervour to the thoughts that she and Mark King had put
+disaster behind them, that ahead lay hope and happiness, that God was
+with her and about her, and that all danger was gone. Down the canon she
+saw the broken, uneven snow where Brodie and his men had left their
+tracks, irregular trails up which Gratton had come, down which Benny and
+the Italian had fled. Upward along the gorge was one deep, straight
+path, wide and hard packed, the track of Mark King's crude snow-shoes.
+Into this she stepped, thinking even at the time how even Mark King's
+trail was characteristic of him and different from that of the other
+men; it looked purposeful and confident and, like the man himself,
+driving straight on. There was a sense of comfort in treading where he
+had trodden before her.
+
+The world slept, but its quiet breathing she seemed to hear as the air
+drew through the pines. She turned up the gorge, a tiny dark figure in
+an immense white wilderness. The stars shone and she loved them; they
+were like bright companionable candles. The moon shed its soft lustre
+and she loved it; it thrust shadows back and drove out the dark. The
+night was all quiet splendour and peace and serenity. The snow was
+crisp, crunching underfoot; sunny days had thawed, clear, cold nights
+had frozen, and the crust had begun to form. Before she had gone a dozen
+feet she discovered this and its importance to her; where King's weight
+on the snow-shoes, along a twice-travelled trail, had packed the snow
+and where now the sun and cold had done their work, there was a crust
+which upbore her slight weight; she could walk swiftly; there was to be
+no more floundering. She could run!
+
+And run she did, when she had crested the first ridge and had started
+down the far side. It was like flying! The crisp air cut her glowing
+cheeks; her blood leaped along her veins; she breathed deeply, a great,
+uplifting elation bore her along. Love--God is love--smoothed the way
+before her; the stars ran with her, the great blazing stars to which
+again and again she lifted her eyes. They spoke to her; they came close
+to her; when she stopped, resting, they were all about her, bending
+down, and she was lifted up among them. Fervour and the ecstasy of the
+hour in which was doing to the uttermost, forgetful of pettiness and
+selfishness and cowardice--she prayed mutely that she was done with them
+for ever, that never again would she be such a woman as Gratton had been
+a man--made her over into a radiant, glorious Gloria. The night stamped
+itself upon her for all time; out of the night she drew, as one draws
+air into his lungs, a new faith that was akin to the man's whom she
+served. For one cannot be alone with the stars and be unmoved by them;
+they are serene with eternity, refulgent with the perfect beauty of a
+perfect creation, eloquent to the heart of man and woman of true values.
+Under the fields of their vastitude, confronted by their infinity,
+Gloria, like thousands before, understood that man in fevered times is
+prone to turn to false gods. Gus Ingle's gold--her own gold, one
+day--was a thing to smile at. Or, at best, not a thing to expend wildly
+for gowns and gowns and shoes and stockings and limousines; to-night
+Gloria felt that she had had her fill of vanities like those, that she
+was done with them; that if, for every moan and agony and slow death and
+thought of envy Gus Ingle's gold had brought into the world, she could
+create a smile here and a hope fulfilled there and a glow yonder, she
+would ask nothing else of the yellow dirt. For dirt or rock or dross it
+was, and that was as clear as starlight. If her hand but lay in the hand
+of Mark King, what did gold matter? Or dresses--or what people thought
+or said of her or him? A strange little smile touched her lips.
+
+"I love you," she whispered, as though Mark were with her--as in her
+soul he was.
+
+Had there not been a great, glowing love in her heart she would have
+been afraid. But there was no room for fear. Had she not felt that he
+was with her and that God was with her she must have felt an
+unutterable, dreary loneliness; but she was upborne at every step and
+gloried in every exertion.
+
+And exertion, until she came close to the limits of endurance, was to be
+hers that white night; hers the knowledge of supreme endeavour. On and
+on she went across the immense glistening smooth fields through which
+the trail ahead was the only scar, through groves of black pines
+whispering, whispering, whispering, down into shadow-filled canons, out
+into the open again, up and down and on and on, a tiny dot upon the
+endless wastes. Fatigue came upon her suddenly, when she had forgotten
+to save her strength and had gone over-fast. She rested, lying on her
+back, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes, she saw the stars, she rose
+and went on. She had gone miles; how many she could not guess. Always,
+after for a little while she had dropped down wearily, she rose again
+and went on; she learned that, though beaten down, one might rise again.
+That was Mark King's way; it would be her way. Despite the rags about
+her boots her feet were soon dangerously cold. She passed into the
+embrace of a forest of black trees casting blacker shadows. Their
+branches seemed motionless, but they sang to her with hushed voices. And
+always there was the trail King had made, leading her on; where he had
+gone before, she followed.
+
+Where he had made slow progress, seeking game and breaking trail, she
+went swiftly on the packed snow. So, in the full splendour of the moon,
+she came at last to the final ridge, whence, looking down into the
+canon, she saw the end of her trail: hanging from a bent pine sapling
+was what she knew must be his bear. Down the steep slope she went, half
+sliding, half rolling. In the bed of the ravine she landed softly in the
+drift; here she rested, sitting in a nest of snow. And before she had
+stirred to begin the last short span of her journey, there came suddenly
+out of the silence a strange, quivering cry, bursting out upon her; a
+sobbing, throbbing scream.
+
+"A woman!" cried Gloria, aghast.
+
+A woman in an agony of terror, she thought. Or a lost soul, the
+wandering spirit of the dead, or God knew what impossible thing. Sudden
+terror leaped out upon her, striking like a knife into her heart. Fear,
+banished all this time, surprised her and clutched at her throat and
+paralysed her muscles. Blind panic gripped her. Then came the piercing
+scream again, and with it enlightenment, and Gloria sank back, seeming
+to melt into the snow about her. Yonder, just upon the next ridge where
+the moonlight carved in fine details the outline of a big bare boulder,
+stood the thing that had screamed; in this light its great body was
+weirdly magnified, so that the entire length of seven or eight feet
+appeared to Gloria's frightened eyes twice that. Long-bodied and lithe,
+small-headed and merciless, steel-muscled and chisel-clawed, the big cat
+in silhouette twitched its restless tail back and forth nervously, and
+from snarling jaws sent forth its almost human call to cut across vast,
+still distances.
+
+Gloria drew back and back where she crouched, her body pressed into the
+snow-bank, in a panicky desire to hide. The big cat had smelled the
+meat, she guessed swiftly. When it leaped upward, seeking to snatch down
+the swinging weight, or clambered up the pine, then she must spring up
+and run, run as she had never run in her life, away from this terrible,
+murderous thing, back to King. Unconscious of cold and wet, she cowered
+and waited, scarce breathing. She saw how the big beast put up its head
+and sniffed; did it in reality smell the meat? Or had it sensed her
+presence?
+
+For what seemed a very long time the gaunt-bodied animal stood as still
+as the rock beneath it; then, silent and swift, it turned and, like a
+cat at home leaping down from a table, dropped into the shadows at the
+base of the rock, and was lost to Gloria's sight in a little hollow. She
+waited, her eyes staring.
+
+Again, all of a sudden, she saw it. Moving with the stealthy caution
+which is its birthright, it appeared fleetingly a score of feet lower on
+the steep slope, the body and its shadow, a twin for stealthy silence,
+gone in a flash, reappearing once more still lower on the slope and just
+beyond the pine sapling. It was coming on. Fascinated, Gloria sat like
+stone, with never a thought of the rifle lying across her knees.
+
+The mountain-lion leaped downward softly from stage to stage of the
+canon-side, paused under the pine, lifted its head, and sent forth again
+its hunger-cry. All this time Gloria sat breathless; the
+fear-fascination still held her powerless. She watched the animal crouch
+and gather its strength and hurl its lean body upward. The lion fell
+back, the ripping claws having missed the meat by some two or three
+feet, and Gloria heard the low, rumbling growl. Again it sprang; again
+it missed. And then, for a weary time of silence it sat still, its head
+back, its eyes on the desired meal. In the moonlight Gloria saw the
+glistening saliva from the half-parted jaws.
+
+But in the end feline craft found the way, and the cat set its paws
+against the tree trunk, and began to climb. Limbs broke under the two
+hundred pounds of weight; the bark was torn under slipping paws, but
+upward the sinuous body writhed. Swiftly now it would come to King's
+kill.
+
+King's! Gloria started; this was Mark's kill: he had stalked it, he had
+ploughed many miles through deep snow to get it. To get it for her as
+well as for him. To keep the life in her--now, without it, King would
+die. And now the lion was going to take it, while she watched and did
+nothing!
+
+"Oh, God, help me!" She sprang to her feet, she jerked up her rifle and
+fired at the black bulk crawling upward in the pine. "It shall not have
+Mark's meat! It shall not!"
+
+At the first shot the mountain-lion dropped through crashing branches.
+She had shot it--she had driven a bullet through its heart. God had
+heard her. That was her first wild thought. But in a flash she saw that
+it was on its feet again, and that with red mouth snarling it had swung
+about, facing her; she saw the cruel white teeth, wet and glistening.
+
+Incoherently Gloria cried out, again sick and shaken with terror. In
+another moment she would have the lean powerful body leaping upon her.
+She fired again and again, taking no time for aim, as fast as she could
+work the lever and pull the trigger; she was trembling so that it was
+all that she could do to hold the gun at all. She prayed and called on
+Mark and fired, all at once.
+
+Never did bullets fly wider of the mark, but never did the roar of
+exploding shells do better service. The lion, though ravenous, was not
+yet starved to the degree to whip it to the supreme desperation of
+attacking a human being and defying a rifle; it whirled and went
+flashing across the snow, seeking the shadows, gone in the drifts,
+vanishing.
+
+Gloria gasped, stared after its wild flight a paralysed moment and then
+ran to the tree where the bear hung. She was shaking like a leaf in a
+storm; she was still terrified, filled with horror at the thought that
+at any second the lean body might come flashing back upon her. But
+through the emotions storming through her there lived on that one
+determination that would live while she lived: that was Mark's meat and
+she was going to save it for him. She began climbing the young pine; she
+fought wildly to get up into its branches; she was handicapped by the
+rifle which she clung to desperately. She got the gun in a crotch above
+her head; she pulled herself upward; she slipped, and tore the skin of
+hands and arms; but hastening frantically she climbed up and up. She got
+the rifle into her hands again, nearly dropped it, thrust it above her,
+jammed it into a fork of a limb and kept on climbing. At last she was
+where she could reach out and touch the swinging carcass. With King's
+keen-edged butcher knife she hacked and cut at the frozen meat, panting
+with every effort. The task seemed endless; the bear swung away from
+her; a branch broke under her foot and she almost fell; she was sobbing
+aloud brokenly before it was done, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
+But at last there was the thud of the falling meat; below her it lay on
+the snow crust. In wild haste she snatched her rifle; holding it in one
+hand, afraid to let it slip out of her grasp for a moment, casting a
+last fearful look in the direction whither the lion had gone, she began
+slipping down. And in another moment, with the precious burden caught up
+with the gun in her arms, she was running back up the ridge, her feet in
+King's trail. _The home trail_!
+
+She looked behind her at every step, picturing the snarling cat
+springing out from every shadow, starting upward from every drift and
+snow-bank. But she clutched her meat tight and struggled on up the
+slope.
+
+Her whole body was shaking; she closed her eyes, overcome with
+faintness. There was a faint wind stirring and it cut like a knife,
+probing through her garments where they were damp. She shivered and
+struggled on and on. She felt that she could run all night without
+stopping. She stumbled and fell and arose, panting and sobbing, and ran
+on. She no longer looked behind her: she had fallen when she did that.
+Again and again from far behind her came the clear, merciless scream of
+the mountain-lion. Time passed; half-hour or hour or two hours, she had
+little idea. Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising,
+staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples,
+drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before--nearer?
+Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the
+stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. Cautious
+now, would its caution slowly subside as its hunger grew and as she
+always fled from it? The thought came to her that such a menace would
+follow one day after day; that it would wait and wait; that in the end
+it knew its time would come when sleep or exhaustion broke down its
+prey's guard. Then it would leap and strike.
+
+Her rifle had grown a heart-breaking weight, until it seemed that it
+would drag her arms from their sockets to hold it up; the pack of meat
+on her back was like lead.
+
+She wondered if King had missed her; if he were awake and wondering at
+her absence. She wondered if he would miss her soon; how soon? At the
+first glint of dawn? Would he begin to see, that she was at least, and
+at last, trying? Well, she had tried; though she died, still she had
+tried. She was cold to the bone; her teeth chattered, her body quaked.
+Yet she kept on. She fell; she lay with the tears of exhaustion rolling
+down her face; she struggled to get to her feet; she fell again. But
+always she rose and always she kept on. And so, in the fulness of time,
+after long frightful, hellish hours, §he came to the last terror of the
+night.
+
+The new day was bright on the mountain tops when she felt at first a
+dull sort of surprise and then a sudden, stimulating gladness, noting
+the familiar look of the ridge ahead. Yonder the cave would be. The cave
+and King, success and rest. She straightened up a little, brushing her
+hand across her straining eyes, making sure that she was right. She
+heard the insistent scream behind her, but now she did not heed it, for
+in front of her, stock-still in the trail, was a man. It was Benny.
+
+To-night she had thrilled to an ecstasy descending from the stars,
+welling up in her own heart, and she had shivered with fear and had
+dropped with weariness akin to despair. Now suddenly all emotions were
+upgathered into searing anger. Her thought was: "He will take the meat
+from me! The meat I have brought for Mark." She grew rigid in her
+tracks. She jerked up her rifle in front of her; her tired eyes
+hardened. She had gone to the limits of endurance in a labour of love;
+she had succeeded; and now she would fight for what she had brought
+back.
+
+Then she noted that Benny had not seen her. Though he was in full view
+on the ridge, he had had no eyes for her. He was stooping. She saw that
+he had a small pack on his back; food, no doubt. On the ground by him
+was a second pack, something in a crash sack; Benny was struggling to
+lift it to his shoulders. It must be very heavy. Gloria drew back
+hastily, glancing about her, found the only hiding-place offered, and
+slipped behind the big rock.
+
+Presently Benny came on. She heard him from a distance; he was talking
+to himself excitedly, jabbering broken fragments of sentences, twice
+breaking into his hideous dry cackle of laughter. She shivered; his
+utterances sounded mad.
+
+And mad they were. Perhaps his drug had run out; certainly for a nervous
+man there had been ample cause for jangling nerves. He jabbered
+constantly, his mutterings at last coming to her in jumbled words as
+Benny drew on.
+
+He was talking about "gold," and he chuckled. He mentioned names,
+Brodie's and Jarrold's and Gratton's and another name, and he chuckled
+again. Gloria peered cautiously from the shelter of her rock. He was
+very near now, struggling with the smaller pack and his rifle and the
+heavy bundle in his sack. She thought that he was going to pass without
+seeing her. But just as he passed abreast of her hiding-place something
+prompted Benny to jerk up his head. He saw her and stopped suddenly; she
+saw his eyes. And she knew on the instant that if the man were not stark
+mad, at least he was not entirely sane. She lifted her rifle, cold all
+over; if he came another step nearer she would shoot....
+
+"It's mine!" Benny shrieked at her. "Mine, I tell you!"
+
+He broke into a run, passing her, leaving the trail, floundering down
+the ridge the shortest way. His rifle encumbered him; she saw it fall
+into the snow, while Benny, clutching his gunny-sack in both arms,
+stumbled on. He fell; he rose, shrieking curses. She watched,
+fascinated. The pack on his back slipped around in front of him; Benny
+tore at it and cursed it and hurled it from him. Still hugging his gold
+he was gone, far down the steep slope. Gloria shuddered and stepped back
+into her own trail. She could hear Benny cursing faintly. Like an echo
+came another cry across the ridges; the cry of a starving cat.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXIII_
+
+
+Mark King awakened to a sensation of piercing cold. In his weakened
+condition the chill struck deep, the pain of it sore in his wound. He
+moved a little to draw his blankets closer about him and, as an awaking
+impression, found that his strength, even though slowly, was surely
+returning to him. He was still terribly weak, but, thank God--and
+Gloria!--that hideous faintness in which he had been unable to stir hand
+or foot or to speak above a whisper had passed. He filled his lungs with
+a deep and grateful breath of satisfaction. In a day or two he would be
+able to carry on again, to do his part.
+
+He turned his head, lifting it a trifle; already he had thought of
+Gloria, and now he sought her. The fire had burned down to a handful of
+glowing coals; Gloria, then, must be asleep. For that, too, he was
+grateful. He had but faint remembrance and dim knowledge of what tasks
+must have fallen to her lot, but his mind, active from the moment his
+eyes flew open, was quick to understand that the burdens had fallen upon
+her shoulders and that she must have been in dire need of rest and
+sleep.
+
+He could not see her anywhere; no doubt she lay in the shadowy dark
+beyond the dying fire. He lay back, staring up into the gloom above
+him. It was thinning; day was coming or had come already. A day with
+sunshine! They could go out on the crust by the time that he was able to
+be about----
+
+Then he remembered the blankets! Last night he had had all of them,
+Gloria's as well as his own. He had wanted to make her take her covers
+and she had put him off, and he had gone to sleep, forgetting! He
+stirred again, hastily, his hands groping, even his feet moving. He had
+them yet, his and hers. And she had slept through the cold night with no
+covering while he, never waking until now, had lain warm and
+comfortable. He struggled to turn on his side and got himself raised a
+little despite the pain from the exertion, seeking her. She must be
+frozen----
+
+Gloria was not in the cave. He sank back, sure of that. For she should
+be sleeping close by the fire. Then she had gone down again for wood. He
+frowned and lay staring upward again. Gloria bringing wood while he lay
+here like a confounded log. He grew nervously restive at the thought; it
+was unthinkable that she should do work like that. He saw her in his
+mind, struggling with the unaccustomed labour. And always he saw her as
+he had first seen her, a fragile-looking girl, a girl with sweet little
+hands as soft as rose petals. He remembered her as he had seen her that
+first day, a vision of loveliness in her fluffy pink dress, her skin
+like the skin of a baby, her eyes the soft, tender grey eyes of the girl
+to whom he had given his heart without reservation. The glorious Gloria,
+all slender delicacy, like a little mountain flower, the Gloria for whom
+it had been his duty and his high privilege to labour. He must fight to
+get his strength back, to get on his feet again, to save her from such
+toil as was no woman's work in the world, certainly never the work for a
+girl like Gloria.
+
+He heard a sound at the cave's mouth. Gloria was coming back. He found
+no words with which to greet her, but lay very still, waiting for her to
+come in. An emotion of which he was ashamed and yet which was infinitely
+sweet swept over him: it was so wonderful a thing to have Gloria come to
+him, nurse him, put her hand so tenderly on his. A thrill shot down his
+faintly stirring pulses as already he fancied her stealing softly to his
+side. So he waited and, when she came where he could at last see her,
+watched.
+
+She set her gun down; at first he wondered at that. Poor little Gloria,
+he thought; taking her rifle with her when she went down for wood,
+frightened and yet strong-hearted enough to go in spite of fear. She
+came on, not to him but to the smouldering coals. She had turned toward
+him, but, no doubt, thought him still asleep. He watched her, still
+knowing that presently she would come, awaiting her coming. And again he
+was perplexed; he did not understand why Gloria walked like that. He had
+never seen her walk so before; she had always been so light of foot, so
+graceful--so like a fairy creature, scarcely touching the ground. Now
+her feet dragged; she groped uncertainly; she was like one gone suddenly
+dizzy.
+
+She dropped down by the coals, her face in her hands. The light was bad;
+he could hardly see her now. He heard a sigh that ended in a sob. She
+rose, oh, so wearily. He saw her sway as she walked; she was throwing
+wood on the fire. It caught; a flame flared out; other flames followed
+with their merry crackling and leaping lights. And now he saw Gloria's
+face. It was drawn and haggard; it had been washed with tears; her eyes
+looked enormous and unnaturally bright. He saw her hair; it was in wild
+disarray, a tumble of disorder. He saw that she had sacks wrapped about
+her lagging feet; that her clothes were torn, that her sleeves were
+ragged, that her arms were covered with long scratches! His first
+thought, making his body tense with anger, was that he had not come in
+time to save her from Brodie's hands....
+
+What was Gloria doing? Struggling with something on her back. Something
+which was tied across her shoulders. She got it free; it fell close to
+the fire, played over by the light of the flames. He craned his neck and
+saw; it was a great chunk of bear meat--he could see bits of the hide
+still on it!
+
+He could not understand. Not yet. All that he could do was stare at her
+and wonder and grope confusedly for the explanation. It was clear that
+something was wrong with Gloria; she dropped down by the fire, she
+slumped forward, she lay her face upon her crossed arms. He could see
+the frail body shaking--he could hear her sudden wild sobbing.
+
+The truth came upon him at last, dawning slowly, slowly.
+
+"Gloria!" It was a gasp of more than amazement; consternation was in his
+heart. "_Gloria_!"
+
+She lifted her head and sat up. He saw her great wide-open eyes and the
+tears gushing from them. She fought to control herself, a sob in her
+throat. She rose and came toward him in strange, wildly uncertain steps.
+
+"Gloria! You----"
+
+"Sh, Mark; you mustn't----"
+
+But he couldn't lie still. He lifted himself upon his elbow and looked
+at her with wondering eyes. She stood over him, looking on the verge of
+collapse. Slowly she came down to him, half kneeling, half falling.
+
+"My God," he cried hoarsely. "You went for my bear? _You did it_."
+
+She tried to smile at him, and into his own eyes there broke a sudden
+gush of tears.
+
+"You wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Gloria!" he cried out. "There is no
+girl in all the world could have done that--there is no girl like you."
+
+Her hand was questing his; he caught it and gripped it with all the
+strength in him; he hurt her, and at last, with the pain, her smile
+broke through.
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+"Mark?"
+
+"Can you--not so soon, but some day--forgive me?"
+
+She found only a faint whisper with which to answer him; her eyes were
+as hungry as his.
+
+"Can you forgive, Mark?"
+
+And now, when their eyes clung together as their hands were already
+clinging, each was marvelling that the other could forgive and love one
+who had erred so.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Everlasting Whisper, by Jackson Gregory
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10213 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #10213 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10213)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Everlasting Whisper, by Jackson Gregory
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Everlasting Whisper
+
+Author: Jackson Gregory
+
+Release Date: November 22, 2003 [EBook #10213]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVERLASTING WHISPER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+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-stricken by something her mother had said, cried:
+
+"You have phoned _everybody!_ Oh, mamma! What--_what_ do you mean?"
+
+"When you didn't come in last night--I have been crazy with worry! I
+thought you might be spending the night with one of your friends; I
+thought that maybe something had happened and it was being kept from me.
+I rang up Georgia Stark and Mildred Carter and the Farrilees--and even
+the emergency hospitals. I thought----"
+
+The rest was only a meaningless buzzing in Gloria's ears; she sat
+speechless herself, bereft of all reason for a dull moment, then
+harbouring quick, clear thoughts, as swift, as vivid as lightning, and
+in the end as blinding by their very quality of blazing light. _The
+newspapers!_
+
+Still, dominated subconsciously by the thought which had brought her to
+the telephone, Gloria managed before the connection was broken to beg
+her mother to come immediately to her at the log house; to tell every
+one that Gloria was with her father. Her mother promised; began asking
+questions, and Gloria said a bleak "good-bye" and hung up.
+
+_The newspapers_. She sat there staring into space and seeing the San
+Francisco _Chronicle_ and _Examiner_, hawked by newsboys, on stands,
+thrust under doors, going like spreading snowflakes of a big storm into
+post-offices, to racing trains, all over the land. Her mother had
+telephoned the emergency hospitals! Gloria could have wept in rage,
+screamed, thrown herself down and given over to paroxysms of weeping.
+But she only sat on, her face whiter and whiter, looking into emptiness
+and seeing headlines that towered as high as immense black cliffs. Her
+mother had telephoned Mildred Carter, that hateful, hateful,
+thrice-hateful Mildred Carter; had confessed that Gloria had gone out
+with Mr. Gratton; was gone all night, no one knew where; Mildred Carter
+who was as good as married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_! And the
+emergency hospitals--Gloria with never a tear coming in her hour of
+greatest distress sat rocking back and forth on her chair, crying: "Oh,
+I wish I were dead!"
+
+As one hears noises through a dream, long powerless to connect them
+logically with familiar happenings, so now did Gloria absently hearken
+to Gratton calling from the foot of the stairs. She jumped up only when
+she heard him start to mount them. Then, galvanized, she sprang to her
+feet, cried to him, "I'll be down in just a second," and ran to her
+room. She stood again looking at herself in her glass.
+
+"Gloria Gaynor," she heard her own pale lips say, "you have gotten
+yourself into a nasty, nasty mess." The lips began to tremble; then,
+with a great struggle for will-power, they steadied. "And," said Gloria
+in a cold, harsh little voice, "it's up to you, and no one else, to get
+out the best you can this time."
+
+She bathed her face and hands; she rubbed her cheeks with a towel,
+determined to bring some vestige of colour back; she took down her hair.
+Only then, so distrait to-day was Gloria, did she think of changing from
+her boyish suit into a house dress. Her eyes, which had harboured only
+bewilderment and terror, now grew speculative. She brought from her
+closet half a dozen dresses; chose a certain pink one without analysing
+the reasons of her selection, found silk stockings and pumps, and
+dressed from top to toe. She would have to have it out with Gratton, one
+way or the other--she began to know which way it would be. But always a
+girl should be at her best. Also, she decided, by the time that she was
+becomingly gowned and her hair arranged tastefully, it was as well to
+let Gratton wait for her a while; waiting always, to some extent,
+brought to the one cooling his heels a sense of disadvantage. In short,
+Gloria had gone through the most panicky of her moments and was getting
+a grip on herself again. When, after Gratton had waited and fumed for
+upward of an hour, she went downstairs she looked cool and pretty, and
+quite unembarrassed. He flashed a look at her that was eloquent of
+nervous excitement.
+
+"I want to explain everything to you, Gloria----"
+
+"It will take a good deal of explaining, won't it, Mr. Gratton?"
+
+They went into the living-room and Gloria sat in a big chair while he
+stood before her, his fingers tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.
+
+"You listened-in while I talked with mamma, didn't you?" she said
+carelessly.
+
+"No!" said Gratton, but so promptly that she knew he lied.
+
+"Well?" she said indifferently. "Suppose we have the explanations now? I
+am sure that they will prove interesting."
+
+"I am afraid," he began, talking swiftly, "that I have been instrumental
+in placing you in a false position. Last night I told you I had
+telephoned to your mother. I did try; they reported the line out of
+order. What could I do? I didn't want to alarm you. It was only a lark;
+I meant innocently, you know that, don't you, Gloria?"
+
+"Did you?" she said, and managed to keep her lips smiling.
+
+"It is only since coming here that I have realized how things will look;
+what people will think--and say, curse them. Our being out so long
+together; my buying clothing for you----"
+
+"Our being registered as Mr. and Mrs. Gratton----"
+
+His eyes burned, his lips clamped tight.
+
+"Forgive me, Gloria! It was the mad impulse of a moment. I thought as we
+went in that it would look strange--a young, unmarried couple; that if I
+put down man and wife no one would think anything at all. And we'd be
+gone in a few hours; and probably you'd never go back there; and no one
+would know who you were."
+
+"I see." Gloria's tone, devoid of expression, gave no clue to her racing
+thoughts. "You did that for my sake!"
+
+"Yes," he said eagerly. "As I would do anything on earth for your sake.
+You know that, Gloria; you know, and have known for a long
+time--always--that I love you. I was going to ask you soon to--to marry
+me, Gloria. And now, now you will marry me, won't you?"
+
+"Yes." But Gloria did not say it aloud; not yet. She merely made it
+perfectly clear to Miss Gloria Gaynor that she was going to marry
+Gratton, and that there was to be no further question of it. And, oh,
+God! at this fateful moment, how she hated him! How she loathed and
+detested him! While a week ago--yesterday--she had wondered, dreamily,
+if she were in love with him! But that was when he was in the city, at
+home in his own wilderness. But now! She was in a trap. This man had
+made it, cunningly using in his work all that he knew of Gloria Gaynor.
+There was no way out, save through the gate of matrimony. And--in her
+heart she laughed at him--through that other wider gate beyond, the
+gate of divorce. She would accept his name; the name of Gratton stood
+high in San Francisco. Then she would tell him how she loathed him; she
+would laugh at him, for physically she had no fear of him. And he would
+never have her for his own, despite all of his money and his position
+and his hideous trickery. Gratton, with all of his shrewdness, had not
+taken into consideration one thing: how in the city, on his native
+heath, he attracted Gloria; how in the woods he impressed her, in his
+unbecoming outdoor togs, as contemptible.
+
+"You know how I love you," he was repeating. And he was sincere; she saw
+that in his eyes, in the unaccustomed colour in his face. He loved her
+as such an unclean animal could love. Oh, how he sickened her! "Will you
+marry me, Gloria? Will you forgive me for having, however
+unintentionally, placed you in a wrong light? Will you give me the right
+to protect you, to defend your good name? Oh, Gloria----"
+
+Strange that the man had never revolted her as he did now! She wanted to
+get up and run from him. Meantime she was telling herself, almost
+calmly: "Yes, you'll marry him. The little beast!" She did get to her
+feet; he followed her into the hall.
+
+"Let me be alone for a little while," she said quietly. She went to the
+stairway. "I am going upstairs; wait here for me----"
+
+"You will come to me? You will marry me?"
+
+"I--think--so. Don't!" she cried sharply as he moved to come to her.
+"Wait----"
+
+He swallowed nervously. "I--I hoped you would. And I saw how terribly
+the events of the last few hours might be misconstrued. So, Gloria,
+daring to hope, I sent word for a justice of the peace. He will be here
+this afternoon or this evening----"
+
+"Justice of the peace!" Gloria's nerves jangled loose in her
+irrepressible laughter.
+
+"We'll have a priest later, of course," he ran on hurriedly. "But I
+couldn't arrange for one so soon."
+
+Gloria went slowly upstairs, walking backward, looking down on him with
+unfathomable eyes.
+
+"Tell me, Gloria. I'll promise not to come near you until you say I
+may. Is it _yes_?"
+
+"Yes," said Gloria, and was gone in a flash, turning, running up and out
+of sight.
+
+He stood looking after her, tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIII_
+
+
+To Gloria the sluggish moments were fraught with despondency or
+pulsating terror. All arrangements were made; she was powerless, in a
+trap; a justice was coming; she was going to marry Gratton. She lay on
+her bed with her door bolted and wept bitterly, moaning over and over:
+"Oh, I wish I were dead!" She heard Gratton stirring restlessly
+downstairs. She herself grew restless; she sprang up, tiptoed to her
+door, and slipped out as silent as a shadow. She went into the little
+room where the telephone was and through it to the sun-porch. For a long
+time she stood looking out across the mountains, her hand pressed to
+lips which trembled. She thought of her mother who, coming as fast as
+she could, no doubt by automobile, since she would not have the patience
+for trains, would not arrive before to-morrow morning. A night
+here--alone, worse than alone----
+
+But great as was the emotional tension, lusty and now wearied youth must
+be served. She had danced and ridden all through the night; she had not
+had over an hour or so of broken sleep; she had been going all day. She
+dropped to sleep on the swing-couch on the porch. It was so very silent
+all about her; the shadows were creeping, creeping among the pines.
+
+She awoke with a start. It was quite dark; the first stars burned with
+steadily growing brilliancy. Some one was standing above her, looking
+down at her. She could see only the vague outline----
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+A little cry of fear broke from her.
+
+"Gloria," pleaded Gratton. "Don't you know I wouldn't----?"
+
+"I'll be down in a minute," she told him, drawing as far away as she
+could, speaking with nervous haste. "Go down, please. Wait for me."
+
+"The justice is downstairs," he said, his own voice agitated despite his
+effort for mastery. "Are you ready?"
+
+"Yes, yes! In a minute I'll be down. Go. Please go."
+
+He hesitated; she could have screamed at him. But presently he began
+withdrawing. Slowly, hideously slowly----
+
+"When you are ready. And--he has a long ride back, Gloria. We should not
+keep him waiting."
+
+She watched until he had gone. Then she crouched, staring with wide,
+unseeing eyes into the outside dark. The man would go right away; she
+would not have even him to mitigate the horrible condition of aloneness
+with Gratton.
+
+"I won't marry him!" she cried out. "I won't. I hate him. He is a beast,
+and--I won't!"
+
+There was, after all, nothing to force her. Nothing--save that she had
+been away all this time with Gratton, that he had bought clothing for
+her, that he had registered himself and wife. _And the newspapers_! She
+heard a door slam and sprang up; if the justice went away now without
+marrying them! She _would_ marry him; why, if he had been of a notion to
+demur she would have made him marry her!
+
+"I can't think clearly. I wonder if I am insane?" She went with heavy,
+leaden steps back to her room. A pale, weary face looked at her from her
+glass. She began arranging her hair. Her fingers, with wills of their
+own, refused to obey her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly
+to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding
+to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers
+raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and
+urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the
+justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing,
+but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She
+guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent to bring the justice.
+
+"Gloria!" Gratton was calling from the foot of the steps.
+
+The voice that answered for her was clear and steady and, downstairs,
+must have sounded untroubled:
+
+"I'm coming. Just a minute."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two hours ago, while Gloria had been watching the shadows creeping among
+the pines, Mark King had arrived. He had come down the ridge from the
+rear and thus to the outbuilding by the stable which housed the
+caretaker, old Jim Spalding.
+
+"Hello, Mark," Jim had said, a trifle startled by King's sudden
+appearance. "Here you come again, like a Injun out'n the woods."
+
+Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench. King paused, saying:
+
+"Hello, Jim. Has Ben showed up yet?"
+
+"No, he ain't showed, Mark. Expectin' him?"
+
+"Yes. Who's in the house, then?"
+
+"Why, some of 'em come on ahead. Ben's girl, for one, and that city guy,
+Gratton, for another. She didn't say anything about Ben comin'; she did
+say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon."
+
+Gloria and Gratton here? King frowned. He had had ample time during the
+long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to
+say to Gloria Gaynor. And now she was here--with Gratton. He turned into
+Jim's quarters. He had no desire--or at least so he told himself very
+emphatically--to see either one of them.
+
+"I've hit the trail hard to-day, Jim," he said as Jim followed him and
+King closed the door. "And I'm dead tired and as hungry as a bear. What
+shape's the cupboard in?"
+
+"Fine," returned Spalding hospitably. "You know me, Mark."
+
+So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone,
+Mark King sat at Spalding's table, not a hundred yards away, and made a
+silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim's crude baking, and a dubious,
+warmed-over stew. Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim's bunk and
+the two smoked their pipes. With nothing in particular to be said,
+virtually nothing was said.
+
+"Needn't tell anybody I'm here, Jim." King was knocking the ashes out of
+his pipe. "I haven't any business with the folks in there. But keep your
+eye peeled for Ben, will you? The minute he comes I want to see him."
+
+"Maybe," suggested Spalding, "his girl brought word?"
+
+"No. Ben is in Coloma. Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would
+have come up from the city, you know. That means they would have come
+through Placerville or Truckee."
+
+"Guess so," agreed Spalding. "That's right. I'll set outside where I can
+watch for Ben. Goin' to take a snooze?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And after lying ten minutes staring up at the ceiling above him King
+went to sleep.
+
+"Must of been goin' some to-day," meditated the man who was once more on
+his bench outside the door. "King looks tuckered."
+
+He sat through the thickening shadows watching the stars come trooping
+into the darkening sky, hearkening to the night breeze among the trees,
+and the thin singing noises of insects. An hour or so later he heard
+horses. "That would be Ben, now," was his first thought. His second was
+that it might be some one else, and that there was no sense waking a
+tired man for nothing. So he went down toward the house. He saw two men
+dismount and tie their horses; he saw the door open and Gratton come
+out. The horsemen went up to the porch. Neither was Ben Gaynor. One, as
+he passed in through the light-filled doorway, was a little grey man
+whom Jim had never seen before; the other man, it happened, he knew.
+Rather well by sight and reputation, a good-for-nothin' scalawag, as
+Jim catalogued him, name of Steve Jarrold. The door closed after them
+and Jim went back to his bench.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the house they were waiting for Gloria. The little grey man whom they
+called "judge," and who had a way of clearing his throat before and
+after the most trifling remark, went up and down with his hands under
+his coat-tails, peering near-sightedly at pictures and books and
+wall-paper.
+
+"Quite a tidy little place Ben Gaynor's got here," he said
+patronizingly. "Quite a tidy little place."
+
+Gratton paced back and forth, whirling always abreast of the stairs,
+looking up expectantly. Steve Jarrold, the man whom Gloria had heard
+laugh, never budged from the spot where he had landed when entering the
+living-room; his wide, spraddled legs seemed rooted through the big feet
+into the floor. Big-framed and bony, with startlingly black restless
+eyes and a three or four days' growth of wiry beard no less lustrously
+black, he was ragged, unkempt, and unthinkably dirty. His eyes roved all
+about the room; they came back to Gratton, sped up the steps, came back
+to Gratton with a leer in them, and all the while he turned and turned
+his black dusty hat like a man doing a job he was being paid for.
+
+At last, since no delay holds back for ever the rolling of the great
+wheels of time, Gloria came. Slowly she descended the stairs, one hand
+at her breast, one gripping the banister. Her pallor was so great that
+her lips, though pale also, looked unnaturally red in contrast. They
+were just a little apart; she seemed to breathe with difficulty. Her
+eyes, glancing wildly about the room and at the men to be seen in the
+hallway, were the eyes of one in a trap, seeking frantically for escape,
+knowing that there was no escape. Her brain, like one's in a fever, was
+quick to impressions, alive with broken fragments of thought like so
+many flashes of vari-coloured light. She noted trifles; she saw a
+painting over Gratton's head--a seascape her father had given her for
+her fourteenth birthday. She saw three pairs of eyes staring at her,
+men's eyes, to her the eyes of wild animals; she read as clearly as if
+their messages had been in large, printed letters what lay in the mind
+of each: in the little grey man's, the judge's, speculation; in Steve
+Jarrold's, the jeers of a man of Jarrold's type at such a moment when
+they fall upon the bride; in Gratton's, quickened desire of her and
+triumphant cunning.
+
+"My dear," said Gratton, coming forward as though to meet her and then
+pausing abruptly and holding back, "this is Judge--Judge Summerling. He
+will--perform the ceremony, you know. And this is Mr. Jarrold. He
+brought the judge and will be a witness."
+
+Gloria from the last step regarded the three men as a prisoner might
+have looked upon jailers coming to drag her to execution. Her lips moved
+but no sound issued. "Judge" Summerling bowed stiffly and cleared his
+throat. Steve Jarrold's hat ceased revolving an instant, then fairly
+spun as though to make up for lost time.
+
+Suddenly Gloria began to laugh hysterically, uncontrollably. Gratton
+whipped back and stared at her; Summerling and Jarrold were mystified.
+She looked so little like laughter! And, as both had cause to regard the
+situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no
+clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little
+grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven,
+leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding!
+She was near madness with the hideous, cruel travesty of such weddings
+as are dear to the hearts of San Francisco "society" girls.
+
+The "judge" was clearing his throat again. She looked at him curiously,
+with the odd sensation that while Gloria Gaynor was asleep, drugged into
+a deep stupor, there was within her another Gloria who took a keen
+interest in the smallest happenings.
+
+"This affair ain't any more regular than it ought to be," he was saying.
+"Now, just the matter of the licence----"
+
+Gratton jerked about and glared at him. The "judge" broke off with a
+vehement clearing of his throat. In a moment he spoke again.
+
+"Seein' as both parties _want_ to get married," he said hastily, "and as
+circumstances is what they is--keepin' in mind how circumstances does
+alter cases--well then--are you ready?"
+
+That "Are you ready?" seemed to explode like a pistol shot in Gloria's
+ears. Something within her shrieked: "No, no, no!" Gratton had said a
+quiet "Yes," and was looking at her. She heard herself saying faintly:
+"Yes."
+
+Gratton put out his hand as though to help her down the last step. She
+made a little gesture, motioning him back. He bit at his lip and obeyed,
+though with a quick flash of the eyes. Gloria looked down at the step.
+About six inches high, and yet--and yet where she stood was as high as
+heaven, down there as deep as hell. She seemed powerless to achieve that
+last step. But Gratton was stirring restlessly; he would put out his
+hand again to help her. She shuddered and moved quickly. Now she stood
+on the same level as Gratton and the others; the physical fact was
+sinister as though symbolical of the psychical.
+
+The "judge" began to grow vastly businesslike. He must have the full
+names correctly, ages, birthplaces. Gratton answered for himself and for
+Gloria, who stood now with her hand on the back of a chair just within
+the living-room door. Across the room was the fireplace; over it an
+ornamental mirror. She wondered dully what she looked like; the "bride"!
+But from where she stood she could see only the reflection of the window
+across the room, the strip of curtain at the side stirring softly in the
+evening breeze. That breeze came down through the pines; it wandered
+free; why couldn't she, Gloria, be like that? She thought poignantly of
+her few days among the pines with Mark King. Oh, the remembered glory of
+it, the clean, sweet freedom of it.
+
+"Now, folks, if you're ready. Stand side by side--"
+
+"Oh!" cried Gloria.
+
+"Eh? What's that?" demanded the "judge."
+
+She tried to smile.
+
+"I--I think----" She saw Steve Jarrold leering. "The witness," she said
+wildly. "There is only one, and----"
+
+"It's usual to have two, anyhow," admitted the "judge." "But, being as
+things _is_ a bit irregular and everything, why we'll make one do."
+
+"There's Jim," said Gloria. She did not look toward Gratton, but he
+understood that she addressed him. "Jim Spalding. I'd feel better if
+some one I knew--if you'd get Jim to come, please."
+
+She knew that she did not care whether Jim Spalding came or did not
+come; that she was fighting for delay and could not help snatching at
+any straw, though she knew that in the end she would go down,
+overwhelmed by circumstance. Circumstance and--Gratton. Gratton also
+knew and frowned.
+
+"Gloria," he said smoothly, "that isn't necessary, is it?"
+
+"Yes, it is!" she flared out at him hotly. "Go, get him."
+
+"It will take only a minute," Gratton said over his shoulder as he went.
+He would see to it that it took no great amount of time. Spalding on his
+bench saw Gratton running toward him.
+
+"You're wanted in the house a minute, Spalding," he said curtly. "Step
+lively, will you?"
+
+Spalding, not given to stepping lively at other men's commands, was slow
+in answering, and then spoke drawlingly:
+
+"Wanted, am I? Well, that's interestin'. By who? I'm wonderin'."
+
+"Miss Gloria. She wants you right away."
+
+"That's different," said old Jim, getting to his feet.
+
+Gratton turned and hastened back to the house, Jim quickening his own
+pace as he sensed something out of the ordinary. The house door stood
+open as Gratton had left it, and the two entered hastily. Jim looked
+from face to face with keen, shrewd eyes, ignored Jarrold, who said a
+mirthful "Evenin', Jim," and turned to Gloria for explanation.
+
+"Miss Gloria wanted----" began Gratton. But Jim Spalding lifted a big
+hand as though to ward off the words.
+
+"I'm here, miss," he said when Gloria's white face only stared at him."
+You ain't sick, are you?"
+
+"No, Jim, I--I am going to be married, and----"
+
+"Married!" Jim looked incredulous and then puzzled as again his eyes
+went swiftly from one to the other of the three men's faces.
+
+"Yes, Jim. And I want you to be a witness."
+
+Jim flushed up and shifted uneasily. He had never been at a wedding; he
+did not know what a "witness" had to do. And to witness the wedding of
+Miss Gloria, who had never appeared to come down to earth long enough to
+know that there was such a man as Jim Spalding on the same sphere with
+her----He managed an uneasy "Yes'm," and backed off toward the door.
+
+"Now, if you folks is ready," began the "judge" again.
+
+"Right now?" muttered Jim. "You're gettin' married right now?"
+
+"Yes," said Gloria wearily. And to Summerling: "I am ready."
+
+"But I ain't!" cried Spalding. He got to the door and started down the
+hall. "Wait a minute, will you?"
+
+Gratton hurried after him, his face hot with rage, while Steve Jarrold
+guffawed loudly and then, under Gloria's startled look, dropped his
+eyes.
+
+"Come back here, Spalding," commanded Gratton angrily. "Whatever you've
+got to do can wait a minute----"
+
+"_You_ wait," growled Jim. "I'll be back quick enough."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mark King was awakened by old Jim rushing into the room, lighting a lamp
+hastily, and making a deal of clatter. He sat up, demanding:
+
+"Has Ben come?"
+
+Jim began chuckling. After all, a wedding was a wedding, and therefore
+a matter well worth a man's allowing himself to get a bit excited. From
+a cupboard he began dragging forth his one and only serviceable suit of
+clothes, dingy black, shiny affairs, but Jim's "best." He kicked off his
+breeches, drew on the black trousers, and caught up the coat.
+
+"No, Ben ain't back," he grinned at King. "Guess he'll be surprised when
+he does come. His girl's gettin' herself married. To that city guy,
+Gratton. Right now in the house!"
+
+"What!" King had heard well enough, but that "What!" broke from him
+explosively.
+
+"An' me, I'm a witness," said old Jim. "Steve Jarrold's another. They
+got the preacher there an' everything." He paused a moment and
+reflected, with puckered brows. "What do you think of her marryin' that
+swab, now? Think Ben's goin' to be pleased? Kind of surprising ain't it,
+Mark?"
+
+King managed a laugh which escaped critical notice only because old Jim
+was only half listening.
+
+"Oh, it's been open and shut all along that she'd marry Gratton," he
+said, keeping his head down as he drew a match across the floor as
+though to like a pipe whose bowl was empty. "If it suits his womenfolk,
+I guess Ben will stand for it."
+
+By now Jim had drawn his coat on and was back at the door.
+
+"Better come along, Mark," he invited. "You don't see a weddin' every
+day. Comin'?"
+
+"No, thanks," said King. He broke his match between nervous fingers. He
+raised his head to watch Jim go.
+
+"Lord, Mark," said Spalding, holding on his heel a moment. "You must of
+made one all-mighty day of it! You sure do look tuckered!"
+
+King rose and went to the door and stood looking after the swiftly
+departing figure. He saw the house, the windows bright with lights,
+light streaming out through the door to the porch. There was Gloria.
+Just there. And he had slept, and Gloria was marrying. And here was the
+end of it--the end of everything, it dawned on him. He, who had never
+looked twice on a woman, had looked thrice on her and again. He, the
+one-woman man, had found the one woman--and had lost her. He looked out
+toward the house and through its thick log walls saw Gloria; Gloria as
+she had come down the stairs to him that first day, floating down like a
+pink thistledown, putting her two hands into his, looking up into his
+eyes with eyes which he would never forget; he saw her in the woods,
+riding with him; by the spring waiting eagerly for the little
+water-ouzel, she so like a bird herself; crossing a stream on
+boulders--she had slipped; he had caught her into his arms--close. Her
+hair had blown across his face. He stood with her on the highest crest
+of a ridge; the world lay below them, they were alone in the blue
+heavens. And he loved her. He groaned and ran his hand across his eyes
+as though to wipe the pictures out--pictures which would never pass
+away.
+
+Gloria was marrying. Gratton. Now. He looked up into the sky bright with
+stars; its great message to him was "Emptiness." The world was empty,
+life was empty. There was nothing. Simply because Gloria had come, had
+laughed into his eyes, and had gone on. She was like the springtime
+which came dancing into the mountains which softened them and brightened
+them--and laughed and passed on and away. She would be laughing
+now--into Gratton's eyes.
+
+He would never see her again after to-night. Other men had loved and
+their loves had crumbled to ashes, blown away by the winds of time. But
+to-night he _would_ see her. The last time. While still she was Gloria
+Gaynor and not Gratton's wife----
+
+He started and hurried toward the house. They were waiting for Jim and
+Jim had hurried. He came to the porch and, with never a board to creak
+under his careful tread, he made his way silently around to the
+living-room side of the house. There was a window there; the shade was
+not drawn; the curtains were blowing back and forth. He drew close and
+stood, watching. He would look at Gloria one last time, turning away
+just before the preacher said the last words; it was like looking for
+the last time on a beloved face before the sod fell----
+
+He saw her. Her back was turned to him; her head was down. He watched
+her fingers moving nervously at her sides and his brow contracted with a
+sudden access of pain. Those fingers had touched his and he had thrilled
+to the soft, warm contact; he loved them better than he loved life. And
+soon they would find their way into Gratton's.
+
+Not once did he move his eyes from her. She did not turn toward him, but
+as the "judge" began talking she lifted her head and King saw her
+throat, her cheek. How pale she was----
+
+Though her head was up, her slim body drooped. Like a little wildwood
+flower wilting. So she remained for what seemed a very long time. Then
+suddenly he saw her body stiffen; her hands flew to her breast. The
+"judge," hurrying along, had asked:
+
+"And do you take this man to be your wedded husband?"
+
+King did not want to hear the answer; he turned to go. But hear now he
+must, for though until now responses had been low-voiced, hardly above a
+murmur, he heard Gloria crying:
+
+"_No! No and no and no_!"
+
+King stopped like a man paralysed. Had he gone mad? Then his pulses
+leaped and hammered. Gloria had cried "_No_!" A tremor shook him; he
+could no longer see her, but he stood where he was, his senses keyed to
+hear a falling pin within.
+
+"He is a beast and I hate him!" cried Gloria wildly. "He tried to trick
+me and trap me. He tried to make me marry him But I won't! I won't! I'd
+rather die."
+
+Her voice died chokingly away, and for five seconds it was deathly
+still. Still King did not move. He heard Gratton's exclamation,
+Gratton's hurried step. The man was excited, was expostulating. Other
+voices; the other men had drawn aside, amazed, leaving Gratton a clear
+field with his unwilling bride.
+
+"Have you gone mad, Gloria?" King could hear the words now. "Think what
+you are saying----"
+
+"I have thought. I hate you. Go away. Let me go."
+
+Gratton's pale eyes must be ablaze with wrath now; his tone told that.
+
+"There's no way out for you. You've got to marry me. I----"
+
+"Take your hand off----"
+
+Her voice broke into a scream.
+
+"You're hurting me----"
+
+And now Mark King moved at last. Before the last word had done vibrating
+through the still room he was through the window, taking the shortest
+way. Gratton's hand was on Gloria's shoulder; King threw it off, hurling
+the man backward across the room. Gloria turned to him----
+
+"Mark!" she cried. "Oh, Mark King!"
+
+He put his arms about her, thinking that she was going to fall. For an
+instant he held her tight; he felt her heart beating as though it would
+burst through her bosom.
+
+"You won't let him----?"
+
+He moved with her to a chair, placed her in it, and turned toward
+Gratton, a look like a naked knife in his eyes.
+
+"By jings!" muttered old Jim under his breath. "By jings!"
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIV_
+
+
+At this, the most critical moment of her life, it would appear
+inevitable that Gloria must bend every mental faculty to grappling with
+the vital issues. And yet, as she sat swallowed up in the big chair, for
+a space of time she was in a spell, caught up and whirled away from
+those about her; she forgot Gratton with the white, angry face; she had
+no eyes for Mark King or for Summerling, Steve Jarrold or Jim Spalding.
+She was thinking of another day, two years ago, when she and her mother
+had been alone in this room. They had been busied with the last touches
+of furniture arrangement; they had discussed locations for chairs and
+had argued over pictures. Both tired out with a day of effort, they had
+come near tears in a verbal battle over the best place for the sole
+article remaining unplaced. Gloria wanted it in the hallway; Mrs. Gaynor
+pleaded for it over the mantel in the living-room. Finally it was Gloria
+who cried with sudden laughter:
+
+"Oh, what _difference_ does it make? We're getting silly over trifles.
+Have it your way, mamma."
+
+Trifles! Gloria wondered if any other act of her life had had the
+tremendous import of that sudden yielding to her mother's wishes. If the
+mirror had been placed anywhere else in the universe, even by a few
+inches removed from its present abiding-place, would there be a _Gloria
+Gaynor_ in all the world right now? Or would her chair hold quite
+another sort of person--Mrs. Gratton? If she had not lifted her
+desperate eyes and seen Mark King reflected at the window, how would she
+have answered that one final question the "judge" propounded? Would she
+have said "Yes"? Or would it have been "No"? She did not know; she would
+never know. She had been on the verge, dizzy with profitless
+speculation. And now, only the extent of one little word stood between
+her and an unthinkable condition. That a whole life should be steered
+down one channel or another--oh, what immeasurably separated
+channels!--by one's breath in a single-syllabled word----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You don't answer!" a voice was saying irritably.
+
+She started. They were talking to her, they had been talking to her, and
+now she realized that she had heard voices across a great distance, and
+by no means as clear to her consciousness as the remembered voice of her
+mother two years ago arguing for a mirror over the fireplace. She turned
+her eyes on Gratton, since obviously it was he who insisted on an
+answer. But King spoke for her.
+
+"Look here, Gratton," he said bluntly, "as far as I can see there is no
+reason why Miss Gaynor should pay the least attention to your
+effervescings if she doesn't care to. She is a free agent and under no
+obligations to you."
+
+"I'll ask your opinion when I want it," snapped Gratton. "Miss
+Gloria----"
+
+"You asked me something?" said Gloria. "Pardon me. I didn't hear."
+
+Her aloof reply disconcerted him. Her attitude was spontaneous,
+unaffected, and hence unconsciously one of polite indifference. Suddenly
+Gratton, fume as he would, had become of not the least importance.
+
+"You said that you would marry me. Not a dozen minutes ago."
+
+"Did I?" she demanded coolly. "Are you quite sure I said that?"
+
+"Look here, Miss Gloria." It was Jim Spalding, who had been ill at ease
+all along and now had the brains and perhaps the delicacy to understand
+that this was no place for him. "If you don't need me after all, I'll
+go."
+
+"And the rest of us with you," said King. "If Miss Gaynor cares to talk
+things over with Gratton----"
+
+Gloria put out her hand impulsively, touching King's arm.
+
+"_You_ stay. Please. Until--he goes."
+
+King inclined his head gravely, not realizing that his body stiffened
+under her light touch.
+
+"What about _me_?" demanded the "judge" sharply. "Am I needed or ain't
+I?"
+
+"I'd say not this evening," King's dry voice answered him. "Good-night
+to you."
+
+"That's a fine way to treat a man," cried Summerling truculently. "Here
+I ride all this way in the dark, and without stoppin' for so much as
+supper; here I ain't had a bite to eat since dinner-time, and it's
+good-night and get out! And that hundred dollars I was to get so fast,
+how about that? Think I'm the man to let folks trample on me and----"
+
+"Maybe Jim will give you a hand-out at his cabin," King told him. "As
+for your money, get it out of Gratton if he promised it to you--or," he
+added with a flash of heat, "take it out of his hide, for all I care."
+
+"Wait for me outside, Summerling," muttered Gratton. "_I_ haven't said
+you won't be needed, have I?"
+
+"Just the same, I wouldn't mind takin' what's comin' to me now----"
+
+"Man alive!" shouted Gratton, whirling on him. "Haven't I got enough on
+my hands without you yelping at me?"
+
+"Just the same----"
+
+"Jim," called King above the incoherent mouthings, "slip your arm
+through Summerling's and lead him off with you. Feed him if you feel
+like it, and let him stick around for a word with Gratton if he wants.
+And you, Steve Jarrold, Ben Gaynor isn't here, but just the same you can
+take it from me that neither you nor any other of Swen Brodie's hangdogs
+is wanted in Ben Gaynor's house. Out you go."
+
+Jarrold's eyes slanted off to Gratton. Then, seeing himself ignored and
+forgotten, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his hat, and went out.
+Behind him, arm in arm, one smiling widely and the other pulling back
+and still sputtering, went Jim and the "judge."
+
+To all this Gloria had given scant attention. The spell no longer lay
+over her; she was keenly awake to the demands of the present; she was
+thinking, thinking, thinking! It seemed that she had walked on
+quicksands; that a hand had drawn her up and placed her where she was
+now, with solid ground underfoot; but that still all about her were
+quicksands. What temporary sense of security was hers was due to Mark
+King, to his presence. As long as he stood there, where she could put
+out a hand and touch him, she could rest calmly, assured of safety. But
+when he went, there remained Gratton and his venom. Quicksands all about
+her in which she would be floundering at this moment but for Mark
+King----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which
+became delicately flushed. Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and
+once more almost childlike--eyes to remind a man that here, after all,
+was no woman of the world, but only a young girl--rose to King's and met
+his long and searchingly. Yet there was that in their expression that
+made him understand that she was not looking at him, the physical man,
+so much as through him. For the first time in her pampered life the day
+had come when she was face to face with vital issues; when there was no
+mamma and no papa to turn to; when there were no shoulders other than
+her own to feel the weight of events. She must do her own thinking, come
+to her own decisions. Here was no time for a misstep. The one great step
+she had already taken; she had cried "No!" That step could be
+reconsidered, retraced; she looked at Gratton's face and saw that. But
+now she would not do that; she could not. In the city, seeing the two
+men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father's log
+house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did
+men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to
+another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon?
+A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know
+more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within
+her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl
+who was very young, spoiled, vain, and selfish; a girl who was older,
+who looked above and beyond the confines of her own self, who was
+warmhearted and impulsive, and could be generous. There was the Gloria
+who was the product of her mother's teaching and pampering; there was
+that other Gloria who was the true daughter of a pioneer stock, a girl
+linked to the city through tradition, bound to the outdoors through
+instinct. There was the Gloria who was ashamed of Mark King at a formal
+gathering in her own home; there was the Gloria who was thrilled to the
+depths of her being as in the forest-lands she knew a breathless moment
+in the arms of Mark King.
+
+Well, here were considerations to linger over on an idle day. Now,
+without seeking for hidden springs, there were on the surface certain
+plain facts. No matter what she had felt toward Gratton before, she
+detested him now; no matter what he might have appeared in San
+Francisco, here in his unaccustomed garb he looked to her puny, shallow,
+and contemptible. He was, as she had told him, a beast. He had betrayed
+her confidence; he had taken advantage of her headlong youth; he had
+displayed to her view the vileness within him. He loved her, did he? So
+much the better. It lay within her power, then, to repay him, if only in
+part, for what he had made her suffer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I repeat, Miss Gloria," Gratton was saying, a stubborn look in his
+eyes, "that you promised to marry me. You have had a hard day, I
+realize; there has been much to unnerve you. I erred in haste, perhaps;
+I should have waited until you had a night's rest. But you know why I
+did not wait. It was for your sake."
+
+Gloria heard him through with a hard little smile.
+
+"Nothing is further from my intention, Mr. Gratton," she told him icily,
+"than to marry you. Now or ever. Please let us consider the matter
+closed once and for all."
+
+His fingers worked nervously at his sides. Gloria chose the moment to
+lift her eyes again fleetingly to King's. She wanted Gratton to see, she
+wanted to hurt him all that she could. She looked back to see him wince.
+Nor did his quick contraction of the brows result from her glance alone;
+he had seen the look lying unhidden in King's eyes. Mark King had
+to-night, for the first time, swept barriers aside and looked straight
+into his own heart and known that all of the love that was in him to
+give had been given to Gloria Gaynor; he had come from Jim's cabin to
+look on her for the last time; he was giving her up. And then, when he
+had turned away rather than hear her murmur "Yes," she had cried out
+ringingly: "No!" The sod had not fallen upon a beloved face; death had
+not entered the door; life was not extinguished--where there was life
+invariably there was hope--he had given Gloria up, yes; but she had come
+back from beyond the frontier, she had come calling to him. He was
+certain of nothing just now beyond the tremendous, all-excluding fact
+that, wise or fool, he loved her. He wanted her with a want that is
+greater than hunger or thirst, or love of man for man or of man for life
+itself. Much of this lay shining in his eyes for Gratton to read--or for
+Gloria.
+
+"I am no boy to be thrown aside like an old glove," cried Gratton,
+beside himself, shaken with jealous fury. "You have promised; you have
+loved me; in your heart you love me now. Shall I stand back for a girl's
+nervous whim? I tell you, you shall marry me."
+
+Gloria's laughter, cool and insolent, maddened him. He clenched his
+hands and was swept away by his passion to gusty vehemence:
+
+"Think before you laugh! What if, instead of doing the gentlemanly
+thing, I refused to marry you? Alone with me all this time; all last
+night; a clerk to swear I bought clothing for you; a register to show
+where we engaged a room as man and wife; the San Francisco papers
+already bandying your name about, already nosing after scandal. You've
+_got_ to marry me; there is nothing else for you to do!"
+
+Gloria flushed hotly. But only in anger this time. King mystified,
+looking from one to the other, turned at last to Gloria and muttered:
+
+"For God's sake let me throw him out of the door!"
+
+"I think it might be best first," she answered quietly, "if Mr. Gratton
+remained long enough to understand that this is the last time I shall
+ever speak to him or listen to a word from him. He has tried to get me
+into a nasty situation; he will do all that he can to promote scandal.
+But I want him to know that he will, in the end of it all, have my
+father to reckon with--and my friends." Again she looked swiftly at King
+and again Gratton writhed at the look. "Papa will not be here to-night;
+he is hurt and in Coloma, and I'll give you his message soon. But----"
+
+"You saw your father! In Coloma!" It was a gasp of astonishment from
+Gratton. "You said nothing. You brought a message to King here?"
+
+"And you escorted me and never guessed!" Gloria taunted him. "Really it
+seems too bad, after all of your week-end trips to Coloma, after all of
+your conferences with the estimable Mr. Swen Brodie!"
+
+His prominent eyes bulged, written large with consternation. For a
+moment he stood the picture of uncertainty, plucking at his lip.
+
+"Gloria," he said shortly, "despite all you have said I shall see you
+again. To-morrow, when we have both rested, I'll come to you. Now, if
+you will pardon me, I'll have a word with King. Strictly business, you
+may be sure, King," he concluded sarcastically.
+
+"There's to be no business between you and me," King told him promptly.
+
+"But there is. If you've got two grains of common sense. Look you, Loony
+Honeycutt is dead at last. His secret is no longer his secret. Swen
+Brodie knows something--a whole lot----"
+
+"It strikes me," frowned King, "that you know more of this than I gave
+you credit for. Where do you come in?"
+
+"I know--nearly all that it is necessary to know!" His eyes flashed
+triumphantly. "Think I'm the man to let the crowd of you lift a fortune
+right under my nose? Here is my proposition, and you'll thank your stars
+that I make it: We are not friends, you and I, but that is no reason
+that we cannot be business associates until this trick is turned. You
+and I enter into a pact right now, purely business, you understand." He
+was speaking more and more rapidly in the grip of a new emotion.
+"Whatever we find we divide, fifty-fifty;----"
+
+King's sudden laughter, no pleasant sound in Gratton's ears, checked the
+rush of words. To accept Gratton as a partner--on a fifty-fifty split of
+the spoils! Was the man crazy?
+
+"I have been working with Brodie," shouted Gratton. "If I go on with him
+now, with him and the men with him, six or eight of them taking what he
+gives them either in money or in curses and orders--if, I say, I chip
+in with him against you, what will the inevitable end be, I ask you?
+Look at the odds----"
+
+"The inevitable end," said King sternly, "will be that they'll pick your
+bones and kick you out."
+
+"I demand to know what word Gaynor sent----"
+
+"Will you have him go, Mark?" said Gloria. "He--sickens me."
+
+King, unleashed by her words, took a quick step forward.
+
+"Gratton," he said, "you'd better go."
+
+Gratton, rising to fresh fury, shouted at him:
+
+"And leave you and her here? Alone? All night----"
+
+King bore down upon him and struck him across the mouth, hurling him
+back so that Gratton tripped and fell. Gloria rose and stood watching,
+terrified and yet fascinated. She saw Gratton crawl to his feet; his
+hand went out to the table to draw himself up; it found one of the heavy
+bronze book-ends; the fingers gripped it so that the tendons stood out
+like cords. She could see the faces of both men, Gratton's twitching and
+vindictive, King's immobile, looking at once calm and terribly stern. If
+there were two Glorias within her, one of them fled now; the other
+watched with quick bright eyes and gloried in the man who had come at
+her hour of direst need; one vanished, afraid, the other felt a little
+thrill go singing through her blood. And though that bronze block, were
+it hurled at King's head, might have been the death of him, she was not
+once in doubt as to the end of this conflict. There before her eyes a
+man contended with a manikin.
+
+"Drop that, Gratton! Do you hear me? Drop it, I say!"
+
+He even drew closer while he spoke. In his voice was assurance that he
+would be obeyed; in his look was the promise of death or near-death, to
+be meted out swiftly and relentlessly for disobedience. Gratton, like a
+man in a daze, hesitated. King's hand shot out swiftly, gripping his
+wrist. There was a sudden jerk and the bit of bronze crashed to the
+floor.
+
+"You'll go now!"
+
+"Yes, I'll go. But----"
+
+"On your way, then!"
+
+"But----"
+
+"Shut up!" A tremor not to be repressed shook King's voice. "And go
+before I----Just go!"
+
+Gratton caught up his hat, stood for a moment plucking at his lip and
+staring at Gloria, and then turned and went out. Strangely, only now
+that he had gone, did Gloria shiver and look after him fearfully. The
+man here had seemed so futile and yet she had seen that last look, so
+filled with malevolence that in his wake the room seemed steeped in
+menace. King must have had somewhat the same sort of an impression; he
+went to the door and called out loudly:
+
+"Jim! Oh, Jim."
+
+Jim's voice answered from the cabin:
+
+"Comin', Mark."
+
+"Gratton's outside. I've told him to clear out. Give him about two
+minutes, and if he's still here throw a gun on him and run him off the
+place."
+
+"Oh, I'm going fast enough." From somewhere off in the dark it was
+Gratton's voice calling back hatefully. "And don't you forget it, Mark
+King, I am going where an offer like mine to you will be accepted. We'll
+be there before you yet, a dozen men that won't lay down before you! And
+you can tell that girl in there, with my compliments, she'll be on her
+knees to me before she's a day older." He lifted his voice so that
+Gloria, shivering in the silent house, must hear every word. "You can
+tell her, too, that if I didn't telephone to her mother from Oakland, I
+did call up two of the San Francisco newspaper offices! Tell her to
+watch for the papers. And when they get wind of the nice little
+situation to-night, Gloria here all night----"
+
+King had held the door open only to see if Gratton was going to his
+horse. Now, however, he slammed it suddenly and went back to Gloria.
+After all, Jim could be depended on to see to Gratton and to do his job
+thoroughly and with joy in the doing. There was still the message to be
+had from Ben Gaynor, who, it seemed, lay hurt somewhere in Coloma.
+
+But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Gloria, and for the moment
+all thoughts of Gaynor or a message fled from his mind. Again she was as
+pale as death; she caught at the back of the chair which had served her
+thus before; she lifted to King eyes sick with terror.
+
+"I haven't got the straight of things very well," King said to her,
+speaking very gently. For in his heart he was thinking: "Poor little
+kid! She's only a kid of a girl and she's pretty near the
+breaking-point, from the look of things, and small wonder." But aloud he
+continued: "Only one thing seems clear. You are tired half to death and
+worried the other half. I wouldn't let myself think of that snake
+Gratton or his poison drippings. Things will work out all right." He
+managed a smile of a sort, the first smile to-night, and added: "They
+always do, you know."
+
+"Do they?" she asked listlessly. And she, too, forced a smile, so wan
+and bleak that it came close to putting a dash of tears into King's
+eyes.
+
+"For one thing," he said brusquely, "I'll bet you haven't had a bite to
+eat since you got here; have you?" She shook her head; she hadn't
+thought of such a thing as eating. When had she eaten last? Not since
+she and Gratton, motoring up from San Francisco, had stopped at the
+wayside lunch-counter? Perhaps that was why this giddy faintness
+troubled her, why the blood drummed in her ears.
+
+"You'll sit right down," commanded King. "Or lie down is better. In two
+shakes I'll have something ready for you."
+
+"You are so good to me." That came straight from Gloria's heart; her
+eyes shone with a gratitude which struck him as far beyond proportion to
+the small deed of the moment. "I'll go upstairs a moment; papa's
+message----"
+
+"It can wait ten minutes."
+
+"Let me get it now. I--I will lie down in my room until you call me, if
+you want me to."
+
+"That's good." He watched her go slowly upstairs and then hastened to
+the kitchen. He got a wood fire going in the range, scouted for coffee,
+found a glass jar of bacon, a tin of milk, all kinds of canned goods.
+And meantime, though occupied with much speculation concerning all that
+had happened to-night and must have happened before and might happen in
+the future, he never for an instant entirely forgot Gloria and how
+pitifully borne down she looked. Gratton had tricked her some way, had
+coerced her, had come close to breaking her utterly. And yet her
+indomitable spirit had in the end triumphed over Gratton's scheming;
+King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless "No!
+No and no and no!"
+
+"Just a little kid of a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity
+of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother,
+spoiled to the _n_th degree, given no opportunity to develop her own
+character, to grow up to life's responsibilities. Her mother had not
+even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of them, making Gloria
+ashamed. Grandparents of whom any one might be justly proud; folk of
+integrity, of stamina, of fearless hardihood, men and women of that
+glorious type that builds empires. And Gloria, King sensed, was like
+them. Deep within her, under the layers of artificiality which her
+mother had striven so indefatigably and lovingly to lay on, she was like
+them. He remembered his two days with her alone in the mountains and
+sought to forget the fragment of one evening in the city. "Here she was
+her real self; there she had been what her mother had made her over."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gloria, with lagging steps, had gone to her room. Now she lay on her
+bed, her hands pressed tight upon her closed eyes, her will set against
+heeding the throbbing in her temples as she strove to think clearly.
+Gratton's words rang in her ears. They plunged her into panic. For
+scores of "friends" and hundreds of acquaintances she would furnish a
+topic of talk. Girls who were jealous of her would get into a warm
+flurry of excitement; Gloria could picture a dozen of them sitting at
+their telephones, calling up this, that, and the other Mabel and
+Ernestine, saying: "Oh, did you hear about Gloria Gaynor? Isn't it
+_terrible_! What _could_ she have been thinking of? I knew she was----"
+and so forth and so on, "ringing interminable changes." Youth, though
+declared by the thoughtless to be a period of heedlessness, takes to
+heart far more seriously than does Age all happenings which touch its
+own interests. Pure tragedy is Youth's own realm. It feels acutely, its
+imaginings are fearful, it magnifies and distorts beyond all reason. Had
+Gloria been above thirty instead of under twenty this moment would have
+been far, far less deeply immersed in the gloom of despair. She suffered
+dry-eyed.
+
+But Youth, condition of wedded extremes, while it holds tragedy to its
+bleeding heart, cannot entirely fail in time to listen to the voice of
+hope. Gloria clung passionately to the one straw offered her: Mark King
+had come; he had saved her, if only for the moment. If there were
+further salvation, it lay in Mark King. And so she came presently to a
+thought that made her sit bolt upright, that set her heart racing, that
+brought a new look into her eyes. Just now it had seemed so clear that
+only one thing could save her from clacking diatribes, from torture
+under the tongues of Ernestines and Mabels and daily newspapers--
+marriage with Gratton. But Gratton was gone and Mark King was here! If
+she married King! The "judge" was still here. King was her father's
+friend; between men like them there was nothing which would be denied
+when friendship asked. What if she went to King, saying to him
+straightforwardly: "Thus and such is my predicament. For my sake--for
+the sake of papa's daughter and hence for papa's sake no less--will you
+go through the form of marrying me? I shall be no burden; it will make
+no difference in your life. For to-morrow I will go back to San
+Francisco and you need never see me again. You can let me have a
+divorce; you will have lost nothing; I shall have been saved everything.
+Will you many me, Mark King?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gloria!" King was calling. "Will you come down now? Everything's
+ready."
+
+"Coming," answered Gloria. "Right away."
+
+She glanced in her glass as she went out; the colour which had played
+hide-and-seek all day was again tinting her cheeks a delicate rose. What
+were fatigue and hunger when hope attended them?
+
+But it happened that Gloria's impulse, which was at least honest and
+frank, was for a little held in abeyance, and thus it came about that
+she lost the opportunity to appear before Mark King at a critical moment
+as being straight-dealing, direct, and outspoken. She thanked him with
+her eyes for the lunch he had set forth for her; she gave him a quick
+little smile as he waited on her. He poured the coffee, gave her milk
+and sugar, brought the hot things from the stove. And all of the time
+there was in his eyes a look which he had no suspicion was there, the
+look of a man's adoration.
+
+"He will do whatever I ask him to do," something sang within her.
+
+"Won't you sit down with me, Mark?" she smiled at him.
+
+And there, while one Gloria had determined to indulge in plain talk, the
+other Gloria came forward obliquely, demanding the place which had
+always been hers when it was a case of man and girl together. The smile
+was the smile of a coquette; it intoxicated; it made a man's heart beat
+hard; it brought him in close to her and thrust the world back. She
+could not have helped the smile or its message.
+
+"I have eaten," he said a trifle harshly, she thought.
+
+"You are so good to me." She stirred her coffee and he saw only the
+lashes and their black shadows on her cheeks. Then she said brightly:
+"This is our third little picnic together, isn't it?"
+
+"Then you haven't forgotten? The others?" The words said themselves for
+him. The human comedy had begun, or the comedy begun long ago was
+resumed smoothly in its third act, King unconsciously answering to his
+cue. After that it was neither Gloria nor himself who played the part of
+stage-director; that time-honoured responsibility was back in the hands
+of the oldest of all stage-managers. The wind that drives autumn leaves
+scurrying, the sun that awakens spring buds were no more resistless or
+inevitable forces than the one now voicing its dictates.
+
+"It would be--unmaidenly to ask him to marry you," whispered that other
+self within her. Oh, if she could only guess which was the _real self_,
+which the pretender! "And there is no need. Look at his eyes!"
+
+King saw lying on the table the package done up in an old cloth which
+she had brought. Further, he knew that he had seen it before and where
+he had seen it. He knew that at last he had old Loony Honeycutt's secret
+where he could put out his hand to it, with none to gainsay him. He knew
+that with it was a message from his old friend Ben; that Ben, himself,
+lay at this moment in Coloma hurt. And yet his eyes clung to the eyes of
+Gloria and all of these things were swept aside in his mind. He saw that
+when her eyes came to a meeting with his the flush in her cheeks grew
+hotter. He tried to remember how he had come away from her in San
+Francisco; how he had given her up for all time. But that memory
+blurred; in its place he stood with her on a boulder in a creek, holding
+her in his arms; he stood with her on a mountain top, with the world
+lost below them. He sought to get a grip on himself; here and now was no
+time to talk to her of love. She was alone; it was his one job right now
+to take Ben's place, to protect her and efface his own madness. But was
+he mad? And was now no time, after all? She was alone, yes; but if some
+day she would marry him, was not now the time? What would he not give
+for the right to stop the nasty mouth of Gratton once and for all.
+
+Fragmentary thoughts, by no means logically aligned. They came and went
+with other thoughts between, pro and con. But thoughts do not always
+sway destiny. In the crisis often enough there is no time for so slow a
+process as thinking; instinct leaps. Instinct compels. All of the
+thought in the world will not draw a steel needle to a bit of wood; all
+of the thought in the world will not hold back the same needle from a
+magnet. There are urges which must be obeyed, the urge of spinning
+worlds to circling suns, the urge of man to maid.
+
+"Gloria!" he said huskily. "Gloria!"
+
+"Yes, Mark?" she said quietly, trying to speak very calmly and as though
+she did not know, oh, so well, all that tumult that lay behind his
+calling her name. But despite her determination she was agitated; the
+moment had come; there was no stopping it. And did she want it? What did
+she want? What, exactly, did she feel?
+
+She knew what was in his heart! His soul exulted as the certainty rushed
+upon him. She knew what he was going to say; words were needless between
+them. And the colour merely deepened in her cheeks while she hid her
+eyes from him.
+
+He came to her swiftly. She rose as swiftly to her feet. He saw that a
+tremor shook her. He saw that she did not draw back from him; her eyes
+at last lifted to meet his own. They baffled him; he could not read
+their meaning. But they shone on him softly; they were the eyes of her
+whom he loved. Like magnet and steel they were swept together. He had
+her in his arms; he felt against his breast the wild flutter of her
+heart, against his face the soft brushing of her hair. He felt her body
+tense but unresisting in his arms; suddenly she relaxed, her head was
+against his breast. Gloria in his arms--Gloria's sweet face hidden from
+him against his rough shirt----
+
+"Gloria!" he cried again. "Gloria!"
+
+"The--the bacon!" gasped Gloria. "It's burning----"
+
+She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with
+the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from
+across the table. Then she fled to the stove and retrieved the burning
+bacon as though here were the one matter of transcendent importance.
+King began to laugh, his laughter as joyous as a boy's.
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+"That's five times you've said 'Gloria,'" she informed him hurriedly.
+"And----Please, Mark," as he moved toward her. "And you haven't read
+papa's letter yet. And--and I'm dying to know what is in that funny
+package. Aren't you?"
+
+"If I'm dying at all," he told her gravely, though he found a smile to
+answer her own--and two very serious smiles they were--"it is of quite
+another complaint. And this time----"
+
+"But _please_, Mark! I am here all alone--with you--and----"
+
+"I know. I haven't forgotten. But, Gloria----"
+
+They both started to a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch.
+Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought
+condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had
+escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the
+puckered and perplexed face of the "judge"; they were just in time to
+see a big hand grasp him by the shoulder and yank him out of sight. They
+heard Summerling expostulate; they heard Jim Spalding's far from gentle
+voice cursing him.
+
+King understood, at least in part, what must lie under Gloria's look of
+distress. Surely circumstance had placed her in an equivocal position
+to-night. Summerling was the type to blab; he was in no charitable frame
+of mind; he had found her alone here with men, had come to marry her to
+one man, and now had seen her in the arms of another. There was but one
+answer, even to Mark King.
+
+"Some time you are going to marry me, Gloria," he said gravely. "Why not
+now?"
+
+"It sounds like--like an advertisement, Mark," she laughed somewhat
+wildly.
+
+"Poor little kid," he muttered, seeing how she trembled. "But, Gloria,
+why not? Some time you are going to give yourself to me, aren't you,
+dear? While this man is still here, won't you let him marry us? It will
+give me the right to shut that fool Gratton's mouth for him and----Oh,
+Gloria, my dear, my dear----"
+
+She stood staring at him with wide eyes. He pleaded with her.
+
+"Will you, Gloria?"
+
+And then from lips which did not smile he heard the very faint but no
+longer evasive "Yes."
+
+"Now, Gloria?"
+
+"Yes, Mark. If you are sure that you want me." She spoke humbly; at the
+instant she was humble. "But," she added hastily, "still you haven't
+read poor papa's letter. He was very anxious. Let me go a minute, Mark.
+I am going upstairs. I--I want to phone to mamma first. And while I am
+gone you can read papa's letter, and--and----" Her face was hot with
+blushes.
+
+"And arrange with the judge," he said, his own voice uncertain. "Yes,
+Gloria."
+
+She ran by him then. He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door
+closing after her. Then like a man who treads on air he went to the
+window and threw it up and called:
+
+"Jim! Tell the judge not to go. I have business with him. I want him and
+you here in ten minutes."
+
+And then when Jim's voice had answered him he thought to take up the
+parcel on the table--largely because Gloria had asked him! A hurried
+letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt's. Something here for
+which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only
+because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to
+bend them to a letter--this was in the beginning an effort. But Ben's
+words caught him when he had read the first line. He had opened the
+packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a
+Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone;
+Gaynor's letter was slipped into it:
+
+    "DEAR MARK:
+
+    "Honeycutt's dead. I've got his secret. But Brodie came
+    near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got
+    there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the
+    "parson's" and then Gus Ingle's. As I was going out of
+    the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me.
+    In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not
+    see; it was just that near! They came close to killing
+    me; when I came to I found they'd been through my
+    pockets. I don't know how much Brodie knows. I do know
+    he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook. I think you
+    can beat them to it, hands down. And, for God's sake,
+    Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don't let the
+    grass grow! I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy;
+    laid up this way I don't see a chance unless you find
+    what we've been after so long _and find it quick_. Will
+    you start without any delay? As soon as you get this
+    phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma. Leave word for me. And
+    let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you!
+    Then I won't go crazy here with worry. And watch out for
+    Gratton as well as Brodie.
+
+    "BEN."
+
+A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old
+excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove
+and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in
+a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace
+left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful
+labourings, was the "secret" at last--Gus Ingle's message come to him
+across the dead years:
+
+    "Good god I never see such gold nor no man neither and
+    when he come in to camp you could reed in his look he
+    had found it because no man could have looked at that
+    Mother load and not look like Jimmy. And big Brodie
+    grabbed him by the throat and shook him and nearly
+    killed him until Jimmy told. And I guess there was
+    enough there for everybody in all the world. We went
+    down the gorge to the narrow place over on the big
+    seedar that had broke off and that was how we come to
+    the First Caive, and then we come to Caive number thre
+    and two. And good god have mercy on my soul when Ime
+    dead but I got the thought right then if it was only all
+    mine--we worked all seven until we dropped that day and
+    night and early in the morning and the storm was coming
+    but we stayed. And for two weeks maybe thre we lost
+    track of time until this grate big pile of gold was dug
+    that I am setting right on top of right now how can a
+    man eat gold when he is dying of hunger and burn it when
+    he is freezing. And it was big Brodie killed pore Manny
+    I seen him and the next day or maybe it was two days
+    Dago was gone and never come back was it Manny's goast
+    got him and drug him down the cliffs screaming horrible
+    and in the gorge--anyway that was Two. and I am all that
+    is left and I am going--I tride to get out and the Big
+    storm drov me back and all I can see is Jimmy Kelp and
+    the parson if I had not of killed them they would killed
+    me sure and big Brodie's gone he is crazy and cant never
+    make it back across the mountains in this storm, and
+    Baldy Winch he took a big nugget and went off, and he
+    stoled what handful of grub there was. And now I can
+    look down in the gorge and see the water all white and
+    snow and ice sickles and I am afraide to get lost in the
+    caives and if I write all this in the bible that was
+    preacher Elsons and tie it up safe in oilcloath and
+    canvas and make a bote out of a chunk of wood and throw
+    it in the river maybe it will get to one of the camps
+    down there and a good man will find it and Ile give him
+    half. You come up the old trail past where the thre
+    Eytalians had their camp last year and over the big
+    mountain strate ahead and about another seven miles
+    strate on and then there is the pass with the big black
+    rocks on one side and streaks of white granite on the
+    other and down into the gorge and strate up four or five
+    miles where the old seedar broke off and fell acrost. My
+    god here goes.
+
+    "GUS INGLE."
+
+To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark
+King, Gus Ingle's message would have brought only stupefaction. But to
+King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the "secret" lay bare. Old names
+held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as
+Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River
+then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.
+
+"What is more," he thought triumphantly, "I know where two caves are in
+there. But where the devil is 'Caive thre'?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were
+steps on the porch. Jim and the "judge" were coming----
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XV_
+
+
+"It strikes me," said Summerling sarcastically, "that there's mighty
+funny goings-on here to-night. I show up to marry one man to a girl and
+nex' thing I know I peek in a winder and see----"
+
+"Never mind that," cut in King hastily. "You are going to marry her
+after all. Only to another man."
+
+"Meanin' you, Mark?" demanded Jim. On his honest old face was a look of
+utter bewilderment; for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he or
+every one else had gone crazy.
+
+King flushed under the look, but nodded and managed a calm "Yes, Jim."
+
+Summerling cleared his throat and thereafter scratched his head.
+
+"It's irregular. I told Gratton that. But he said there was--was
+extenuatin' circumstances and all that. Hadn't been time for a licence.
+It's irregular; don't know as I mightn't get in trouble for it----"
+
+"The marriage would be binding, wouldn't it?" demanded King.
+
+"Sure it would; once I said 'man and wife' nary man could set _that_
+aside. But, if any one wanted to get _me_ in bad, seeing there's no
+licence--well, it would make trouble with my bondsmen and they'd make
+trouble with me."
+
+King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the
+living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should
+hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had
+undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then,
+"either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself
+will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"
+
+"Gratton promised me a hundred dollars," muttered the "judge." "And he
+cleared out without taking the trouble to pay me."
+
+King's face cleared. His cheque for a hundred dollars decided the
+"judge."
+
+"That's a might of money to pay the old duffer for one night's work,
+Mark," muttered Jim. "Strikes me that way, anyhow."
+
+A might of money! King laughed.
+
+"Now if you folks are ready," said Summerling, grown impatient the
+moment the cheque was in his pocket, "I've got a long ride ahead of me."
+
+This time Gloria did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase
+to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a
+thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking--she, too,
+remembered--how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him;
+she put out her two hands to him as she had done that other time. And
+right there they were married--on Gus Ingle's old Bible.
+
+"It's done!" whispered Mark, bending over her. "You are mine now; mine
+for all time, Gloria. And, girl of mine," he added reverently, "may God
+deal with me as I deal with you."
+
+"It's done!" In an awed little voice came Gloria's response, like an
+echo. Mark King had seen her across the quicksands.
+
+Jim and the "judge" had gone. They two were alone in the still house.
+Gloria was nervous; King could see that and thought that he understood.
+So he went for wood, made a cheery blaze in the fireplace, and drew two
+chairs up to it.
+
+"Tell me about papa's letter," said Gloria hastily Had there not been
+that obvious topic she would have caught at another, any other. "He
+didn't tell me how badly he was hurt or what had happened."
+
+King put out his hand for hers, and while Gloria looked into the fire
+and he looked into her face, he told her. At the end he brought out Gus
+Ingle's Bible and read to her what was written in it. All the time that
+his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But
+by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of
+her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay
+this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of treachery
+and lonely death.
+
+"And you know where it is?"
+
+"I can go to it as straight as a string. Two days to get to it and to
+stake a claim; two days to come out with a couple of horses loaded to
+the guards. And that itself means a fortune, if it's clean, raw gold, as
+would seem to be the case. We need not fear the poorhouse, you and I,
+Mrs. King!"
+
+"But Brodie? And Mr. Gratton?"
+
+"They don't know where it is! They can't know, since we've got the
+Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they
+would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before
+dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if
+they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have
+lost the game!"
+
+"You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"
+
+"He wanted me to telephone as soon as I got this." He rose, lingering
+over her. "We mustn't forget him, even for our own happiness." He
+brushed her hair with his lips; he hastened the few steps to the
+telephone in Ben's study.
+
+"I--I am going upstairs, Mark," called Gloria after him.
+
+"All right, Queen of the World," he answered her. "I'm just to phone in
+a message for him. It won't take me five minutes to get it done; just to
+say: 'Tell Ben that I start at dawn and that he's got my word for it
+that nothing's going to stop me! And--that I've just married Gloria!'"
+
+But he was at the telephone longer than he thought to be. The operator
+buzzed into his ear as he took down the receiver; San Francisco was
+trying to get a message through. For Gloria Gaynor. Would he take the
+message? Then an operator in San Francisco, droning the words: "For Miss
+Gloria Gaynor. Your father is hurt in Coloma. Just sent me word. Says
+not dangerously, but I must go to him immediately. Meet me there.
+Mamma."
+
+"Got it," said King, and San Francisco rang off. Thereafter he got his
+own message through; he wondered how Mrs. Gaynor would take the news of
+her new son-in-law. Ben would be glad; he was sure of Ben.
+
+Gloria was still upstairs. King sat in front of the fire, staring into
+the flames, listening to the wind in the chimney, waiting for Gloria.
+When time passed and she did not come, he went softly upstairs and to
+her door. It was closed and he knocked lightly, then dropped his hand to
+the knob, awaiting her voice.
+
+His knuckles had hardly brushed the door, this door which he approached
+in reverence; Gloria had not even heard him. He called softly, his voice
+little above a whisper:
+
+"Gloria!"  He heard her move; for a moment she did not answer. He could
+not know how she stood, scarcely breathing, her hands at her breast; nor
+how, now that the great step was taken, she was again half-frightened,
+half-regretful, altogether bewildered and uncertain. Of herself, of him,
+of everything----
+
+"Is it you, Mark?"
+
+"Yes. May I come in, Gloria?"
+
+"Please, Mark. It's all so new, so strange ... I intended to come right
+back downstairs, but I'm so tired, Mark. And I want to be alone a
+little; to think. I haven't had time to think of anything! You don't
+mind, do you, Mark?"
+
+He answered promptly and heartily, refusing to allow himself to harbour
+a shadow of disappointment.
+
+"No. No, of course not. You will go right to bed? I know you must be
+half-dead for sleep."
+
+"Yes." There was a note of eagerness in the voice coming to him from
+beyond the shut door.
+
+"There was a message from your mother; she has gone to your father and
+wanted you to meet her there. But we will talk of that later."
+
+"Yes.... Good-night, Mark."
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss me good-night?" he asked, hesitating a little
+between the words. His new privilege, a lover's, a husband's, was not an
+hour old; he felt strangely shy as he spoke softly to her.
+
+"Please, Mark! I am terribly tired out, and--and I'm afraid I've mislaid
+the key, and----"
+
+That hurt him; his eyes darkened with the quick pain that came to him
+from her words. He had hoped that Gloria had known him better than that.
+
+"You need never lock your door against me, my dear," he told her gently.
+"I don't want you to be afraid of me. Why, God bless you, I wouldn't
+touch the hem of your dress if you didn't want me to."
+
+"Yes," said Gloria. "I know. You are so good, Mark. But now----"
+
+"I am going," he returned tenderly, "to sit by the fire and think. Just
+to soak myself in the realization," he added with a happy laugh, "that
+you are mine."
+
+"Before you go in the morning you will come to my door?"
+
+"If you want me to...."
+
+"Of course, Mark."
+
+"Then--good-night, dear."
+
+"Good-night, Mark."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVI_
+
+
+King was astir long before dawn. He got the fire going in the kitchen
+and started breakfast, seeking to be very silent and succeeding in
+making the usual clatter of a male among pots and pans. Whilst water
+heated and bacon sizzled, he rummaged through the store-room at the rear
+of the house, gathering what he meant to put into his pack for the four
+or five days' trip. As he returned from the last journey to the
+store-room, his arms full of camp accessories, including canvas and camp
+blankets, he confronted Gloria, fully dressed. He dropped his arm-load
+and filled his eyes with her. Any shadow left overnight in his heart was
+sent scurrying before his new joyousness. Gloria had come down to him
+while he deemed her fast asleep!
+
+"Gloria!" he cried.
+
+A more radiantly lovely Gloria he had never looked upon. She had slept
+and rested; she had bathed and groomed and set herself in order. She was
+dressed after a fashion to bewilder a mere man in the only utterly
+ravishing outing costume Mark King had ever seen. He felt insanely
+inclined to pick up her little boots, one after the other, and go down
+on his knees and kiss them; her hat was a flopsy turban, from under the
+brim of which the most adorable of golden-brown curls half escaped to
+throw kiss-shadows on her rosy cheeks. And Gloria's eyes!
+
+This time there was no door between them, nor even the memory of a
+door. He gathered her up into his arms so that her boot-heels swung
+clear of the floor.
+
+"Do you know ... do you guess ... have you the faintest suspicion how I
+love you?"
+
+"The--the coffee!" gasped Gloria. "It's boiling over!"
+
+He laughed joyously at that, and finally, when he had set her down,
+Gloria, bright and flushed, laughed too.
+
+"Burning bacon last night, boiling coffee this morning!" he chuckled.
+And then, there in the kitchen, they sat down to breakfast. "It's sweet
+of you," he told her softly, "to get up and come down and see me off."
+
+"Oh," said Gloria, "I am going with you."
+
+Not once had King dared think of a thing like that. He had thought that
+at best he would be with her again in four or five days. But that she
+should go with him into the mountains on this quest of his? He sat and
+pondered and stared at her.
+
+"Don't you want me?" asked Gloria. "Aren't you glad, Mark?"
+
+She was serenely prepared for objections, should they be forthcoming.
+For it was not on any spur of the moment, but after long deliberation,
+that she had decided that she would go with him. She wanted no scandal
+in the papers; she meant that there should be none. If it were rumoured
+that she had gone out of town with Gratton; if Gratton wanted to be ugly
+and feed rumour; then on top of that if she appeared within reach of a
+reporter without a husband, there would be talk. If it were answered
+that she was married to Mark King, there would be the question: "And
+where, my dear, is this Mark King?" Those girl friends in San Francisco
+who had met him at her birthday-party would be fairly squirming with
+excited curiosity to know _everything_. Among themselves they would make
+insinuations about the Bear Tamer or the Animal Trainer, as Gloria knew
+that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find
+it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next
+without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they
+would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork
+of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation.... From
+upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the
+"judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake
+outright, not to allow the scotched reptile to writhe free. She was
+married; she was going with her husband into the wilderness on the most
+romantic of all honeymoons. The papers were free to make much of that.
+
+"Of course I want you," said King slowly. "Glad? Glad that you want to
+come with me? Can't you see that I am the gladdest man on earth?
+But----"
+
+"I have already written a message I wanted to send to a girl friend in
+San Francisco...." It was to Miss Mildred Carter, who was engaged to be
+married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_.... "I was going to have it
+phoned in to her. It tells her I'm--married. To you, Mark. And that
+we're off on the most wonderful trip together into the heart of the wild
+country."
+
+"God bless you," he said heartily. But Gloria, glancing at him swiftly,
+saw that his eyes were clouded with perplexity.
+
+"Of course," she said, "if you don't want a girl along----"
+
+"Gloria!"
+
+"Well, then? It's settled? I'm to go?"
+
+"Only I'm afraid it isn't the sort of a trip for a girl. It's hard
+going, and--Oh, it's a cursed shame I can't put it off."
+
+"You said last night that you weren't afraid of anything Brodie and his
+men could do? That they didn't even know where to go? That they'd never
+know where to find you?"
+
+"Yes. And I meant it. But----"
+
+He wanted her with him; she wanted to come. Further, it pained him to
+think that those first glorious days should be spent with the mountains
+between them. He was tempted, sorely tempted. Gloria knew; she smiled
+at him across the table; she tempted him further. ...Was there really
+any danger, would there be danger to her? If he thought so, that there
+was the faintest likelihood of harm to her, he would say no, no matter
+what the yearning in his heart. But if they made a quick dash in and
+out; two days each way, not over one day at Gus Ingle's caves? If they
+went on horseback nearly all the way, and travelled light? He carried a
+rifle nowadays, and he rather believed he might carry it ten years
+without ever firing a shot at any man of their hulking crowd. They could
+go in one way, come out another. They had at least a full day's head
+start of any possible followers. No, in his heart he did not believe
+that there would be any danger to Gloria. Further, the thought struck
+him that she would not be altogether safe here; there was venom in
+Gratton, God only knew how virulent. And there was sinister significance
+in the fact that Gratton was hand in glove now with Swen Brodie. Then,
+too, Gratton knew from Gloria's own lips that she had brought the
+message from her father in Coloma; hence Gratton might suspect, and
+Brodie after him, that Gloria was in possession of old Loony Honeycutt's
+secret. Instead of seeming hazardous to take Gloria with him, it began
+to appear that his new responsibility of guarding her from all harm had
+begun already, and that he could best protect her from any possible evil
+by having her always with him. He could not allow her to go to her
+parents in Coloma; he thought of that, but that was Brodie's hangout,
+and Ben was in no condition to send for her. Nor was it advisable for
+her to go alone to San Francisco; her mother was not there, and Gratton
+might be looked on to follow her....So with himself communed Mark King,
+never a man overly given to caution, but seeking now to measure chances,
+to set them in the scales over against the desire of his heart. A
+fanciful thought insisted on being heard: had Gus Ingle's treasure
+hidden itself all these years, awaiting the time when he and Gloria
+together came to it? Their wedding gift! How much more precious then
+than mere gold!
+
+"We'd travel light," he said thoughtfully, and Gloria knew that she had
+won. "We'd go in quick, out quick. It's getting late in the year," he
+added with a smile, "and we'd have to hurry, Brodie or no Brodie. I've
+no notion for a prolonged honeymoon snow-bound in those mountains."
+
+Her eyes danced.
+
+"Wouldn't that be fun!"
+
+His smile quickened. Her childish ignorance of what such an adventure
+would mean was in keeping with her vast inexperience with matters of the
+outdoors; she had merely begun, in his company, to glimpse the true
+meanings of the solitudes. She would learn further--with him. And a warm
+glow of pleasure came with the thought that Gloria wanted to go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pearl-grey dawn was flowering into a still pink morning when they
+locked the door behind them and stepped out into the crisp, sweet
+freshness of the autumn air. He had made two small packs, provisions
+rolled into the bedding and the whole wrapped in pieces of canvas; he
+estimated they would be gone five days, and then, making due allowance
+for any reasonable delay, provisioned for ten. When he saw that Gloria
+had noted how for the first time on a woodland jaunt with her he carried
+a very businesslike-looking rifle, he explained laughingly that if they
+developed abnormal appetites there were both deer and bear to be had.
+She was much interested in everything, and looked out to the mountains
+eagerly when King had swung her up to her saddle on Blackie, the tall,
+sober-faced horse, where she sat with a roll of blankets at her back and
+with the horn before her decorated with a miscellany of camp
+equipment--a frying-pan, a short-handled axe in its sheath, an overcoat
+done into a compact bundle. Here was another moment when thoughts were
+too slow processes to emphasize themselves; she was swayed by emotions
+provoked by the moment. Where were the trunks and suitcases and
+hat-boxes to accompany the young bride? In their stead, a coat tied into
+a tight bundle and a frying-pan before her. King looked at her and
+marvelled; her cheeks were roses, her eyes were Gloria's own, wonderful
+and big and deep beyond fathoming. From his own saddle on the buckskin
+he nodded his approval of her.
+
+"You are not afraid that I can't take care of you, are you, Gloria?" he
+asked.
+
+And Gloria laughed gaily, answering:
+
+"My dear Mr. Man, I am not the least little bit afraid of anything in
+all the world this morning!"
+
+So with the glorious day brightening all about them they turned away
+from the log house and into the trail which straightway King dubbed
+"Adventure Trail." And as they went he sang out joyously:
+
+ "The Lord knows what we'll find, dear heart, and the deuce knows what
+      we'll do.
+  But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
+  And Life runs large on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVII_
+
+
+The magnificent wilderness into which rode Mark and Gloria King seemed
+to prostrate its august self to do them honour upon this their wedding
+morning. Succeeding the paler tints of the earlier hour came the rare
+blue day. Last night's clouds had vanished; the air was clear and crisp,
+with still a hint of frost. On all hands had October in passing splashed
+the world with colour. Along the creek the aspens danced and played and
+shivered in bright golden raiment; through the bushes there was a
+glimpse of vivid scarlet where the leaves of a dwarf maple were as
+bright as snow-plants. A little grove of gracefully slender poplars
+trembled in yellow against the azure above. The clear, thin sunlight
+pricked out colours until it made the woods a riot of them, greens dark
+and light, the grey of sage, the white of a granite seam, the black of a
+lava rock, and in the creek spray a brilliant vari-coloured rainbow
+sheen. They two, riding side by side, while the broad trail permitted,
+passed over the ridge and out of sight of the house. Immediately the
+solitudes shut down about them with titanic walls. They rode down into a
+long, shadowy hollow, out through a tiny verdant meadow fringed with the
+rusty brown of sunflower leaves, and on up to the crest of the second
+ridge. Already they were alone in the world, a man and his mate, with
+only infinity and its concrete symbols embracing them, ancient and
+ageless trees, limitless sky, mile after mile of ridge and precipice and
+barren peak. And upon them and about them and within them the utter
+serene hush of the Sierra.
+
+With every swinging step of the horses taking them on, a new gladness
+blossomed in King's heart. For they were pushing ever further into the
+portion of the world which he knew best, loved best. The present left
+him nothing to wish for; he had Gloria, and Gloria had elected to come
+with him. Until high noon they would wind along, for the most part
+climbing pretty steadily with the old trail--Indian trail, miners'
+trail, trail which even to-day seems to lead from the first generation
+of the twentieth century straight back into the heart of 1850 and
+beyond. Here men did not penetrate save at long intervals; here was true
+solitude. And soon, when they should leave this trail to travel as
+straight a line as the broken country would allow toward Gus Ingle's
+caves, they would enter a region given over entirely to the wild's own
+bright-eyed, shy inhabitants.
+
+There were red spots in Gloria's cheeks when they started. King sought
+to guess at what might be the emotions of a young girl going on with
+Gloria's present emotional adventure--vain task of a mere man seeking to
+fathom those troubled feminine depths!--marking that she was a little
+nervous and distrait.
+
+"I know the place Gus Ingle tried to describe," he said, "as well as I
+know my old hat. Or at least I'd have said so until he mentioned the
+third cave. I've been there dozens of times, too, but I've got to see
+more than two caves there yet."
+
+Together they had read the crabbed lines in the Bible; they had been
+silent thereafter as to each came imagined pictures like ghosts from the
+past; ghosts of greed and envy and despair. Now Gloria mused aloud:
+
+"I wonder--do you suppose we'll find it as he says?"
+
+"At least we'll see about it. And whether there be heaps and piles of
+red, red gold, as the tale telleth, be sure our trip is going to be
+worth the two days' ride. I'll show you such chasms and gorges and crags
+as you've never turned those two lovely eyes of yours upon, Mrs. Gloria
+King." (He couldn't abstain absolutely from all love-making.) "And a
+little grove of sequoias which belongs to me. Or, at least, I believe I
+am the only man who knows where they are. Friends of mine, those big
+fellows are, five old noble-souled monarchs."
+
+She looked interested and treated him to a fleeting smile, but asked
+curiously:
+
+"How can a man speak of a tree that way? As though it were alive--" She
+broke off, laughing, and amended: "But they _are_ alive, aren't they? I
+mean--human."
+
+"Why, you poor little city-bred angel," he cried heartily. "You will
+answer your own question inside of two days. No doubt I'm going to grow
+jealous of old Vulcan and Thor and Majesty. Sure, I've named them," he
+chuckled. "And you'll come with me into their dim cathedral to-morrow at
+dusk and listen with me to their old sermon. A man ought to go to church
+to them at least once a year, to keep his soul cleaned out and growing
+properly."
+
+Gloria appeared thoughtful; that she was interested just now less in
+that of which he spoke than in the man himself he did not suspect. She
+was noting how he spoke of trees as friends; how he was different from
+other men whom she knew in that he stood so much closer to the ancient
+mother, the wilderness now embracing them. Instinctively she knew that
+it behoved her to penetrate as deeply as she might into the inner nature
+of this man who, hardly more than a pleasant, attractive stranger
+yesterday, was to-day her husband.
+
+"What is the oldest thing in the world?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+She wrinkled her brows prettily at him.
+
+"Church to-morrow evening and school now?" she countered lightly.
+
+"Answer," insisted King. "Just at a rough guess what would you say was
+the oldest thing in the world?"
+
+Gloria cudgelled her brains. Finally, since he seemed quite serious, and
+she knew that wisdom lay in pleasing the male of the species in small
+and unimportant matters, she sought to reply.
+
+"The Sphinx or the Pyramids, I'd guess," she offered.
+
+"Naturally," he returned. "And what will you say when I introduce you to
+the Pharaoh who was a big, husky giant before Thebes was thought of?"
+
+Again she looked to see a twinkle of jest in his eyes.
+
+"Pharaoh?" she said. "Just a tree? Over two or three thousand years
+old!"
+
+"By at least another thousand," he rejoined triumphantly. "And as
+staunch an old gentleman as you'll find."
+
+Even Gloria, a poor little city-bred angel, must muse upon the
+statement. Having caught her interest he told her picturesquely of his
+old friends; how they had dwelt on serenely while peoples were born and
+empires rose and fell; while Rome smote Greece and both went down in the
+dust; while Columbus pushed his three boats across the seas; while the
+world itself passed from one phase to another; how they were all but
+co-eternal with eternity.
+
+"When you think how these old fellows were a thousand years old when the
+Christ was a little boy," he ended simply, "you will begin to realize
+the sort of things they have a way of saying to you while you lie still
+and look up and up, and still up among their branches that seem at
+night to brush against the stars."
+
+She let her fancies drift in the leash of his. But again they left the
+picturesque ancient trees and returned to him. A little smile touched
+her lips and was gone before he was sure of it; she was thinking that a
+man like King kept always in his heart something of the simplicity of a
+little child; she wondered if she herself, though so much younger in
+actual years, were not worlds more sophisticated. For his part King
+noted that she displayed to-day none of that chattering, singing gaiety
+of their former rides together; he remembered, sympathetically, that she
+had had very little sleep last night, and that she had endured a
+wearisome twenty-four hours before, and that the long, nervous strain
+under which she had struggled must certainly have told upon her, both
+physically and mentally. So, believing that she would be grateful for
+silence, he grew silent with her.
+
+Further and ever further into the heart of the solitudes they rode
+through the quiet hours of the forenoon, with Gloria ever more
+abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence,
+drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They
+forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad
+little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a
+flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar
+grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land
+over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the
+work it had to do before many weeks passed. Though there were some few
+level spaces, though now and then as King sought for her the easier way
+they rode down short slopes, with every mile put behind them they had
+climbed perceptibly. Already Gloria had the sensation of being by the
+world forgotten--though for her the world could not be forgot. A ridge
+from which they looked out across the peaks and valleys seemed to her
+like an island, lost, remote, eternally set apart from other people
+whom she knew, from all her life as she had lived it. She went on and on
+and felt like one in a dream, journeying into a fierce, rugged land over
+which lay a spell of enchantment, a spell that had been cast over it
+before King's all but immortal trees had burst from the seeds, so that
+now, while the outside world pulsed and beat with life, and swung back
+and forth with its pendulous progress, here all was unchanged,
+changeless.
+
+King led her, well before midday, to the spot in which from the first he
+had planned that they would noon. A forest pool ringed with boulders,
+which were green with moss under the splashing of the water from above,
+where the swaying pines mirrored themselves and shivered in the little
+breeze which ruffled the clear, cold water. Here was a tiny upland
+meadow and much rich grass; here a sheltered spot where Gloria might sit
+in the sun and be protected from the colder air.
+
+He was quick to help her to dismount and noted that she came down
+stiffly; the eyes which she turned to him were heavy with fatigue; some
+of the rose flush had faded from her cheeks.
+
+"Maybe I shouldn't have let you come after all, dear," he said
+contritely. "These are harder trails than we've ridden before, and we've
+had to keep at it steadier."
+
+There was an effort in her smile answering him.
+
+"The last two days _have_ been hard to get through with," she said as
+she yielded to his insistence and sat down on the sun-warmed
+pine-needles. "I am sorry I am so--so----"
+
+He did not allow her to run down the elusive word.
+
+"Nonsense," he told her heartily. "You've got a right to be tired. But
+when you've had some hot lunch and a cup of hot coffee you'll be tip-top
+again. You'll see."
+
+King unsaddled and tethered the horses where they could browse and rest
+and roll; built his little fire and went about lunch-getting with a joy
+he had never known in the old accustomed routine before. Now and then he
+glanced toward Gloria; he could not help that. But he saw that she was
+lying back, her eyes closed, and while his heart went out to her he did
+not force his sympathy on her. She was tired and, what was more, she had
+every right and reason to be tired. He hoped that she might get three
+winks of sleep. When he came near her for the coffee-pot he tiptoed. She
+seemed to be asleep.
+
+But Gloria was not asleep. Never had her mind raced so. It was done and
+she was Mark King's wife! Higher and higher loomed that fact above all
+other considerations. But there were other considerations; her father
+hurt, she did not know how badly; her mother mystified, by now perhaps
+informed of Gloria's marriage; Gratton with the poison extracted from
+his fangs had the fangs still; gold ahead somewhere, in caves where men
+long ago had laboured and fought and snarled at one another like
+starving wolves and died; Brodie somewhere, Brodie with the horrible
+face. She shivered and stirred restlessly, and King, who saw everything,
+thought that she had dreamed a bad dream. But lunch was ready; he came
+to her with plate and cup. And again Gloria did her best to smile
+gratefully.
+
+"You are so good to me, Mark," she said. Her eyes were thoughtful; would
+he always be good to her? Even when--but she was too weary to think. It
+seemed to her that only now was she beginning to feel the effects of all
+she had been through.
+
+"I want to learn how to be good to you, wife of mine," he said very
+gently. "That is all on earth I ask. Just to make you happy."
+
+"You love me so much, Mark?" she asked, as one who wondered at what she
+had read in his low voice and glimpsed in his eyes.
+
+"Gloria," he told her gently, "I don't understand this thing they call
+love yet; it is too new, too wonderful. But I do know that in all the
+world there is nothing else that matters."
+
+"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold?" she said rather more lightly than
+she had spoken.
+
+"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold."
+
+She looked at him long and curiously.
+
+"You would do anything you could to make me happy? Anything, Mark?"
+
+"I pray with all my heart and soul that I always may!"
+
+Gloria seemed to rest through the noon hour and to brighten. When she
+saw him the second time look at the sun she got up from the ground and
+said:
+
+"Time to go on? I'm ready. And after that banquet I feel all _me_
+again!"
+
+He laughed and went off after the horses, singing at the top of his
+voice. She stood very still, looking off after him, her brows puckering
+into a shadowy frown. Oh, if she could only read herself as he allowed
+her to read him; if she could only be as sure of Gloria as she was of
+Mark; if she could only look deep into her heart as she looked into his.
+But she could not! His heart was like the clear pool just yonder across
+which the sunshine lay and far down in which she could see the stones
+and pebbles as through so much clear glass; hers was like the rushing
+stream above, eddying and swirling and hiding itself under its own light
+spray. All day long she had tried to see what lay under the surface.
+_Did she love Mark King_? She had thrilled to him as she had thrilled to
+no other man; but that had been in the springtime. Twice then she had
+been sure that she loved him. But that was so long ago. And now that she
+had allowed him to carry her out of the quicksands? What now? She was so
+borne down by all that she had lived through; he was so much a part of
+the mountainous solitudes towering about them. And was she one to love
+the wilderness--for long? Or did it not begin to bear down upon her
+uncertain spirit? Did it not menace and frighten and, in the end, would
+it not repel? Oh, if she had only let him go on alone this morning; if
+she had remained where she could rest and think and thus come to see
+clearly, even into her own troubled heart!
+
+Their first hour after lunch led them through a region which, given
+over to silence itself, denied them any considerable opportunity for
+conversation. King rode ahead, turning off to the left from their
+resting-place by the pool, and riding through a sea of grey brush,
+following a narrow trail made by deer. Then the mountain-side reared its
+barrier and made all forward and upward progress slow and toilsome.
+Three times they dismounted and King led the horses; here Gloria clung
+to the steep mountain-side, looking fearfully down into the monster
+gorge carved at its base, dwelling with fascinated fancies on the
+thought of slipping, losing handhold and foothold and plunging down
+among the jagged boulders strewing the lower levels. There was really no
+great danger, she told herself over and over; King's cheery calls
+reassured her; no danger so long as they went forward on foot. But now
+and then when a horse's foot slipped and a wild cascade of loose soil
+and rocks went hurtling downward, she grew rigid with apprehension.
+
+But there was only an hour of this. Thereafter they rode down a long
+slope and into a long, narrow, twisting ravine, rocky cliffs on one hand
+and a noisy stream on the other, a fair trail underfoot. Nearly always
+now King rode ahead, finding the way for her; and Gloria, her spirits
+drooping again with the advancing afternoon, vaguely oppressed by the
+solemn stillness about her, was glad that she too could be silent. When
+he did call to her she needed only nod or smile; he turned to point out
+some rare view that appealed to him, a vista worth her seeing, a cascade
+or a fall of cliff, or a ferny nook, or perhaps a late ceanothus-
+blossom. He pointed out a scampering Douglas squirrel and had her
+hearken to a quail.
+
+"We're already in the finest timber belt in the world," he told her,
+full of enthusiastic loyalty to his beloved mountains.
+
+Thus, he leading the way, she following with head down and shoulders
+drooping, they came about four o'clock to a small meadow, cliff-ringed,
+studded with big yellow pines and here and there graced with an incense
+cedar. Stopping in the open, sitting sideways in the saddle, he waited
+for her.
+
+"And what do you think of this, Miss Gloria?" he called gaily as her
+horse thrust his black nose through the alders down by the creek.
+
+Gloria drew rein and looked at him with large eyes across the twenty
+paces separating them.
+
+"I can't go any further," she said bleakly. "I'm tired out!"
+
+He was quick to see a gathering of tears, and swung down from his horse
+and went to her with long strides, his own eyes filled with concern.
+
+"Poor little kidlet," he said humbly. "I've let you do yourself up...."
+
+And it was his duty, his privilege, and no one's else in the world, to
+shelter her, to stand between her and all hardship. He put out his arms
+to take her into them quite as he could have picked up a little maid of
+six, something stirring in the depths of him which in man is twin to the
+maternal instinct in woman. But Gloria said hurriedly: "Please, Mark, I
+am so tired ..." and drew back, and he let his hands fall to his side.
+For a second time her act hurt him; her gesture was akin to locking a
+door last night. But in a moment, his pity and loyalty and staunch faith
+in her crowding the small ache out of his heart, he was unrolling a
+pack, making a temporary couch for her and commanding her lovingly just
+to lie down and look up at the tree-tops above her, and rest while he
+staked out the horses. Sensing that perhaps the very bigness and
+majestic silence of these uplands might rest heavy upon her spirit and
+perhaps depress if not actually awake in her an emotion akin to fear, he
+strove to cheer her by his own blithe acceptance of the fortune of the
+hour. He told her heartily that she had earned a rest if any one ever
+had; that it was well, after all, to get an early start at pitching
+camp; that he was going to make his lady-love as cosy here in his big
+outdoor home as was ever princess in castle walls. Gloria shivered and
+threw herself face down on the blankets. Gloria did not know what
+possessed her; she fought for repression, hiding her face from him. Out
+of a hideously stern world a black spirit had leaped upon her; it
+clutched at her throat, it dragged at her heart. When King called a
+cheery word from beyond the thicket where he had gone with the horses,
+she could have screamed. She was so nervous that now and again a fierce
+tremor shook her from head to foot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King was counting it fortunate that they were granted so likely a camp
+site for the night. He looked up at the tall black cliffs shutting in
+the little meadow; they would hold back the night winds from Gloria. He
+chose the spot, well back from the creek, where she would sleep. High
+overhead, like brooding giants, stood the upright pines. Where a little
+clump of mere youngsters, lusty fellows not a score of years old, had
+the air of pressing close together as though thus with their combined
+strength they sought to match the strength of their aloof parents, a
+compact grove to make a further shelter against the mountain air, Gloria
+would sleep. He stretched a strip of canvas from tree to tree, making a
+five-foot wall of it. Close by he started his fire, knowing from
+experience oft repeated how a cheery blaze in the forest may dispel
+shadows within even as it makes the sombrest of shadows dance gaily
+under the trees; to one side he laid many resinous faggots, planning on
+their crackling light later on when the dark came. He ringed his fire
+with rocks, lugging them as heavy as he could carry up from the creek
+side, making the rudest of fireplaces. But it had the merit that it
+threw the heat back toward his extended canvas, and there between it
+would be snug and warm. All about him, as he laboured, was the singing
+of water and, high in air, the singing of pine tops. They made merry
+music and King, gone down to the stream to fill his coffee-pot, sang
+with it from a full, brimming heart. Gloria was tired, but she was
+resting now. And in a little while, when dark came, he and she would sit
+by his fire and look into it and talk in hushed voices, hand locked in
+hand; they would watch for the first of the big blazing stars to come
+out--he and Gloria, alone in the wilderness.
+
+He saw a trout swinging lazily in a quiet pool. Trout for Gloria! He
+glanced toward where she lay; he was glad that she was not looking. It
+would be a surprise for her. He hurried to his kit in his pack, got out
+hook and line, baited with a tiny bit of red flannel, and went back to
+the creek. For he knew that it was not likely that the trout here could
+have had any remembered encounters with man; they were plentiful and
+might, like many other sorts of beings, be lured to their undoing by
+curiosity and greed. He cut a willow pole, stood back and cast out his
+gay bit of bait, letting it drift with the riffles. There came a quick
+tug, another, sharp and vigorous, and he swung his prize out of the
+water, breaking the surface into scattering jewels, flashing in the
+sunlight as it struck against the grass along the creek's edge.
+
+Dusk gathered while he worked over his fire. The aroma of boiling coffee
+rose, crept through the air, blended with the aromas of the woods. He
+had made toast, holding the bread to the coals upon a sharpened stick.
+There were strips of crisp bacon garnishing a trout browned to the last
+painstaking turn. There were fried potatoes, cut by King's pocket-knife
+into thin strips and turned into gold by the alchemy of cooking. He set
+out his dishes upon a flat-topped rock, replenished his fire, threw on
+some fresh-cut green cedar boughs for their delightful fragrance, and
+went to call Gloria.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gloria, too tired bodily and mentally to wage a winning battle against
+those black vapours which flock so frequently about luckless youth, had
+suffered and yielded and gone down in misery. She had been crying, just
+why she knew not; crying because she could not help it. Hers was a state
+of overwrought nerves which forbade clear thinking, which distorted and
+warped and magnified. The babble of the water which had been music to
+King was to her a chorus of jeering voices; the wind in the pines an
+eerie moaning as of lost spirits wailing; the trees themselves, merging
+with the dusk, were brooding, shadowy giant things which she suddenly
+both feared and hated; the cliffs rising against the sky loomed so near
+and so gigantically tall that she felt as though they were pressing in
+upon her to suffocate her, to crush her, to annihilate her. The world
+was turning black with the night; the night rushed, treading out the
+last gleam of sunlight; even the one star which she had glimpsed through
+her tears impressed her only with its remoteness. She was frightened;
+not because of any physical violence, for Mark King stood between her
+and that. But of vague horrors. She thought of San Francisco; of her own
+bright room there; of the lights in the streets, of pedestrians and
+motors and street-cars filling that other steel-cañoned wilderness with
+familiar noises. And somehow, San Francisco seemed further away,
+immeasurably further away, than that one remote star blazing through the
+vastness of space.
+
+"A cup of coffee and a bit of supper," King said gently. "You'll feel a
+lot better."
+
+She rose wearily and followed him. Without a word she dropped down
+beside his banquet, putting out a listless hand to her tin cup. The
+firelight upon her face showed him her thoughtful eyes; but they were
+turned not toward him but toward the bed of coals. He had anticipated
+her lively surprise at the trout; she pushed the brown morsel aside,
+saying absently:
+
+"I am not hungry. It was good of you to go to all of this trouble. I am
+afraid I am not much of a camper." She forced the shadow of a smile with
+the admission.
+
+"Tuckered out," he thought as he looked into her face across which light
+and shadow flickered as flame and smoke in the camp-fire came and went
+fitfully, twisted by the evening breeze. "Clean tuckered out."
+
+Gloria, feeling his gaze so steady upon her, turned her eyes toward his,
+eyes heavy and sober with her drooping spirit. As the flames frolicked
+about the pitch-pine he had tossed to the coals, he saw the traces of
+tears. He said nothing, supposing that he understood; he but strove the
+harder to be good to her, to share with her some of that rare joy
+filling his own heart. He sought with unobtrusive tenderness to
+anticipate her slightest want; he jumped to his feet and brought her a
+cup of water; he shoved aside a burning branch which rolled impudently
+too near the divine foot; he removed the offending fish from under her
+nostrils hastily and half apologetically; he piled the fire high when he
+saw her shiver. And finally when she pushed her cup away and let her two
+hands drop into her lap he gathered the dishes and carried them away to
+the nearest pool to wash them, leaving Gloria silent and thoughtful,
+brooding over his fire.
+
+When he came back to her in the hush of the first hour of night, he
+thought that he understood her need for silence, and spoke only
+infrequently and briefly, and very, very softly, calling her attention
+now to the last lingering light upon the piney ridge behind them or to
+the liquid music of the creek, which, with the coming of night, seemed
+to grow clearer and finer and sweeter, or finally to the big star
+burning gloriously in the perfect deep-blue sky.
+
+"And now," he said, taking up his short-handled axe, "I am going to make
+for my lady-love the finest couch for tranquil, restful sleep that
+mortal ever had."
+
+As he strode away toward a grove of firs he was lost to her eyes before
+he had gone a hundred paces. The night came so swiftly it seemed to her
+feverish fancies that in the dark the big tree trunks were huddling
+closer together. In a moment she heard the sound of his axe, striking
+softly through green juicy branches. He worked swiftly, grudging every
+minute away from her. And then, with his arms full of the fragrant,
+balsamy boughs, he stopped and let them slip down to the ground and
+himself sat down upon a log and filled his pipe with slow fingers. He'd
+force himself to smoke one pipe before he went back to her, thinking
+that she would be grateful for a few moments alone.
+
+Almost with the first puff of smoke there came to him Gloria's piercing
+scream. His heart stopping, he jumped up and ran through the trees to
+her, shouting: "Gloria I Gloria! I'm coming. What is it?"
+
+Gloria was cowering against the nearest tree, her face showing
+frightened in the firelight, her eyes wide with nervous horror.
+
+"There is something there ... in the bushes!" she cried excitedly. "I
+heard it moving...."
+
+He looked where she pointed. Down by the creek, just waddling back into
+the alders, was a fat old porcupine, dimly seen in the fringe of the
+camp-fire. But King did not laugh. His first impulse upon him,
+strengthened by Gloria's helplessness, he took her into his arms,
+holding her close to him.
+
+"Why did you leave me?" asked Gloria petulantly. "So long."
+
+He had been away from her fifteen minutes while he cut an armful of
+fir-boughs, and thereafter filled and lighted his pipe--and to Gloria
+the time had seemed long! Little enough of love's confession, surely,
+but a golden crumb to a man's starving love. He drew her closer; their
+faces, ruddy with fire-glow, each tense with its own emotion, were close
+together.
+
+"Oh!" cried Gloria. She wrenched away from him violently. "You--you hurt
+me. Let me go!" She buried her face in her hands; he saw her shoulders
+lift and droop; he heard her sob: "Oh, I was a fool----"
+
+His arms had dropped to his sides and he stood for a moment speechless,
+staring at her as across a chasm shadow-filled.
+
+"Gloria," he said, bewildered.
+
+But now her hands, too, were at her sides, clenched and nervous; her
+white face was lifted and she broke out passionately into hot words; he
+saw her breast heaving and sensed that she was stirred to depths never
+until now plumbed. What he could not glimpse were the vague,
+unreasonable reasons, the distorted horrors grinning at her among the
+spaces of black gloom into which her spirit had sunk; had he been a
+fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and
+nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an
+understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy,
+and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition
+which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that
+had gone before.
+
+"I was half-mad last night," she panted. "There was no way to turn. That
+beast of a man drove me to desperation. Then you came, and--and----Oh,
+I wish that I were dead!"
+
+Incredulous, amazed, near stupefied, he stood rooted to the ground.
+
+"I don't understand," he said dully after a long silence broken only by
+a tumble and frolic of the water and Gloria's quick, hard breathing. He
+strove to be very gentle with her. "Just what is it? Can you tell me,
+dear?"
+
+"Don't call me dear ... like that," she cried sharply. "Just as though I
+were your ... _property_." He saw the roundness of her eyes. She
+shuddered. "You knew that I was driven to it, to save my name, to stop
+hideous gossip...."
+
+In her disordered mind she had been flung, as upon shoals, to many bleak
+points of view; she had blamed fate for her undoing, she had blamed
+Gratton, she had laid the responsibility upon her mother for having
+allowed her to drift; but always she had looked upon herself as the
+victim. Now, in her agitation, which had risen close to hysteria, it was
+suddenly Mark King whom she blamed for everything; he, in the guise of
+fate, had betrayed her!
+
+"You saw that I was half dead with terror; that I hardly knew what I was
+doing; that all I could think of was escape from the horrible trap that
+had been set for me; you----"
+
+"So that was it?" But still his tone was utterly devoid of any emotion
+save that of incredulity. "You mean you didn't love me, Gloria?"
+
+"When did you ever ask me if I loved you?"
+
+"But you ... you married me.... Great God!" He ran his hand across his
+brow as though to brush away an obsession. "Not loving me, you married
+me just to save yourself from possible scandal?"
+
+"What girl wouldn't?" she cried wildly. "Driven as I was?"
+
+He tried to think with all of that calm deliberation which this moment
+so plainly required. In mind he went back stage by stage through all of
+last night's events. And so he came in retrospect in due time to the
+moment when he had come to the porch and had looked in through the
+window to take his last farewell of her; when he had seen her standing
+at Gratton's side. She had drooped so like a figure of despondency; she
+had lifted her head slowly at the "judge's" question. And then there had
+occurred that sudden change in her bearing and in her voice alike, when
+abruptly she had cried out: "No. No and no and no!"
+
+"Tell me," said King heavily, "when you refused to marry Gratton last
+night--did you know that I was outside?"
+
+"Yes," she answered. She wondered why he asked. "There was a mirror; I
+saw your reflection in it."
+
+"If I had not come--would you have gone on with the thing?" He
+hesitated, then said harshly: "Would you have married him?"
+
+"I don't know. Oh," she exclaimed, twisting at her hands, "how can I
+tell what I would have done? driven one way, torn another----"
+
+"You might have married him? You but chose me as the lesser of two
+evils? Was that it?"
+
+"I tell you I don't know! I only know that I was hideously compromised;
+I would never have dared show my face again in San Francisco--anywhere--it
+would have killed me----"
+
+And even yet there was in King's face only a queer tortured incredulity.
+For a long time neither moved nor spoke. His eyes were on her, hers
+intently on him. When he answered it was in a voice from which all of
+to-day's joyousness had fled.
+
+"I'm going to make your bed, Gloria," he said evenly. "Near the fire,
+which I'll keep going. I'll make mine on the outside, so you need not
+be afraid of any prowling animal. Then in the morning we will talk."
+
+She watched him go back for his scattered fir-boughs. And even Gloria
+noted how heavy was his walk. But she could not guess how when he was
+alone with his trees, and the darkness dropped curtainwise between him
+and her he went down on both knees and buried his face in one of those
+same fallen sprays from the fir.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVIII_
+
+
+Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon
+the slow procession of the stars. Just so had he lain many a night in
+the forest-land--but life then and now were as two distinct existences
+which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds,
+remote one from the other. Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the
+physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the
+darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and
+sparkle. Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long
+years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion.
+Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the
+message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to
+him across the limitless vastitude of the universe. Countless times that
+voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of
+the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him
+with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human
+strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a "small" act; he
+marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and
+eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two
+feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them. He
+had known that firefly cluster of lights above to be the majestic
+processional of worlds. He saw himself as small; the universe as big.
+And the knowledge did not crush; it elevated. Throughout the whole of
+creation ran the fine chain of divine ordinance, of a law that flowered
+in beauty. There was God's work above him, about him, within him. And
+God stood back of it all, vouching for it, making it good. The spinning
+of worlds, the pulses of tides, the course of the blood in his
+veins--these were kindred phenomena; the law of God bound about with its
+fine chain of divine will and love the greater and the lesser bodies
+moving through the universe. Upon such a comprehension, brotherhood of
+man and tree and sun and flower, had been raised Mark King's haphazard
+edifice of a theory of life. The stars reminded him that through the
+eons all had been right with the world of worlds; they sang of hope and
+happiness and beauty. They showed a man the way to rich, full
+contentment. They lighted the path to generous dealings with other men.
+They threw their searchlight upon the day a man had just done with and
+set him thinking; they led his thoughts ahead to the day soon to dawn,
+making him wish to make a better job of things.
+
+But to-night between him and his beloved stars stretched a region of
+shadows through which the eyes of his soul did not look. Something
+within him had been stricken; sorely wounded; beaten to its knees;
+chilled with death. He sought to think quite calmly, and for a long time
+clear consecutive thought was beyond his reach. A moment had come when
+he could only _feel_. He was swept this way and that. He had given to
+Gloria his love without stint, without reservation, without limit. The
+love which no other woman had ever awakened had poured itself out before
+Gloria like a flood of clear swift water breaking free. He loved after
+the only fashion possible to him, with his whole heart and soul, with
+his whole being. He adored. He made of his beloved a princess, a
+goddess. He saw her upon a plane where no woman ever lived, in an
+atmosphere too rare for flesh-and-blood humanity. A man does not love
+through human reason; rather through a reason, hidden even to him,
+deeper than humanity. Then Gloria had put her hand into his; Gloria had
+married him; Gloria had elected to come with him. After that he had seen
+nothing in its true light; Gloria had remade the world into paradise
+ineffable.
+
+He had been on the heights, lifted among the stars. And without warning,
+without mercy, the world had crashed about him. From the zenith to the
+nadir. Small wonder that thoughts did not come logically! He floundered,
+lost, crushed, bewildered.
+
+Just yonder, on the bed of fir-boughs he had made for her, lay Gloria.
+He did not look that way. The wind was rising; he heard it go rushing
+through the tree-tops; it struck with sudden, relentless impact; it set
+the shivering needles to shrill whistling; it made the staunch old
+trunks shudder. He heard the canvas flap-flapping by Gloria's bed; above
+him tossing boughs scraped and creaked.
+
+One thing only seemed clear to him: the time had come when a man must
+seek to hold himself in check, when he must not leap, when he must
+strive with all the stubborn will in him to reserve judgment. His own
+life's crisis had come to him, revealing itself with the blinding
+swiftness of a flash of lightning. A step forward or back now would be
+one step toward which his entire destiny, from the hour of birth until
+now, had led him; there would be no retracing it; it would be final; and
+everything--everything--was at stake. He must think; he must try to
+understand all that Gloria had experienced; to see what impulses had
+moved her; to make allowances for her; to come to read aright what lay
+in her heart. He must see clearly into two human hearts! Task for the
+gods! As though the wilderness about him were a colossal malevolent
+entity endowed with the power to look into human breasts, it jeered at
+him with its voice of the wind.
+
+He had but half a mind to give to physical senses. Though the wind
+howled all night long, he scarce was conscious of it; though the cold
+increased, he did not know that he was cold before he had grown numb.
+He had given to Gloria all of their bedding, save alone the one blanket
+he had wrapped about him; he had kept on all his clothing, buttoned up
+his coat, and forgotten that he was not warmly covered. Now he got up
+and walked up and down; he made the fire blaze up; he sat huddled over
+it until it burned down to a bed of glowing red coals.
+
+Once or twice he heard Gloria stir restlessly upon her fir-bough bed.
+But he did not speak. There was nothing to be said between them now;
+they would wait until she had rested, until morning. Then there would be
+no more delay. They would understand each other then as few men and
+women had understood; there would be plain words and but few of them. He
+grew impatient for morning and sat looking forward to its coming with a
+face set and hard, growing as stern as death.
+
+Gloria, exhausted, had gone to sleep, snuggled warmly into her blankets.
+It was the wind that awoke her; she started wide awake, her heart in her
+throat, startled by the flapping of the canvas at her head. She lay
+still and looked up; the pines were black and swayed dismally; the wind
+among them made shuddersome music; the cold began to drive through her
+blankets, through her clothing. Her body was stiff and sore; the
+branches of fir under her hurt her through the canvas and one blanket
+which covered them. She turned, twisting into a position of less
+discomfort. The creek babbled and splashed; its voice merged with the
+wilds into a bleak, cheerless duet.
+
+She lifted her head a little; the fire was dying out and King had gone!
+The darkness bore down upon her; she heard everywhere vague sounds,
+noises as of stealthy feet. She knew a moment of blind terror; she tried
+to cry out but only a little choking gasp resulted. She saw something
+moving, a vague, formless, dreadful something, and lay back, chilled
+with fright. It was King; he was bringing fresh fuel. She sank back and
+again looked up at the pines swaying against the field of stars. She
+began to shiver; a nervous chill. She felt the slow tears form and spill
+over and trickle down her cheeks. She gathered her nether lip between
+her teeth and lay very still, shaken now and then by a noiseless sob.
+
+She existed through a period of suppressed excitement. If King found
+cool logic eluding him, Gloria's mind was an orgy of nervous imaginings.
+She was back with her mother, weeping, sobbing out upon a comforting
+breast all of her hideous adventures; she was reading the tall headlines
+in the newspapers; she was commenting on them with simulated flippancy
+to Georgia and Ernestine; she was meeting Mr. Gratton for the first time
+again, treating him to such haughty disdain as put hot blood into his
+white face; she was standing erect in the morning, confronting Mark King
+fearlessly, demanding her rights, commanding that he take her home. And,
+piteously lonely and frightened, she was longing to have him come to her
+now, to put his arms about her, to hold her tight, to set his fearless
+body between hers and the vague and terrible menaces of the night and
+the jeering night voices. She heard a twig snap; her heart beat wildly;
+she wondered what she would do when he came--and she saw that he sat
+motionless by the fire.
+
+The night wore on. She dozed now and then, fitfully, awakened always
+rudely by unaccustomed noises or by the cold or the discomfort of her
+bed. She put her hand to her cheek, wondering if she were going to be
+feverish; her face was cold. She saw that King had lighted his pipe. She
+wanted to scream at him. How she hated him for that. That he could smoke
+while she lay here in such wretchedness made her briefly hot with anger.
+He was a man, and sweepingly she told herself that she loathed all
+mankind. She accused him of heartlessness, of lack of understanding, of
+brutal lack of sympathy. He and he alone was responsible for
+everything--that vague, terrible _everything_. He sat there as still as
+a rooted tree; he bulked big through the gloom like a rugged boulder; he
+was a part of this wild land, as indifferent, as cold, as merciless.
+The thought now that he might come to her made her quake with fear; she
+was afraid of him.
+
+If she could only sleep! No sleep to-night, little the night before,
+less the night before that. No wonder her brain swirled. If all this had
+happened at any other time--She was a bundle of nerves--nerves that
+vibrated at the slightest suggestion. She was going to be ill. Perhaps
+the end of it would be that she would die. All of the misshapen,
+monstrous fancies which are bred of a sleepless and nervous night made
+for her a period of such stress that as the hours wore on they blanched
+her cheeks and put dark shadows under her eyes and taunted her with
+longings for a rest which they denied her.
+
+Thus, in the stern grips of their destinies, Mark King and Gloria lived
+through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And
+thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the
+ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they
+must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night
+the wind, like a hateful voice, jeered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At four o'clock that chill, wind-blown morning King began the day. He
+saw that Gloria was awake and sitting up, looking straight ahead of her.
+He gave no sign of having noted her, but busied himself in a swift,
+silent sort of way with fire-building and breakfast preparation. Gloria,
+in turn, saw him; she experienced aloof wonder at the look on his face.
+He was haggard; his mouth was set and hard.
+
+She had thought to be thankful when daylight came. Now she got up and
+went to the fire, rubbing her cold hands together, looking at an
+awakened world with dull, lack-lustre eyes. It was not yet full day;
+what light filtered down here into this sheltered spot was cheerless; as
+it drew forest details out of the thinning shadows it seemed to be
+painting them in cold grey monotones upon a cold grey world.
+
+He and she, when he came back with an arm-load of wood, looked straight
+into each other's eyes, long and soberly, searchingly and hopelessly.
+After that they did not again look into each other's faces; no
+good-morning had passed between them since both sensed that any time for
+empty civilities had gone. There could be no conventional pretence at
+harmony even in small things; they must be in each other's arms or
+worlds apart.
+
+Out of a night's grappling with chimeras, King had come to one and only
+one determination: he would go slowly, he would hold an iron check upon
+himself, he would throttle down a temper which more than once in his
+life, at moments of tempest, had blazed out uncontrollably. He would
+smother within himself that passion which in forthright men is so prone
+to burst into violence. Were Gloria to show herself to be this or that,
+were she to say this word or another, he would speak with her coolly, he
+would listen to her calmly, and in the end, since judge he must, he
+would judge with his heart ordered to beat steadily and not with a wild
+rush of blood. He had set a guard in his own breast as he might have set
+a guard over a camp of treacherous enemies.
+
+Yet, from the outset, nothing was more unlikely than that these two
+should advance by smooth paths to a clear and utter understanding. His
+one glimpse of her face dethroned his cold logic and moved him very
+deeply; she was so white, so pitifully sad-looking. She, too, had
+suffered; God knew that she had battled through hours of anguish. He
+wanted her in his arms; he wanted to batter at the world with his fists
+to save her from its flings of grief and pain. He bit savagely at his
+lip and turned away. And she, seeing his haggard eyes, his drawn face,
+knew that she had been unjust last night when she had hated him for
+seeming a soulless man, who could smoke his pipe in all serenity and
+feel nothing of the unhappiness of the night. He did not look like the
+Mark King of yesterday; the glad gleam of joy had died in his eyes; the
+quick resiliency had gone out of his step. He, too, had lived through
+slow hours of torture. He did love her--she could never doubt that----
+
+Had he suddenly caught her to him then, had he crushed her close in his
+arms, had he cried out in headlong passion that she _must_ love him,
+that he would make her love him, that she was his, that he would not
+give her up--would she have wrenched away from him, hot with anger--or
+would she have crept close and known at last whether or not she loved
+him? But here was something else she could not know; he turned and went
+off for his wood; she crouched shivering by the fire.
+
+They breakfasted in silence, the fire between them. Neither did much
+more than drink the strong coffee. Gloria sat tossing bits of bread into
+the fire. It was on his lips to tell her not to do that; waste in the
+wilderness is a crime. But he held his words back. He went methodically
+about camp work; cleaned the plates and cups and pans; remade the two
+packs. All this time she did not stir. At last he came back to her and
+stood by the dying fire, ominously silent. She grew nervously restive,
+wishing that he would say something.
+
+"There's a day's work to be done," he said at last. His voice, meant to
+be impersonal, was only stern. "That means an early start. And--"
+
+"Is it very much further to the caves?" she asked.
+
+He had paused; she had to say something.
+
+"It will take a long day getting there. You see, we didn't come very far
+yesterday."
+
+This, she supposed, was a fling at her, and she stiffened under it. But
+when she spoke it was to ignore the innuendo, intended or not. For,
+wherever they might be led, she hoped it would not be into sordid
+quarrelling.
+
+"It begins to be rather obvious that I should not have come. Doesn't
+it?" she asked.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Now, if I turn back----"
+
+"To the house?"
+
+"And then to mamma and papa, in Coloma. And then to San Francisco."
+
+"And I?"
+
+"If you would go with me as far as the house----"
+
+She saw how his body straightened, how his broad shoulders squared.
+There was something eloquent in the gesture; Mark King, with no
+toleration of a clutter of side issues, came straight to the main
+barrier, which must be swept aside for good and all, or which must be
+skirted and so passed and relegated to the limbo of dead hopes.
+
+"Do you love me, Gloria?" he demanded. "As lovers love? As I have loved
+you? As a wife should love her husband?"
+
+"Didn't I explain all of that last night?" she said petulantly. "Must we
+go over it all again? If I have ... have pained you, I am sorry. I can't
+say any more than that, can I? I thought I made you see how I was
+placed, how there was but the one thing for me to do...."
+
+"Marry Gratton or me? And you chose me?"
+
+She hesitated. She knew that he was angry, though he gave so little
+outward sign. Nor did she fail to recognize that he had grounds for
+anger. But none the less she resented his insistent questionings. She
+stood looking blankly at him. If she had only obeyed her straightforward
+impulse at the house to go to him and explain her predicament!
+
+"I intended," she began in a low, strange voice, "to go to you, to tell
+you----"
+
+"Answer me," he said sternly. "Yes or no. Did you marry me without love
+and just to save yourself from possible gossip of being alone all night
+with a man? Is that why you married me? Yes or no?"
+
+To Gloria, as to King, the issue was clear and not to be clouded; to her
+credit be it said that she wasted no time in fruitless evasion. This
+matter would demand settlement, as well now as later. There was wisdom
+in ending all unpleasantness once and for ever.
+
+"Yes," she answered defiantly.
+
+Then suddenly it was given her to see a Mark King she had never dreamed
+of, a Mark King of blazing wrath thrusting aside the man whom she knew
+and who had held himself in check and throttled down his emotion until
+she spoke that quiet "Yes." The word was like a spark to a train of
+gunpowder. His determination to beat down his temper, no matter what
+came, was gone; his memory of her ordeals was wiped out; from his whole
+tense being there flashed out upon her a hot, heady anger, like stabbing
+lightning from an ominous cloud. His few words seared and scorched a
+place in her memory to endure always.
+
+He clenched his hands and raised them; for an instant she thought he was
+going to strike her down.
+
+"You are utterly contemptible!" he shouted at her. "And I am done with
+you!"
+
+He turned and left her. Gloria stared after him in amazement. She saw
+how he walked swiftly, his big boots crunching through the gravel down
+by the creek bed, splashing through the water, carrying him up the
+timbered slope toward the horses. She could not know that he was almost
+running because he was telling himself in his fierce white passion that
+unless he left her thus he would lose the last power of restraint, and
+set his hands to her pink-and-white throat and choke her. Until the last
+second he had sought not to condemn too soon. Now, after his fashion, he
+condemned sweepingly. For the moment he held that she was less to him
+than the grime upon his boots.
+
+When he came to the horses he was white with anger; he lifted his hand
+and looked at his fingers queerly; they were trembling. He cursed
+himself for a fool, shut the hand into a hard fist as steady as rock,
+and for an instant glared at it blackly. Then he opened the fingers
+slowly; a hard smile made his mouth ugly and left it cruel; the fingers
+had hearkened to a superb will, and gave no greater hint of trembling
+than did the nigged hole of the giant cedar under which he stood.
+
+He coiled his horse's tie-rope and led him back to camp. As he drew
+near, Gloria promptly turned her back and studied her nails; she had had
+encounters with men before now and had not yet gauged the profundity of
+this man's emotion. She counted fully on bringing him to a full and
+contrite sense of his crime before she condescended so much as to look
+at him. But when she flashed him a quick, furtive glance she saw that he
+had his back upon her, and that he gave neither hint of softening nor
+yet of knowledge of her presence. He bridled the buckskin, saddled, tied
+his rope at the saddle-horn, and began making his pack. She watched,
+uneasy and concerned but not yet fully understanding. But when she noted
+how he took from their breakfast-table one cup, one plate, one knife and
+fork, only; how he did not appear interested in the marmalade-jar which
+she knew had been brought for her; how he left half of the coffee and
+bacon and sugar; a strange alarm came over her. She glanced wildly
+around. The forest glowered darkly; the silence was overpowering; the
+loneliness bewildering. He was going to leave her--she had not the
+faintest idea in the world where the trail lay.
+
+King went swiftly about his preparations. He did not even see her; he
+studiously kept his eyes aloof. Within his soul he swore that he would
+never look at her again....He took up his rifle.
+
+Gloria stirred uneasily. She did not like to yield to him even to the
+extent of saying a stiff word. But she felt that the man was not playing
+a part, and that in another moment she would be alone.
+
+"You are not going to leave me here alone, are you?" she demanded
+coldly.
+
+"I am going on," was his curt rejoinder.
+
+"And I?" she persisted.
+
+"What you please."
+
+He went on with his preparations. Terror sprang up into the girl's
+heart.
+
+"I would never find my way out," she cried, jumping to her feet and
+coming toward him. "I am not used to the mountains ...I don't know which
+way ...I would die...."
+
+"To be rid of you the easiest way," he returned bluntly, "I would turn
+back with you until we got within striking distance of the open. But
+you have made me waste time as it is, and I promised Ben that I'd be in
+Gus Ingle's caves with no time lost. So I am going on."
+
+"But," and all of her surging terror trembled in her rushing words, "I
+would die, I tell you...."
+
+"And I tell you," he snapped back at her, "that I don't care a damn if
+you do. Must I tell you twice that I am through with you?"
+
+He set his foot to the stirrup. Gloria, pride lost in panic, ran to him
+and grasped his arm, crying to him:
+
+"You mustn't leave me this way! It's brutal ... it's murder."
+
+"I gave my promise to Ben," he said. "You are not worth breaking a
+promise."
+
+"If you won't take me back, then let me go with you."
+
+"Worthless and selfish and cowardly! Useless and vain and brainless!
+Good God! am I, a man full grown, to loiter on the trail with the like
+of you? Let go!" He shook her hand off roughly and swung up into the
+saddle, sending his horse with a boot-heel in the flank down to the
+ford. But Gloria screamed after him, and ran after him, down to the
+creek and through it, calling out:
+
+"Mark! Mark! For God's sake don't leave me. I am afraid; I will die of
+fear. Take me with you...."
+
+He did not look back at her, but he did pause. After all, she was the
+daughter of his old friend.
+
+"The woods are free and open," he said slowly. "To even such as you. For
+the third time and for the last I tell you this: I am done with you. But
+if you like you may follow behind me. I will wait for you ten minutes.
+Not here, but on the ridge up there. And if you have not come, I will go
+on at the end of that time. That is my solemn word, Gloria Gaynor."
+
+He rode from her, straight and massive in the saddle, up the slope among
+the big-boled trees, and in a trice out of sight. She stood like one in
+a sudden trance. Then, with an inarticulate moan, she ran into the grove
+and grasped Blackie's rope, and dragged at him trying to make him run
+with her to her saddle and few belongings. The saddle nearly
+overmastered her; it was heavy, and she knew as little of it as did any
+city girl. But her need was sore and her young body not without supple
+strength. In half of the allotted time Gloria came riding up the ridge.
+Now King glanced toward her briefly. But less at her than at her pack.
+
+"You had better go back for the rest of the grub," he said to her. "And
+for your blanket-roll. That would be my advice to the devil himself....
+You can do it in the five minutes left to you."
+
+Gloria flung up her head, opened her lips for a stinging reply, and then
+held for a moment in silence and hesitation.
+
+"You hideous brute!" she flung at him. But none the less she hastened
+back for her outfit. Five minutes later they rode on into the
+ever-deepening wilderness, she just keeping his form in sight, he never
+turning nor speaking.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIX_
+
+
+For his brutal treatment of her Gloria fully meant that in the ripeness
+of time he should pay to the uttermost. After that first panic she felt
+toward King only such anger as she had never experienced before, never
+having cause for it. Perhaps the emotion was the beginning of a new
+soul-life for her; certainly here was a moment of reversion to a
+condition of unplumbed progenital influences; the scorching anger
+arising from such a primitive situation was in itself primal. Hence the
+emotion no less that the experience itself was novel; clean, searing
+anger.
+
+Following this emotion which rode her and sapped her nervous strength
+came a period of faintness and nausea. She closed her eyes and dropped
+her head and clung to the horn of her saddle with hands which went cold
+and shook. In this mood she called out once to King. But he was far
+ahead and did not turn. She did not know whether he had heard her.
+Gradually the weakness passed; they topped the ridge and the sun wanned
+her. Coolly and collectedly she turned her thoughts upon the
+insufferable insult and came back through a sort of circle to her first
+intention. Now the decision was cold and stubborn: he would pay and in
+full.
+
+King led the way unfalteringly. Time and again she saw no hint of a
+trail underfoot or ahead; they broke through brush or made a difficult
+way through a thicket of alders or willows and invariably came again
+upon a trail. It was evident that the man thought only of his journey's
+end and was hastening; hence he took all the short cuts which he knew.
+In one of these pathless places, where the scrub-trees and tangle of
+brush were above her head, where it seemed that she must smother, she
+lost all sight of him. Her horse came to a dead halt. She listened and
+could not hear the hoofs of his horse. Again panic mastered her, and she
+cried out wildly. But just ahead was a mad mountain stream filling the
+gorge with its thunder. She knew that King could not hear her; she felt
+the desperate certainty that he would not heed could he hear. Then she
+struck her horse frantically with her bare hands, and pounded him with
+her heels, longing for the sight of King as one athirst in the bad lands
+longs for water. The horse snorted, and whirling and plunging went
+ripping through the bushes which whipped at her and tore the skin of
+hands and face. But in three minutes he brought her into the open and
+into full sight of King, riding up a gentle slope through big red-boled
+cedars. When her fear died, as it did swiftly after the way of fear, it
+left not the old, hot anger, but a new elemental emotion--cold hatred.
+
+Thus upon their second morning the honeymoon entered upon its second
+phase. Every moment brought some new discomfort to her; the saddle hurt
+her: her clothes were torn, her tender skin bruised and scratched;
+pains came stabbingly with early fatigue As for King, he had come
+abruptly to look down upon her as utterly despicable; being a man of
+high honour he convicted her out of hand as one without honour;
+despising her, he despised himself for having linked his life in ever so
+little with hers. But yesterday he had knelt to her humbly in his
+innermost heart of hearts; now he sought to shut his mind against her
+quite as definitely as he turned his back on her.
+
+What sombre, misshapen edifice they should build upon these
+corner-stones of hate and contempt was a matter into which no conjecture
+could enter even slightly had their compelling environment been
+different. In the city they would have turned their backs and walked
+away from each other. But two storm-driven men upon a raft don't
+separate until land is sighted. Gloria, at least, was in her present
+plight comparable to a shipwrecked sailor of little skill and less
+resource. Hence, what was to be, remained to be seen.
+
+At ten o'clock the air was sun-warmed and sweet. Half an hour later the
+genial day was made over by the high wind trailing vapours into a chill
+bleak sky. They had climbed to fresh altitudes; the timber through which
+they progressed indicated that a height of at least seven thousand feet
+above sea-level had been passed. They passed through groves of the
+thin-barked tamaracks, came at the base of a rugged slope to scattering
+mountain pines, which reared into lusty perfection on bleak, wind-swept
+levels, where many of their companion growths were beginning to run out
+in dwarfed, twisted misery, and came to a rocky pass through the
+mountains where on all sides the red cedar, the juniper of the Sierra,
+throve hardily among bare boulders, crowning the lofty crests like a
+sparse, stiff, hirsute display upon the gigantic body of the world. The
+dwarf pine lingered here, straggling along the slopes, beaten down by
+many a winter of wind and heavy snow. But by noon they had made a slow,
+tedious way down a rocky ridge and were once more in the heart of the
+upper forest belt. In an upland meadow, through whose narrow boundaries
+a thin, cold stream trickled, they nooned. Long had Gloria hungered for
+the moment when she would see King swing down from the saddle; during
+the last half-hour she had begun to fear that his brutality knew no
+bounds and that he would spare neither the horses nor her but crowd on
+until nightfall. When he did dismount by the creek she drew rein fifty
+feet from him.
+
+King slipped Buck's bridle, dropped the tie-rope, and let the animal
+forage along the fringes of the brook. To Gloria, in a voice which
+struck her as being as chill as the grey, overcast sky, he said:
+
+"Better let your horse eat. We've got to go pretty steady to get
+anywhere to-day."
+
+Gloria got down stiffly from her saddle. In all the days of her life she
+had never been so unutterably weary. Further, she was faint from hunger
+and her throat pained her; she went to the creek and threw herself down
+and put her face into the cool water, from which she rose with a long
+sigh. She had seen how King did with his tie-rope; she did similarly,
+but was too tired to trouble with removing the bit from her horse's
+mouth. Still Blackie accepted his handicapped opportunity and joined
+Buck in tearing and ripping at the lush grass. It was more inviting than
+the manzanita-bushes and occasional sunflower-leaves at which he had
+snatched during the day.
+
+King made coffee and fried bacon; the horses had earned an hour of rest
+and fodder, and a man has the right to bacon and coffee even though hard
+miles lie before him. While he pottered with his fire he looked more
+than once at the sky in the south-west. With all of his heart he wished
+that he had turned back with Gloria this morning. By now he could have
+set her feet in a trail which even a fool could travel back to the log
+house, and he could be again hastening upon his errand. Gloria lay
+inert; she chewed slowly at a bit broken from a slab of hard chocolate
+and kept her eyes closed. Her face was very white; two big tears of
+distress slipped out from the shut lids. But King did not come close
+enough to see them.
+
+When his coffee was ready he called to her, saying indifferently:
+"Better have a cup. It helps." But Gloria did not reply. King seemed not
+to notice whether she ate or not. But, when he had drunk his own coffee
+and she still lay quiet on the grass, he sweetened a cup for her, put
+some milk in it, and set it at her elbow. "Better drink it," he said
+coldly. And Gloria gathered her strength and sat up and drank.
+Thereafter she ate some bread and potted ham. Fragments of bread, the
+crust, and half of the ham she threw away. King opened his mouth to
+protest; then shrugged and remained silent. His back to a tree, he sat
+and smoked until the hour had passed.
+
+Precisely at one o'clock they were on their way. Gloria caught her own
+horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and
+to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was
+all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities
+began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that
+she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie
+here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as
+one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of
+death seemed less terrible than that of utter desertion. The mountains
+were so big they stifled her. With every tortuous step forward this
+formidable land all about her had grown more severe, more lonely, more
+to her like the kingdom of desolation than she had ever dreamed existed.
+There were slope fields strewn with black lava rock where never a
+solitary blade of grass upthrust a thin spear; there were broken
+expanses across which the eye might travel wearily for what appeared
+endless miles. One could call out here with never a faint hope of being
+heard; one left alone here could die miserably, taunted only by the
+echoes of her own choking voice. This devil's land took on a vindictive
+personality; it was a hideous colossus, stooping over her, inspired with
+but one cruel desire, to crush her soft white body, to stamp out her
+life, to annihilate her and gloat over her shrieking despair. She felt
+like some hapless little princess in a fairy-tale who had wandered into
+a monstrous land of black sorcery.
+
+By four o'clock, when it seemed to Gloria that she had reached and was
+passing the limits of her endurance, came two momentous occurrences.
+King, riding ahead as usual, was not quite so far in advance, and did
+not have his back turned square upon her. For the first time he had
+briefly mistaken the trail; they were on the steep flank of the
+mountain; he turned and rode back in her general direction but some
+hundred yards lower on the slope.
+
+"The trail's down here," he announced shortly. He did not lift his eyes
+to her face, did not note the droop of the weary body. His look was all
+for her horse, and a new and unreasonable spurt of anger was in his
+heart Through her unbounded ignorance she had needlessly fatigued her
+mount, having no knowledge of the ways one employs to save his horse.
+
+Gloria understood dully that she was too far up and must ride down to
+his level. She was beyond complaining or asking questions; with a sudden
+jerk upon the reins she brought Blackie about. King cursed under his
+breath.
+
+"That's too steep!" he called to her. "Want to kill your horse?"
+
+Blackie tried to swerve and sidle down. Gloria lifted her whip and
+struck him. Blackie snorted and obeyed her command. Some loose dirt gave
+way underfoot, the tired beast stumbled, a dead limb caught at his legs,
+tripping him, and Blackie lurched downward and fell. Through the grace
+of fortune Gloria rolled clear and unhurt. Blackie got up, tottering,
+with one quivering fore-leg lifted. King's face went black with rage.
+
+But this time it was wordless rage. He dismounted and made his way up to
+the lamed horse; Gloria, from where she lay, thought at first that of
+course he was coming to her. But he kept his back to her as he lifted
+the horse's fore-leg and felt tenderly at the wrenched muscle. Gloria,
+without stirring, and without experiencing any poignant emotion, watched
+him listlessly, then shut her eyes. Her most clear sensation was one of
+relief; they would no doubt make camp here.
+
+A cold drop of rain splashed on her cheek. She opened her eyes. King was
+removing Blackie's saddle. Gloria closed her eyes again and sighed. A
+sort of dreary thankfulness blossomed feebly in her heart that the
+torturous day was over. King would make some sort of a shelter; she
+would drink a cup of coffee and crawl into her blankets and go to
+sleep....
+
+"Come on," called a voice as though from some great distance. "We've got
+to hurry as fast as God will let us."
+
+Blackie was standing where King had led him, his saddle and bridle swung
+up into a tree, his foot still lifted, his nostrils close to the long
+grass but untempted. Gloria's canvas-rolled pack and the rifle were
+across King's back. As she sat up and stared at him she read his
+intentions. He was going on on foot, expecting her to take his horse.
+
+"I can't," she said miserably.
+
+He looked up into the sky and not at her.
+
+"You can do what you please," he retorted curtly. "I am going on."
+
+She rose and went stumbling down the slope. She swayed as she tried to
+mount, but he did not offer his hand. When she was in the saddle he
+strode on ahead. Blackie looked after them wistfully.
+
+"The leg's not broken," King told her gruffly. "Just a bad sprain. Not
+your fault it isn't worse, though. He'll take care of himself; God knows
+he's got as good a chance as we have."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.
+
+He merely swung up his arm toward the sky by way of answer and went on.
+The second big rain-drop hit Gloria's cheek. It was chill; its dullness
+seemed to drive straight to her heart.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XX_
+
+
+The storm caught them as it has caught so many a wayfarer before and
+since. The wintry season was not due for a full four weeks, but the
+winter had thrust sign and season aside and made his regal entry after
+his own ancient fashion. There came a crash of reverberating thunder, a
+scurry in the thickening mass of black clouds, a drenching downpour of
+rain. For twenty minutes they crouched in what scant shelter was
+afforded them by a squat, wide-limbed cedar. Then the wind went ripping
+off through the tree-tops, exacting its toll of flying twigs and leaving
+in its wake a brief, hushed calm. Through the still air fell scattering
+flakes of snow, big and unbroken and feathery. King's eyes were filled
+with concern; his face was ominous like the face of the world about him.
+
+Again Gloria's tired body was assured of rest; again King said
+expressionlessly: "Come on." This time he helped her into the saddle,
+being in haste and of no mind to wait for trifles. He hurried on ahead;
+she followed on Buck listlessly, clinging to the saddle, her eyes often
+shut.
+
+For an hour it snowed. Though there was no sun it was not dark save in
+the deeper cañons. Nor was it as cold as Gloria had thought it must
+be--or else she was too tired to feel the pinch of the sharp air. But
+presently the flakes grew fewer and then ceased utterly. Those that lay
+on the ground or clung to branches melted swiftly; and with their
+departure the last light of the day was gone. Now King led the horse and
+Gloria rode through a gathering darkness. She wanted to ask why they did
+not stop; why they did not turn back, but lacked the spirit. Now and
+then she half dozed.
+
+At last it was pitch dark and the rain was beginning again. King had
+stopped and was helping her down. She was numb now in body; her brain
+was numb. The rain hardened into a rattle of hail. Thereafter the air
+softened and filled with swirling snow. Gloria could not see if they
+were in an open valley or shut in by canon walls or upon the slope of a
+mountain. Nor did she greatly care. She waited until King prepared some
+kind of a shelter, and then went wordlessly to it; she felt fir-boughs
+under her aching body and was, in pure animal fashion, conscious of
+blanket and canvas over her and of a grateful warmth. Through a tangle
+of bushes she saw the flicker of a small fire; she smelled coffee; she
+drank half of the hot cup which he brought to her. Then she let go her
+grip upon a wretched world and passed like a child into a heavy sleep.
+
+By his fire of little cheer Mark King sat, with his canvas drawn over
+his slumping shoulders, his head down, his heart as black as the night,
+his soul possessed by ravaging blue demons. At the end of a fool's day
+came a fool's night. He should have paid heed to the first threat of a
+thin film across the sky; he should have turned back with Gloria the
+first thing this morning; he should have done anything in the world save
+exactly what he had done. He should not have married her; he should not
+have brought her with him; it was even sheer idiocy to come after this
+blind fashion into the mountains in the late fall. Though the season was
+early the hour was ominous. The storm might pass before dawn. There
+remained the equal likelihood that it would not. Were he alone, or had
+he a man, or, yes, by heaven! a real woman with him, things would not be
+so bad. The wind jeered at him through the trees; the storm drenched his
+fire; he cursed back at both.
+
+"One thing," he thought when his pipe brought him a solitary instant of
+peace, "I won't be worried with Gratton and Brodie and his
+double-dealing crowd. If they ever started they would have sense enough
+to turn back long ago."
+
+After the cold, wet night came a sodden morning. King stood up and
+looked about him curiously; his first thought was to make sure that they
+had really camped upon the edge of that particular upland valley which
+he had striven for. And a glint of satisfaction came into his eyes; it
+is something to have followed such a trail aright upon such a night.
+Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which
+many miles further on flowed into the American. Rising abrupt beyond it
+were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the
+mountain tributaries of the American. The rocks, like the river, were
+black, and looked far colder than the white world which extended in all
+directions.
+
+If, in truth, there existed heaps of raw red gold somewhere in a cave in
+these mountains, and there had been any exactness in the description in
+Gus Ingle's Bible, then the spot was not more than three or four miles
+away. That was one consideration. It was still snowing. Here was a
+second consideration. King turned moody eyes to Gloria's canvas-and-fir
+shelter in the lee of a little bit of cliff. There lay the third. He
+prepared breakfast without delay but without enthusiasm. He felt a tired
+man with shackled limbs dragging a dead weight.
+
+When he went to wake Gloria he first stood over her, looking queerly
+down upon her sleep. She showed less trace of the hard day and wild
+night than he had expected to see; his preparations for her comfort,
+instinctive and thorough, had been made with the cunning skill of a man
+familiar with situations like the present. She had rested; she lay
+curled up, snug and warm, under the covers, upon which a thin layer of
+fluffy snow had gathered. Her face was against a curved arm, and the
+sweetness of it in its tranquil repose was a bitter sweet to him. Her
+lashes against her cheek stirred and flew apart under his steady gaze.
+He looked into Gloria's eyes, sweet and soft, heavy with sleep.
+
+"Time to be up," he said. He turned on his heel and went back in haste
+to his fire.
+
+Gloria, awake, was ravenously hungry. She came sooner than he had
+expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order.
+Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him. She shrugged
+her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands to the small,
+wind-blown blaze.
+
+"Are we going back?" she asked colourlessly.
+
+"No," he returned as indifferently. "It's about four miles to the caves.
+We'll be there in a couple of hours. Then we'll see what we see."
+
+Gloria sent a long, searching, and awe-struck look across the broken
+country. Yonder, then, she realized dismally, lay their destination;
+bleak, black, rocky heights, at so great an altitude and in a region so
+barren that but few wind-broken trees grew, and the brutal face of the
+world was unmasked. She saw bare peaks, steep slopes, a tremendous gorge
+like an ugly gash; on the far side of the gorge sheer cliffs. Toward
+them King looked. Was it there that Gus Ingle's caves awaited them? Was
+that journey's end? She shivered and drew closer to the fire, closer to
+her companion, shrinking from the menace of the mountains.
+
+"Is it going to keep on snowing?" she asked.
+
+This time he shrugged. That was his only answer. She stared at him, a
+slow flush came into her cheeks, her eyes hardened.
+
+"Oh, very well," she said coldly.
+
+That was the whole of their conversation save for one curt remark and an
+impudent laugh in answer at the end of the scanty meal. Gloria tossed a
+piece of bacon into the fire. King looked at her sternly and said:
+
+"Young lady, we may be up against the real thing right now. Nobody but a
+fool will do a trick like that."
+
+The laugh was Gloria's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once on their way they climbed almost steadily. The air grew rarer and
+colder. The snowflakes became smaller, at last a fine sifting like sand
+particles that cut at hands and face viciously. No longer were there
+groves to shelter them; on all sides bare, hostile rocks, and only
+occasionally a sparse growth of sprawling, earth-hugging dwarf pine and
+cedar, over which King strode as over so much low, tangled brush. Then
+came a long ridge, a spine from which the world dropped almost sheer on
+both sides, with the wind raging so that it seemed Buck must be blown
+off his feet, or the girl torn from the saddle and borne far out like a
+thistledown. With frightened eyes, which she strove vainly to keep
+closed, she saw long, broken slopes; occasionally when the air cleared,
+a frothing torrent; and once, at the end of a couple of hours, far down
+in a distant level land, a growth of giant timber. She thought that King
+was making his way down there. But his purpose soon became plain even to
+her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the
+ravine which lower down cut like a knife across the timbered tract,
+headed for what he took to be Gus Ingle's cave. A mile away she saw it;
+a great, ragged, black hole in a high mass of rock, close to the crest
+of the next ridge.
+
+She was wrapped warmly and yet here the icy breath of the wind pierced
+the fabric of her wrappings and hurt her to the bone. She watched King
+wonderingly as he hastened on; did the man have no sense of bodily
+discomfort? Certainly he gave no sign. He was like an animal; she found
+room for a flash of scorn in the thought. For so she was pleased to
+consider him lower in the scale than herself.
+
+At another time she might have seen the world about her clothed in
+grandeur; now its sublimity was lost I upon her. It was a ravening
+beast, an ugly thing, big and brutal, and ... like King. Oh, how she
+hated it and him!
+
+When at last he waited for her and told her to get down she had the
+suspicion that he had gone mad. Certainly here was no spot to tarry; it
+was on her lips to demur. But she looked at his face and slipped stiffly
+from the saddle. They were high up on the ridge; Gloria, on foot beside
+him, clutched at the wind-twisted branch of one of the sprawling cliff
+growths, in sudden panic that she was being swept from her feet. Just
+below them was the deepening cleft in the mountain-side which, further
+down, widened and descended into the steep-walled gorge. Through it
+shot a mad, frothy stream. A hundred yards further on, high up in the
+cliffs, was the yawning hole in the rocks. King, holding Buck's bridle,
+looked about him and at the sky. Gloria read in his manner a hint of
+uncertainty. Hoping to influence his decision, she said quickly:
+
+"Hadn't we better turn back now?"
+
+He looked at her steadily before answering.
+
+"In what," he replied in that impersonal way which maddened her, "have
+you so altered as to be worth a man's broken promise?" And then she knew
+that no thought of going back had had any part in his brief indecision.
+He was going forward, would go forward in anything he undertook; that
+was a part of his make-up. He was merely seeking the best place to
+unpack and a convenient spot to tether Buck. They were going to make
+camp either right here or nearer the cave, perhaps in it. She looked at
+the uninviting hole and shivered. She would know his decision when King
+saw fit to enlighten her.
+
+Now he merely dumped at her feet the roll from the horse's back, setting
+his rifle down against it. Then he led Buck away, zigzagging tediously,
+at last passing from sight beyond an out jutting monster crag. Gloria
+crouched, seeking to shield herself from the whiplashes of the wind. She
+listened to it as it shrieked about the slabs and boulders of granite;
+the sound was indescribably eerie, filled with unrest, eloquent of the
+brutal contempt of the eternal for the feeble and transient. The
+universe grew utterly lonely; the wind was a whining thing cutting
+through the silence. And King was so long in coming back....
+
+The terrifying thought electrified her: "What if he had deserted her?
+What if he had no intention of coming back?" She should have known
+better; perhaps, deep down within her, she did know better. But the
+suspicion brought its wild flutter; she sprang up and grew rigid in
+tense fright; she felt a strange, glad rush of joy as she saw his hat
+bobbing up and toward her along the mountain flank. When he rejoined
+her she was staring off at nothingness, her back to him.
+
+He lashed the two canvas rolls together, swung them up to his shoulders,
+took frying-pan, coffee-pot, and rifle in his free hand, and nodded
+toward the small pack of provisions which had been left over from lunch.
+"Better bring those," he advised briefly. "There's no telling what may
+be in the cards." He went on along the knife-edge of the ridge, down
+into a little depression, up beyond. She hesitated, saw that he had not
+looked, bit her lip angrily, and snatched up the parcel. Then she
+followed him, stooping against the wind.
+
+When she came up with him he had thrown down his pack at the very edge
+of the gorge. She came to his side, leaned forward, and looked down. Far
+below plunged the wildest torrent she had ever seen; it hurled itself in
+mad haste between boulders; it shot down over dizzy falls; it made for
+itself a white mantle of frothing waters; it looked as black as ebony in
+sections of smoother channel and as cold as death; it spun in
+whirlpools, it filled the air with its din. And King meant to go down to
+it; to cross it; to climb the dizzy cliff upon the further side! She
+knew from his look, without asking. For just across the chasm from them
+in the highest of the cliffs was the yawning black-mouthed place of
+horrors. If one slipped on those bare rocks, clambering down or climbing
+on the further side! She sat down suddenly; now when her lip was caught
+between her teeth it was to fight back the tears. The world was so cold
+and stern and brutal; this man was so much like the environment; she was
+so woefully, desperately heart-sick. On this lofty crest of a
+devil-tossed land she felt the insignificance of a fly clinging to the
+brow of an abyss.
+
+King went about his task methodically. Gloria watched him rather than
+look across the rocky gorges. Slowly and with difficulty he made his way
+down the steep wall of rocks, dragging and pulling the roll of bedding
+and provisions after him. It required perhaps twenty minutes for him to
+get to the bottom. She wondered where he would attempt a crossing; the
+water looked so black in the pools, so violent over the rapids. He went
+up-stream; there lay an old cedar log so that it spanned the current,
+its sturdy old trunk ten feet above the water. For a moment King
+disappeared under an out-thrust ledge; then she saw him again, the pack
+on his shoulders. He had climbed up to the top of the log; he was
+crossing. Where he went now she must follow!
+
+Fascinated, she watched him. Once she thought he was going to fall. But
+unerringly he trod the rude bridge underfoot, gained the other side
+without mishap, tossed down his bundle, and lowered himself from the log
+after it. Gloria marvelled at him; she could see his face and it was
+impassive. Could he not hear the hostile voices of the raging waters?
+Could he not feel the ominous threat of the bleak day and the monster
+cliffs? Was he a man without imagination as he seemed to be without
+fear?
+
+On he went, down-stream again, clinging to the steep pitch of the gorge,
+until he was almost under the mouth of the cavern. He put back his head
+and looked up; it was a hundred feet above him and the cliffs, from
+where Gloria sat numb with cold and dread, looked unsurmountable. Yet he
+was going up them!
+
+"And where he goes you will follow." It was as though the wild waters
+below were chanting it into her ears and thereafter filling the gorge
+with the mockery of derisive laughter.
+
+Slowly, tediously, but with never a sign of hesitation, King made his
+way up the cliff. He had been here before; he knew and remembered every
+foothold and handhold. Nor was the task the impossible one it looked
+from a distance. There were cracks and crevices; there were seams of a
+harder material which, better withstanding the attacks of time, were
+thrust out beyond the general level; on them a man might stand. There
+were spots of softer material, scooped out into pockets by wind and
+water; there were flinty splinters; there were places where the wall,
+looking from across the cañon to be sheer and perpendicular, sloped more
+gently, and a man might crawl up them.
+
+King had drawn up after him, stage after stage, the roll of bedding,
+using Blackie's tie-rope to haul it up and to moor it briefly. Gloria
+saw it swing at times like a huge, misshapen pendulum; watched it crawl
+up after him. She saw the wind snatch at it and set it scraping back and
+forth when he let it dangle at rope's end; she saw King's coat flap in
+the wind. Once she cried out aloud, thinking a second time that King was
+falling. If he fell from that height--if he were killed--what then would
+be the fate of Gloria Gaynor!
+
+But at length he came safely to the cave's mouth. He stood upright and
+looked about him. Then he drew up to his feet the dangling roll; with it
+in his arms he was gone into that yawning hole. She waited breathlessly
+for his return. She saw him come again into the light; he had the rope
+in his hand, was coiling it. He began to come down. He was returning for
+her.
+
+She did not stir while he made the slow descent, nor while he recrossed
+on the log and climbed the steep bank to her.
+
+"I am going to spend the day up there," he told her in his studied aloof
+manner. "I'll know soon enough now what truth there is in the story of
+Gus Ingle's gold. There's room in the cave to sleep, and there's shelter
+of a sort. To-morrow morning, if I find nothing, I'll start back with
+you. If you care to come up now I'll help you."
+
+"What else is there to do?" cried Gloria, with the first flash of
+passion. "What else do you leave me?"
+
+He slipped a loop of the rope about her waist, taking slow pains not to
+touch her with his hands, and turned downward again. She followed,
+filled with sudden fear when they had climbed down ten feet, obeying him
+hastily when he commanded her to stand still or to move on, feeling her
+fear grow mightily as they progressed. The wind, strengthening abruptly,
+tore at her in angry gusts. She was panting and shaking visibly when
+finally she reached the log spanning the stream. He was up before her,
+offering her his hand. How she hated to touch it! How she feared to
+follow him! But her hand went into his, her steps followed his, and
+without hesitation; for there was nothing left now to choice. She looked
+down and saw the water raging below; it was like a monster leaping at
+her, snatching at her. She wanted to look away and could not. Like one
+moving through the fearsome steps of a nightmare she went on, clinging
+to King's hand, his hand tight upon hers, cold hands which met because
+they must. At last the torrent was behind her; she came down into King's
+arms from the log; she was faint and would have sat down. But he urged
+her on.
+
+It was another nightmare climbing up the cliffs to the cave. He went
+ahead; he stopped and braced himself; he tautened the rope about her
+waist and said: "Come on. Slow and careful does it." She clutched with
+her cold, sore fingers at the rocks, felt the rope tighten, and went up
+and up. The wind, as though in a fury at losing its quarry, shrieked in
+her ears, and in mighty gusts strove to drag her hands from the rocks
+and to set her swinging as it had swung the roll of bedding. She climbed
+on. King ordered and she obeyed; she waited for him to go up, further
+ahead; for him to call to her and draw in on the rope. Stage by stage,
+weary stages fraught with terror, she toiled up and up and up. And so at
+last, when it seemed to her that no strength remained in her, she came
+to King's side at the gloomy entrance of Gus Ingle's cave. The formless
+black void before her which under other circumstances would have
+repelled, now invited. It offered shelter and rest and protection. She
+crept by King with never a backward glance, and threw herself face down
+on the uneven floor.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXI_
+
+
+A long time King stood at the mouth of the cave, looking forth upon the
+newly whitened world. The look of the thickening sky, the wintry sting
+of the rushing air, the businesslike way in which the snow swirled and
+fell created a condition upon which he had not counted and for which he
+had no relish. This was more like a mid-winter blizzard than any storm
+had any business being so early in the season. For many hours already
+the snow had been falling, piling up in the mountain passes; if it kept
+on at this rate through another day and night--well, he and Gloria had
+best be getting out without any loitering.
+
+He looked at his watch; not yet eleven o'clock. Need for haste; the day
+would be short. Before darkness shut down he had half a dozen hours,
+hours for methodical search. Here was one of Gus Ingle's caves; another,
+he knew, was directly below and at the base of the cliffs; the third
+should be near. It was the third that he was chiefly interested in. He
+recalled the words in the old Bible: "We come to the First Caive and
+then we come to Caive number three and two!" There lay significance in
+the order of Ingle's numerals; first, three, and two. Two of the caves
+were for any one to see; before now King had been in both of them. Hence
+it must be that Gus Ingle's treasure lay in the third. That one King
+must locate. And without too much delay. He looked down at Gloria. She
+lay motionless just as she had thrown herself down.
+
+Taking his rope with him King made what haste he could going down the
+cliffs. The sides of the ravine were littered with dead wood, drift and
+limbs that had broken off the few battered trees above. He gathered as
+heavy a load of dry branches as he could handle, bound them about with
+his rope, and, fighting his way all the way up, clambered again to the
+upper cave. Gloria had not stirred. He moved about her, went a dozen
+paces deeper into the great cavern, and threw down his wood. Breaking
+branches into short lengths he quickly got a fire going. The flames
+spurted up eagerly, bright and cheery, and threw dancing light among the
+wavering shadows. He brought the bedding-roll closer and opened it into
+a rough-and-ready bed. Then he called to Gloria.
+
+"You'd better lie here by the fire," he told her. "You're apt to catch
+cold there."
+
+She was sitting up, watching him. Now she rose listlessly and came
+forward, dropping down into a sitting position upon the blankets, her
+chilled hands out toward the blaze.
+
+"I don't like the look of this storm," he told her. "It is up to us to
+hurry. I am going to look around now. I think you had better rest all
+you can so as to be ready to make a start back as soon as I find out
+whether we are on a wild-goose chase or not."
+
+"You mean--we may start back to-day?"
+
+"I don't know what I am going to find, of course; whether I am going to
+find anything. But if we can get only a couple of hours on our way
+to-day, it's just that much gained."
+
+"You are going to leave me here?"
+
+"I won't be far." With that he set fire to a dry pine faggot, the best
+torch available, and left her, going deeper into the cave. She watched
+him, marvelling at the size of the cavern. He went on a score of paces;
+he seemed to be ascending a steepening slant floor and then to have gone
+over a sort of ridge and to be descending again. But still going further
+from her. Presently she knew that the tunnel had turned sharply to the
+right; she could hear the thud of his boots and for a little while could
+see the flare of his torch against a wall of rock; he himself had passed
+out of her sight.
+
+But she knew that he had not gone a great deal further. For he was not
+so far away that she could not hear him; he was going back and forth; at
+irregular intervals she saw a dim, ghostly light playing upon the dark
+cavern walls. And, despite the weary ache of a hardship-tortured body,
+she began to be interested in his search. If there were, in truth, such
+gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of--gold
+for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony
+Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his
+following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening
+wolves on the trail--gold in quantity to make even toughened old
+gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it--why, then, that gold was
+half Mark King's and half Ben Gaynor's! And it might be that now, at
+this very instant, Mark King was finding it; was standing over it,
+staring down at it by the ghostly flare of a smoking torch. She sat,
+tense and still, listening, trying to probe with tired but suddenly
+bright eyes through the dark.
+
+She started, realizing that no longer could she hear King searching back
+and forth. It was very silent about her, only the crackle of the flames
+making a sound to be heard against the rush of air outside. It seemed to
+her that King had been gone a long time. She rose to her feet, tempted
+to follow him. She was curious to know what he was doing; why he was so
+silent; where he had gone. But in the end pride restrained her and she
+sat down again to wait in an attitude of indifference.
+
+But the minutes dragged on and never a sound came back from the far,
+dark depths of the cavern; fifteen minutes, half an hour. She grew
+restless and walked up and down; she went to the mouth of the cave and
+stood looking out into the swirling snow-storm; she returned to the
+fire, throwing on more wood. She felt sure that an hour had passed--two
+hours--she began to grow alarmed. Always that dread thought was ready to
+spring out upon her: "If something had happened to him!" She went a
+little way in the direction he had taken; stood peering into the dark,
+listening breathless and rigid. Never a sound. She went back to the
+front of the cave, looking down, staring out into the grey sky, across
+the ridge....
+
+Gloria, trembling with a new excitement, was down on her knees before
+the pack when King returned. She sprang up to face him. And each, with
+the other's emotions and experiences of the past two or three hours
+unknown to him, marvelled at what was to be read in the other's face.
+Gloria was excited; King's excitement was no less. Where she had at
+least the clue to his altered expression, he had none to hers.
+
+"It's here!" he burst out. "And I've found it. Tons and tons of it, such
+knobs and nuggets of pure gold as never man laid eyes on! We have here
+the Magic Lamp to rub: a castle in Spain and an ocean-going yacht and
+the newest thing in motor-cars and a trip around the world and a
+presentation to royalty--a fragment of heaven and a very large slice of
+hell. Ambition fulfilled and love consumed and hate born. We have old
+Ben made whole and full of power again. And here we have all that is
+left of Gus Ingle and his friends--except for a pile of bones back
+yonder!"
+
+She saw that in each hand he carried what looked like a big rough stone;
+she saw from the way he carried them that they were heavy. The fires
+leaped higher, brighter in her eyes. Now she saw the way to make Mark
+King pay for all of his brutality to her; to pay to the uttermost!
+
+"I have nothing to say to you," she said as stiffly as she knew the way.
+"I care to hear nothing you have to say. I have tolerated all that I
+mean to tolerate from you."
+
+Her bearing, no less than her words, astonished him. For the first time
+he saw what it was that she held in her hands. She had been gathering up
+her own little personal effects; a tiny parcel of silken things, comb
+and brush, trifling feminine odds and ends. He stared at her
+wonderingly.
+
+"I don't understand----"
+
+Gloria treated him to cool laughter.
+
+"You will in a minute. I am going."
+
+"Going? You? In God's name, _where_?"
+
+Deep silence answered him. He frowned at her in puzzled fashion a
+moment; then, suspecting the truth, since his racing mind could hit on
+no other possible explanation of her manner, he dropped to the fireside
+the things in his hands and went swiftly to the cave's mouth. He looked
+out into the storm, his eyes questing in all directions. Nothing. Only
+the thickening storm, the ridges dim beyond the swirl of snow----
+
+Then he saw. For a long time he stood, studying it, seeking to make
+sure. What he saw was beaten down by the falling snow, dissipated by the
+wind, gone entirely over and again only to rise like a shapeless ghost
+of disaster. It was a column of smoke. Some one had encamped no great
+distance away; on the same stream, hidden only by the windings of the
+gorge. Some one? Why, then, Gratton and Brodie and their crowd, after
+all! He glowered angrily toward the faint smudge of smoke. Then he swung
+about and came back to Gloria's side.
+
+"You saw that smoke?" he demanded. "You plan on going to them?"
+
+"Yes," cried Gloria. She sprang up and confronted him angrily. "Yes to
+both questions."
+
+"You know who they are, then?"
+
+"No; but that doesn't matter."
+
+"Which means as plain as print," he said thoughtfully, "that you would
+go to any man to be rid of me." He laughed unpleasantly and Gloria's
+anger flared the higher.
+
+"Do you know," he said presently, "that they are probably Gratton and
+Swen Brodie and their outfit?"
+
+"What of it?" asked Gloria, erect and defiant.
+
+"You know that Gratton has set out to ruin your father? That he's a
+double-dealing scoundrel? That Brodie is worse? That neither is hardly
+the sort for a girl to trust herself to in a place like this?"
+
+"I am not given much choice," Gloria informed him with high insolence.
+
+"That's a fact," he conceded with a grunt.
+
+He'd give a thousand dollars right now to be well rid of her; yes, and
+have Gratton and Brodie and the rest of them come on looking for any
+sort of a row that suited their ilk. He told himself that with savage
+emphasis, but he asked: could he let her go?
+
+"Before I go," said Gloria when she thought that he had nothing further
+to add, "I want to say just one thing: father has always considered you
+his best friend. I shall lose no time in telling him what you really
+are."
+
+Gloria's remark, coming just when it did in King's perplexity, settled
+his decision firmly on him. The girl was a vicious little fool; so he
+was determined to think of her unequivocally. But she was, after all,
+Ben Gaynor's daughter and, furthermore, the apple of Ben's eye. She was
+in King's keeping; he had been eminently to blame for bringing her here,
+his was the responsibility. Gratton's eye was the sort that soils a
+woman.
+
+"You are _not_ going," he said suddenly, turning upon her. "I won't
+allow you to put yourself in Gratton's or Brodie's dirty hands."
+
+A quick light was in her eyes, a quick spurt of satisfaction in her
+heart. In King's decision she read the assurance that he was still madly
+in love with her, that now his jealousy stirred him. She lifted her chin
+and with her little bundle under her arm came forward, walking
+confidently.
+
+"Stand aside, please," she commanded. "I am going, I tell you."
+
+Again sensing the familiarity of the battlefield she felt an almost
+serene confidence, believing herself easily mistress of the situation.
+So much must have been plain to King from that "Stand aside, please,"
+which Miss Gloria Gaynor of last week might have addressed to a porter,
+were it not that just now King's thought was not bended to trifles. When
+she came to his side and he did not stir, she sought to brush by him.
+There was no hesitation in the way in which he put out his hand and held
+her back.
+
+"There can be only one captain to an expedition in adventure," he told
+her seriously. "I have been elected to the job. You'll pardon me if I
+put matters into one-syllable words? Until we are well out of this, if
+we are ever out at all, you will have to do what I tell you. You are not
+going to desert ship."
+
+She stared at him speechlessly. Then:
+
+"By what right do _you_ issue orders to _me_?" she cried.
+
+"Let us say," he returned in the coin of her own harshness, "by the old
+right of a husband. If that isn't sufficient you can add to it: by the
+time-honoured right of the lord and master! For that is just precisely
+what I intend being until I can turn you over to your dawdling set in
+the city again. Wait a minute," he added sternly, as he saw her lips
+opening to a rush of words. "I would be glad to have you go were
+conditions less exacting. Now I have thought matters over and it appears
+essential that certain of our marriage vows be remembered. You don't
+have to love or honour, but by thunder you are going to obey! Reversion
+to an ancient order of things, eh? Well, the world was better then,
+largely in that women were worth a man's while. Further, for my part, I
+fully intend to keep my obligation of protecting you against your own
+foolishness, the storm, Gratton, Brodie, and the devil himself. And,
+finally, I mean to keep my promise to your father. He sent me to get Gus
+Ingle's gold; it's here. So is Gratton with his cut-throat crowd. I will
+in all probability have my hands full. But, once and for all, you stick
+with me. Where," he concluded with the last jeer, "the wife's place
+should be!"
+
+Gloria tried to stare him down, to wither him with the fire of her
+scorn, to brave by him. But the man, all emotion having receded from his
+eyes, was once more like so much rock, but rock endowed with dormant
+power of aggression. She felt as though she had to do with a great
+poised boulder which offered no menace so long as she let it alone, but
+which needed but an unwary step of hers to destroy its equilibrium and
+thus bring it crashing down upon her, crushing her. She began by
+wondering if she had mistaken his look just now when she had leaped to
+the triumphant decision that he loved her; she ended by feeling hopeless
+and tired and uncertain of all things. To keep him from noting how she
+was trembling she went hastily back to the roll of bedding and dropped
+down to it. On the instant it became clear to her that physically King
+was the master. To her, before whom difficulties had heretofore
+invariably melted, it seemed equally clear that there must be a way out
+of an unbearable situation. So now, for the first time, she began a
+certain logical line of thought, seeking to shape her own plans.
+
+"Please listen to me seriously," King said quietly to her. "I won't talk
+long to you. Your father is on the edge of bankruptcy. He is temporarily
+out of the running--at the hands of the very men you want to go to. He
+counts on me for what is in Gus Ingle's caves. I have found at least a
+part of it and I honestly believe that it is in your hands and mine to
+pull Ben through and leave him a rich man on top of it. Gratton and
+Brodie are down there; they'll clean us out if they can. The stake is
+big enough for them to stop at nothing short of murder, and I am not
+oversure they'd stop there. Gus Ingle's crowd didn't, and I don't know
+that men have changed much in half a hundred years."
+
+"I am listening," said Gloria coolly when he paused.
+
+"Here's the point: this is treasure-trove; we got here first. It is up
+to us to hold it. Can I count on you? You don't happen to have any love
+for me; well, you shouldn't have any for Gratton or Brodie, either. And
+you know that you can trust yourself to me. Can I count on you sticking
+on the job, your father's and your own job as much as mine, until we
+make a go of it?"
+
+Gloria's logical thinking had barely begun, and as yet had not had time
+to progress. Her spite was lively and bitter. In her distorted vision,
+blurred by passionate anger, she cried out quickly:
+
+"So, now that the odds are against you, you come cringing to me, do
+you?" Again she was misled into fancying that she held a whip-hand over
+him. "Answering your question, I would trust Mr. Gratton any day rather
+than you. He, at least, is not quite the brute and bully that you are."
+
+King was hardly disappointed.
+
+"At least you have given a straight answer," he muttered. "That is
+something."
+
+Now he shaped his plans swiftly and carefully, knowing where she stood.
+It was characteristic of him that, once having seen clearly his own
+responsibility toward a foolish girl, he did not seek to simplify his
+own difficulty by ridding himself of her. Henceforth he would merely
+consider her his chief handicap, with him but against him. He consoled
+himself with the whimsical thought that there was never a proper
+treasure-hunt that did not carry traitorous mutineers on the questing
+ship.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXII_
+
+
+And so, after all, he and Gloria were not alone in the mountains; that
+other crowd was still to be reckoned with. King stood at the cave's
+mouth, frowning into the ever-thickening smother of the storm. Their
+smoke was gone again, beaten down, hidden behind the snow-curtain. But
+they were there, at no very great distance. Thus, then, they knew
+something. Just what? Here was the matter of his perplexity; did they
+know all that he did? Or had they merely such a hint as would lead them
+as close as this? Or had they followed his trail?
+
+He grew impatient with seeking to speculate. It struck him clearly and
+forcefully that he had but one thing to do: to trust that they did not
+have such full information as had fallen into his hands and to see to it
+that he gave them no help. Though they should come close, very close,
+still that which he had found might remain hidden from them. There lay
+his work; to do all that he could to hide Gus Ingle's gold. First he
+would bring with him more than the two nuggets; all that he felt he
+could manage to carry with the rest of his necessary load. Enough to
+help Ben Gaynor over a crisis; enough raw gold to slam down before some
+San Francisco capitalist, together with a tale which would make any man
+eager to stake the owner to what loan he asked. With that he'd seek to
+get back to the open. He would get provisions, snow-shoes, a dog-team,
+if necessary, a couple of trusted men to come with him; he would be back
+here within the week. But first, before he went, he would strive to make
+as sure as a man could that Brodie's crowd did not find the golden
+hoard.
+
+He went a second time far back into the darkness of the further cave,
+carrying a smoking torch as before, vanishing from Gloria's eyes. She
+was alone; nothing stood between her and the cave's mouth; she was free
+to go! He must have thought of that. He was giving her her chance. She
+had but to snatch up the few things she meant to take with her, to go
+out, to find her way down the cliffs----She shuddered. She was afraid!
+Did he know that, too? Had he thought of that? She moved back and forth
+restlessly; at one instant she was sure that she would go, only to be
+certain of nothing before another second passed. How soon would he
+return? Would he hurry after her, would he bring her back forcibly?...
+She went where she could look out; the column of smoke had disappeared;
+the wind tore at her in mighty gusts. She hesitated and time passed.
+
+How long he was gone she did not know. She only knew that she had done
+nothing when at length he returned. There was a look of grim
+satisfaction on his face; whatever he had gone to do he had done in a
+manner to please him. She noted that his coat was off; that in it, as in
+a bag, he carried something heavy.
+
+"This goes with us wherever we go," he announced triumphantly. "It's a
+big breathing spell for Ben Gaynor." He dumped it out; there were other
+lumps like the two he had brought back the first time. She wondered
+dully if that grimy stuff were gold! She watched him while he emptied a
+provision-bag and thereafter dropped into it the stuff he had brought in
+his coat. On top of it went the articles of food.
+
+"If you can whip up enough endurance for the work ahead of us," he
+announced impersonally, "we stand a good chance of getting out of this.
+Otherwise, we stand a whole lot better show of being caught here and
+freezing and starving to death."
+
+Gloria shook visibly. Nervousness and fear and the cold were combined
+and merciless. Her look sped from King's face to what she could see of
+the snow-storm.
+
+"But we'll wait," she asked in utter, weary meekness, "until this
+horrible storm is over?"
+
+"One never knows about a storm like this," he told her. "It may blow
+itself out soon and it may keep on for a long time. Now, it's beginning
+to pile up in the drifts, to hide the trails, to make going harder every
+minute. As it is we'll have our work cut out for us; if this keeps up
+all afternoon and all night ..." He shrugged.
+
+"You mean that then we couldn't get out at all?" she asked sharply.
+
+He looked down on her thoughtfully. "I don't know," he replied slowly,
+"whether you could make it then or not. I am more or less used to this
+sort of thing and you are not. I figure that we ought to take no more
+long shots than we have to. If we start right now and have any luck we
+can make several miles before night and camp in some of the thick
+timber. We'd be as well off there as we are here and just that much
+nearer the outside. If the weather allowed us to travel at all we could
+be back at your father's place in four or five days at the longest.
+And," he added significantly, "we have food to last us just about that
+long."
+
+Gloria sprang up hastily. "Quick," she cried. "Let's hurry."
+
+King nodded and began his preparations. Into the squares of canvas he
+rolled everything they were to take with them, and he took no single
+article which he judged was not absolutely necessary. One small
+frying-pan and one light aluminium pot, with single knife, fork, and
+spoon, constituted all in the way of cooking utensils. With jealous eye
+he judged the weight, bulk, and worth of every other article, whether it
+be a tin of fruit or a slab of bacon. Those delicacies, which his love
+for Gloria had prompted him to bring with them, he now placed at one
+side, to be left behind. Bacon, to the last small scrap and fat-lined
+rind, coffee, to the once-boiled dregs in the coffee-pot, he packed
+carefully. Then, his roll made and drawn tight, he took up the discarded
+articles and hid them under some loose dirt in a remote, black corner of
+the cave. Ten minutes later he had gotten first his pack, then Gloria,
+safely down the cliffs, and they started. Head down, silent, like two
+grotesque automatons, they trudged on. They crossed on the fallen cedar,
+they climbed out of the gorge on the far side, they fought their way on.
+
+Several times King turned. But she soon saw it was not to look at her;
+his glance passed down the long cañon toward the spot where they had
+seen the smudge of smoke. She had come near forgetting that other men
+were near; she had no interest in them now. King had brought her here;
+King must take her safely back to the world which she had forsaken so
+stupidly. The obligation was plainly his; the power seemed his no less.
+
+As Gloria fought her way along she was upborne at every step by the
+expectation of coming presently to their horse, of being placed in the
+saddle, and of having nothing to do from then on but hold to the pommel
+and have King lead her on to an ultimate safety. The progress would be
+long and the way little less than an adventure in hell to her; but at
+least hers would have become a slightly more passive part and she would
+be moving on toward the luxury of four walls and a maid and warm
+comforts. So when they came to the spot where King had tethered his
+horse, and there was no horse there, Gloria looked her blank, stupefied
+bewilderment, and then simply collapsed. She dropped down in the snow,
+her face in her hands, too weary and heartbroken to sob aloud. King
+stared about him with an almost equal consternation.
+
+Leaving Gloria where she lay inert in the snow, King put down rifle and
+pack and hurried down into the hollow where he had tethered his horse.
+Five minutes of reading the signs in the snow told him the story. He had
+been right; his venture from the beginning had been loaded to the guards
+with bad luck. There was the end of the broken tie-rope; there the
+tracks showing the way Buck had gone, in full, headlong flight. The rope
+was stout and would have broken only were the animal terrified. If
+frightened, then there had been something to cause fright. Again, since
+the horse fled straight down the slope, that something startling it
+would have been at some point directly above. King turned and mounted to
+the ridge top again. Here were other tracks, all but obliterated by the
+snow which had fallen since they were made. A bear had come up over the
+ridge; had frightened the horse into breaking its tether and running.
+And the equally startled bear had turned tail and raced off the other
+way. Both animals were probably a dozen miles off by now; the bear,
+perhaps, twice that distance.
+
+King came back slowly and sat down on his pack. From Gloria's dejected
+figure he looked to his watch, from his watch again to the four points
+of the compass. His lips tightened. The afternoon was passing and the
+dark would come early.
+
+"Are you up to crowding ahead on foot?" he called to Gloria. "If you
+have the nerve we can really make better time that way, anyhow, from now
+on. Can you do it?"
+
+At first she did not try to answer. But when he shouted to her again,
+his voice hard with anger, she moaned miserably:
+
+"I am sick; I am dying, I think. I can't go on."
+
+King grunted disgustedly.
+
+He let Gloria lie where she was until she had rested. Then he went to
+her and put his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. She was
+limp and pale, her eyes shut, her lashes looking unusually black against
+the pallor of her pinched cheeks.
+
+"We'll go back to the cave for the night, after all," he told her
+quietly. "It's the inevitable, and that's one thing there's no sense
+bucking against. Stand up!"
+
+But the slight figure in its boyish garb drooped against him; Gloria's
+head moved the slightest bit in sidewise negation; her pale lips stirred
+soundlessly.
+
+"What?" asked King.
+
+"I can't," came her whisper.
+
+He judged that here was no time for foolishness, but rather the time for
+each one to do his part if the two of them lived to make all of this an
+unpleasant memory.
+
+"You've got to," he informed her crisply. "I can't carry you and the
+pack and rifle and everything, can I? I am going back; the rest is up to
+you. Do you want to lie here and die to-night?"
+
+"I don't care," said Gloria listlessly.
+
+He looked at her curiously. As he drew his hands away she slipped down
+and lay as she had lain before. He turned away, took up his pack and
+gun, set his back square upon her, and trudged off toward the only
+shelter that was theirs. Along the ridge, buffeted by the wind, half
+blind with the flurries of stinging hail with which that wind lashed him
+as with countless bits of broken glass, he did not turn to look behind
+him; not until he had gone fully half of the way to the cave. Then he
+did turn. He could not see her following as he had pictured her. He
+dropped his burden and went back to her. She lay as he had left her, her
+face whiter than he had ever seen it, her eyes shut, certain small blue
+veins making a delicate tracery across the lids.
+
+He had meant to storm at her, to stir her into activity by the lashings
+of his rage. But instead he stooped and gathered her up into his arms
+and carried her through the storm, shielding her body all that he could.
+And as he stooped and as he moved off he was growling deep down in his
+throat like a disgruntled old bear. When it came to clambering down and
+then up the cliffs Gloria obeyed his commands listlessly and as in a
+dream, lending the certain small aid that was necessary. Even so, the
+climb was hard and slow, and more than ever before filled with danger.
+But in the end it was done; again they were in Gus Ingle's cave. King
+built a fire, left Gloria lying by it, and went back for his pack. When
+he returned she had not moved. He made a bed for her, placed her on it
+so that her feet were toward the fire, and covered her with his own
+blanket. Then he boiled some coffee and made her drink it. She obeyed
+again, neither thanked him nor upbraided him, and drooped back upon her
+hard bed and shut her eyes. Here was a new Gloria, a Gloria who did not
+care whether she lived or died. With a quickening alarm in his eyes he
+stood by the smoky fire, staring at her. Uninured to hardship, her
+delicate body was already beaten; with still further hardship to come
+might she not--die? And what would Mark King say to Ben Gaynor, even if
+he brought back much raw red gold, if it had cost the life of Ben
+Gaynor's daughter?
+
+She did not stir when he came to her and knelt and put his hand against
+her cheek. He was shocked to learn how cold she was. Lightly he set his
+fingers against her softly pulsing throat; it was cold, like ice.
+Plainly she was chilled through. As he began unlacing her boots a
+curiously bitter thought came to him. She was his; the marriage service
+had given her to him with her own willingness; his wife. And now he was
+doing for her the first intimate little thing. He drew off her boots and
+stockings and found that her feet were terribly cold. He wrapped them in
+a hot blanket and hastened to set a pot of water on the coals. While the
+water warmed he knelt and chafed her feet between his palms, afraid for
+a moment that they were frozen. Finally, while he bathed them in
+steaming water, the dead white began to give place to a faint pinkness,
+like a blush, and again he put the blanket about them.
+
+She had not moved. When a second time he laid his hand against her
+throat the cold of it alarmed him. He hesitated a moment; then, the
+urgent need being more than evident, he began swiftly to undo her outer
+garments. The boyish shirt he unbuttoned and managed to remove; it was
+wet through, and stiff with frost. He noted her under-garments, silken
+and foolish little things, with amazement; she had known no better than
+to wear such nonsensical affairs on a trip like this! Good God, what
+_did_ she know? But he did not pause in his labours until he had slipped
+off the wet clothing. Then he wrapped her in another warm blanket and
+placed her on her bed, her feet still to the blaze. All of the time she
+had seemed, and probably was, hardly conscious. Now only she opened her
+eyes.
+
+"I can't have you playing the fool and getting pneumonia," he growled at
+her. "We've got our hands full as it is. Don't you know enough to ..."
+
+But she was not listening. She stirred slightly, eased herself into a
+new position, cuddled her face against a bare arm, sighed, and went to
+sleep.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIII_
+
+
+All night King kept his fire blazing. With several long sticks and a
+piece of the canvas, drawing deeply upon his ingenuity and almost to the
+dregs of his patience, he contrived a rude barrier to the cold across
+the mouth of the cave. Countless times he rolled out of his own bunk,
+heavy-eyed and stiff, to readjust the screen when it had blown down, to
+put more wood on his fire, to make sure that Gloria was covered and
+warm, sleeping heavily, and not dead. His nerves were frayed. In the
+long night his fears grew, misshapen and grotesque. Within his soul he
+prayed mutely that when morning came Gloria would be alive. When with
+the first sickly streaks of dawn he went to put fresh fuel upon the
+dying embers he found that there was but a handful of wood left. He came
+to stoop over the girl and listen to her breathing. Then he descended
+the cliffs for more wood.
+
+During the night winter had set the white seal of his sovereignty upon
+the world. The snarling wind had died in its own fierceness, giving over
+to a still, calm air, through which steadily the big flakes fell. Now
+they clung to bush and tree everywhere; the limbs had grown thick and
+heavy, drooping like countless plumes. Fat mats of snow lay on the level
+spaces, upon flat rocks, curling over and down at the edges. Where he
+stood King sank ankle-deep in the fluffy stuff. As he moved along the
+cliffs and down the slope toward a dead tree he stepped now and then
+into drifts where the snow was gathering swiftly. As he looked up,
+seeking to penetrate the skies above him and judge their import, he saw
+only myriads of grey particles high up, swirling but slightly in some
+softly stirring air-current, for the most part dropping, floating,
+falling almost vertically. Nowhere was there a hint or hope of
+cessation. The winter, a full four weeks early, had come.
+
+In the noose of his rope he dragged up the cliff much dead wood, riven
+from a fallen pine. Throughout the noise of his comings and goings the
+girl slept heavily. He got a big fire blazing without waking her and set
+about getting breakfast. While he waited for the coffee to boil he took
+careful stock of provisions. For two people there was enough for some
+twenty meals, food for about a week. Time to conserve the grease from
+the frying-pan; to hoard the smallest bit of bacon rind. He even counted
+his rounds of ammunition; here alone he was affluent. He had in the
+neighbourhood of a hundred cartridges for the rifle. While he was
+setting the gun aside he felt Gloria's eyes upon him.
+
+During the night and now, during this inventory, he had been granted
+both ample time and cause for his decision. He addressed her with prompt
+frankness.
+
+"Inside fifteen minutes we've got to be on our way out. As we go we'll
+look for the horse. But, find it or not, we're going."
+
+She lay looking up at him thoughtfully. She had rested; she resented his
+coolly assumed mastery; she had not forgotten that there were other men
+near by. But she merely said, by way of beginning:
+
+"The storm is over, then?"
+
+"No. But we are not going to wait. We have food for only six or seven
+days, at the most."
+
+She let her eyes droop to the fire so that the lids hid them from him.
+It was not yet full day; it was still snowing. Gratton and the men with
+him would, of course, have ample supplies. She yearned feverishly to be
+rid of King and his intolerable domineering. She estimated swiftly that,
+paradoxically, her only power over him was that of powerlessness; while
+she lay here hers was, in a way, the advantage. On her feet, following
+him, he would be again to her the brute he had been coming in.
+
+"I am tired out," she said faintly, still not looking up. "I am sick. I
+have a pain here." She moved her hand to her side where, in reality, she
+was conscious of a troublesome soreness. "I can't go on."
+
+He stared at her. She was pale. Now that she lifted her eyes for a brief
+reading of his look, he remarked that they appeared unusually large and
+luminous. There was a flush on her cheeks. His old fear surged back on
+him: Gloria was going to die! So he did what Gloria had counted on
+having him do: put milk and sugar in her coffee and brought the cup to
+her; he hastened to serve her a piping-hot breakfast of crisp bacon, hot
+cakes and jam. He urged her to eat, and made his own meal of unsweetened
+black coffee and cakes without jam. Triumphantly and covertly Gloria
+observed all of this. Hers was the victory. Mark King was again waiting
+on her, hand and foot, sacrificing for her.
+
+He allowed himself half a pipe of tobacco--tobacco, like food, was going
+to run out soon--and smoked sombrely. Here already was the thing to be
+dreaded more than aught else: Gloria threatened with illness. As Ben
+Gaynor's daughter, never as his own beloved wife, she had become his
+responsibility. She was a parcel marked "Fragile--Handle with Care,"
+which he had undertaken to deliver safely to a friend.
+
+"I am going to look for the horse," he told her. He got to his feet and
+took up his rifle. "But don't count too much on my success. All the
+chances are that Buck is a long way on the trail back to his stable.
+Blackie has probably limped back home by now. Another thing: if I don't
+get Buck to-day he'll be of no use to us; that is, if the snow keeps on.
+But I'll do what I can."
+
+But, before leaving, he did what he could to make for her comfort during
+his absence. He brought up fir-boughs, making them into a bed for her.
+He readjusted his canvas screen, securing it more carefully, thereby
+making the cave somewhat more snug. And at the last he dropped a little,
+much-worn book at her side; she did not know he had it with him. She did
+not appear to note it until he had gone. Then she took it up curiously.
+A volume of Kipling's poems, compact and companionable, on India paper
+between worn covers. With a little sniff she put the book down; just the
+sort of thing for Mark King to read, she thought with fine scorn, and
+utterly stupid to Gloria. What had she to do with _The Explorer_ and
+_Snarleyow_ and _Boots_ and _The Feet of the Young Men_? Less than
+nothing, in sheer, regrettable fact. She knew he had one other book with
+him, Gus Ingle's Bible! The profaned volume of a murderous, long-dead
+scoundrel. What a library for a dainty lady! Gloria suddenly found that
+she could have screamed.
+
+She scrambled up and went to peer out around the canvas screen. No sound
+out there, for the wind was dead and the snow dropped noiselessly; the
+creek in the gorge, because what little draught there was in the air
+bore down the canon, sent no sound to her ears. The wilderness of crag
+and peak and distant forest was hostile, pitiless. She sought eagerly
+for some sign of Gratton. There was none; no smoke this morning denoted
+his camp, no longed-for figure toiled upward toward her. But he would
+come soon; he must. King had found the gold here; Gratton would know and
+come. She would wait, hoping for Gratton's coming before King's return.
+
+Meanwhile King, making his way down the mountain slope, found that his
+estimate of the storm was cheerlessly correct; the fluffy stuff
+underfoot was in places already knee-deep and mounting steadily higher.
+He shook himself and growled in his throat and ploughed through it
+vigorously.
+
+"A pair of webs would look like wings before long," he muttered. "Well,
+we'll make 'em, since we can't buy 'em."
+
+Making his way back to the point where Buck had broken his tether, King
+overlooked no precaution; since he did not care to have his and Gloria's
+hiding-place known unnecessarily to Gratton and his following, he
+forsook the natural pathway and made slower, hard progress along the
+gorge where others would be less likely to chance upon his tracks and
+where the tracks themselves would soonest fill with drifting snow.
+Passing about many a stunted grove he came at last to the place whence
+Buck had fled. He knew that in the general direction indicated by the
+line of flight, beyond two ridges, was the valley of the giant sequoias.
+There a horse would find water, shelter, and grass. If he failed to find
+the animal there--well, then, Buck was well on the trail or lost to King
+in any one of a hundred places.
+
+And always as he went, panting up and ploughing down, the steep slopes,
+his eyes were keen for meat, be it Douglas squirrel or bear. But the
+woods seemed deserted and empty; only those cheerful, impudent little
+bundles of feathers, the snowbirds, and an occasional, darting
+water-ouzel along the creeks. These he let alone, but with the mental
+reservation that the time might well be at hand when even such as they
+must be called on to keep life in him and Gloria.
+
+He had taken on a man's-sized contract for his morning's work and drove
+his big body at it relentlessly. And he took his own sort of joy from
+it, the joy of a fight against odds, the joy of action in the open. His
+body was wet with sweat, but neither his ardour nor optimism were
+dampened; his foot came perilously near frost-bite after he slipped into
+the hidden water of a small stream, but he considered the accident but a
+part of the day's work. So, prepared by common sense for
+disappointment, he looked hopefully to finding the horse. And as he
+pushed on he pondered other likely spots to seek this afternoon or
+to-morrow if he did not find the animal in the sequoias.
+
+When at last he came to the grove of big trees he was among old friends.
+But he knew almost as soon as he reached them that they had no word for
+him to-day. On his wedding morning he had planned how he would bring
+Gloria here, taking it for granted, in his blind infatuation, that they
+would mean to her what they had meant to him. Now he passed swiftly like
+a noiseless shadow between the gigantic boles; he did not lift his head
+to look at old Vulcan's lightning-blasted crest, two hundred feet in
+air, all but lost up there in the falling snow; he gave no thought to
+the thousands of years which were Majesty's and Thor's. He went with his
+eyes on the ground, seeking tracks of a horse. And as he had more than
+half expected, he found nothing. The magnificent vistas, carpeted in
+snow, gave him no view of anything but snow.
+
+Later he must cudgel his brains and seek elsewhere. Now, with other work
+to be done, he should go back the shortest, quickest way. So he set his
+feet into the trail which they had made, and turned his back upon the
+grove. Where he crossed streams he took stock of pools; there were trout
+there if a man could take them. This was another matter to see about.
+Oh, he would be busy enough. And yet he did not loiter, and stopped only
+briefly and infrequently to rest.
+
+Before returning to Gloria, King meant to look in on Brodie's camp, if
+only from a distance. As matters stood now there was no telling what
+bearing Gratton's and Brodie's actions might have later upon his own
+affairs. It would be well to note if the men were preparing to fight the
+storm out or to pack up and leave rather than take prolonged chances
+with the season. So, a mile below his own camp, he slipped into a grove
+of firs and made his unseen way toward the fringe whence he counted upon
+seeing what they were about. He was still moving on slowly and had had
+no glimpse of the men when he heard them. He stopped abruptly and
+listened.
+
+They were down there, against the cañon wall. Words came to him
+indistinctly, muffled by the thick air. The tones of the voices were
+unmistakable. Three voices there were, each with its own peculiarity,
+none of them Gratton's. First a big, booming voice; then a sharp,
+staccato-quick voice; thereafter a high-pitched, querulous utterance,
+nervous and irritable. Disagreement, if not out-and-out quarrel, had
+already come to camp. King moved a few paces nearer, pushed aside a low
+branch from which the snow dropped with little thuds, and saw the men.
+
+There were four of them in an excited group, and slightly drawn apart,
+one hand at his mouth, was Gratton. The four paid no attention to him,
+but formed a group exclusively self-centred. Of these four one now held
+his own counsel, his attitude alert, his hands in his pockets, his head
+turning swiftly, so that his eyes were now on one speaker, now on
+another. Across the brief distance King could see the puffs of smoke
+from the pipe in his teeth. The man wore a red handkerchief knotted
+about his throat; its colour was as bright as fresh-spilled blood. Swen
+Brodie.
+
+Now and then as a voice was lifted King caught a word; repeated several
+times he heard the word "bacon." Here, doubtless, was the matter under
+discussion. One man, he of the thin, querulous voice swung his nervous
+arm widely and fairly shrieked his message; it came in little puffs and
+was lost between. King heard him shout "bacon" and "snow" and "hell."
+The three expressions, so oddly connected and yet disjointed, were
+significant.
+
+Gratton stood apart and gnawed at his hand; though he could not see the
+prominent eyes, King could imagine the look in them. Swen Brodie puffed
+regularly at his pipe and watched and listened intently.
+
+Abruptly the wrangling knot of men resolved itself into two definite
+factions. His fellows had turned upon the shrill-voiced man, plainly in
+some sort of denunciation or accusation. He was the smallest of the
+lot, and drew back hastily, step after step, offering the knife-edge of
+his curses as the others clubbed their fists.
+
+"... a lie!" he shrieked. "Fools...."
+
+Gratton gnawed at his knuckles, Brodie puffed steadily, and the two
+aggressors accepted windy denial as sign of guilt. One of them sprang
+forward and struck; the little man whipped out a revolver and fired. The
+shot sounded dull and muffled; a puff of smoke hung for a moment like
+the smoke from the pipe, appearing methodically between the passive
+onlooker's teeth; the man who had struck stopped dead in his tracks.
+There came a second shot; then in sharp staccato succession four others,
+followed by the ugly little metallic click announcing that the gun had
+emptied itself. Before the last explosion the balancing body sagged
+limply and sprawled in the snow.
+
+King's first natural impulse was to break through the brush and run
+forward. But his caution of the day commanded by circumstance, though
+never a part of the man's headlong nature, remained with him,
+counselling cool thought instead of hot haste. The man down was dead or
+as good as dead; him King could not help. So he held back and watched.
+
+There fell a brief silence while the man who had done the shooting and
+the men about him, no less than the figure lying in the snow, were as
+motionless as so many carven statues. At last Brodie spoke heavily.
+
+"Benny's right. Bates had it coming to him. Times like this stealing a
+side of bacon is worse'n murder. Bates stole it; he was going to try to
+double-cross us and beat it out of here. Now he's dead, and good
+riddance." He spat into the snow when he had done.
+
+Benny, chattering wildly to himself now, began a hasty reloading of his
+revolver. The man whom he had shot, whom Brodie named Bates, lay not
+five steps from Benny's feet, his blood already congealing where it
+flushed the snow. Oddly enough, King knew personally or by repute each
+of the men before him with the single exception of the man who had paid
+in full for his own--or some one else's--crime of stealing food at a
+time when food meant a chance for life. To begin with, there was Swen
+Brodie and there was Gratton. There was Benny, who had done the killing,
+a degenerate, a morphine addict, and a thorough-going scoundrel. Beyond
+him stood the burly ruffian of the big, awkward, bony frame, who had
+brought the "judge" to the log house the other night at Gratton's
+bidding, Steve Jarrold. Through the trees, coming up now, were two more
+of the ill-featured party, a swart, squat Italian, and just at his heels
+a ragged scarecrow of a man named Brail. It was Brail who came close
+enough to stoop over the fallen man.
+
+"Dead, ain't he?" queried Benny, half-coughing over his words.
+
+His fellows had drawn closer so that they stood in a ring about the
+body. One man alone held apart. Gratton's eyes were wild, void of
+purpose; the dead, chalky-white of his face turned a sickly greenish
+tinge. After a little, while no one paid any attention to him, he began
+a slow withdrawal, moving jerkily step by step, his dragging heels
+making long furrows in the snow. Then King, too, began to draw back,
+slipping quietly and swiftly through the screen of tree and bush,
+stepping in the tracks he had made coming hither, praying suddenly for
+further fast-falling snow to hide or obliterate the trail he had made.
+And for the moment he was not thinking of the gold which they, too,
+sought, and which he had meant to snatch away from under their noses. He
+thought only of Gloria. If that crowd, in its present temper, found the
+way to his camp--if, in one way or another, Gloria fell into their
+hands--then could she thank God for a clean bullet and a swift end of
+things.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIV_
+
+
+The mere fact of being absolutely alone from midday to dark would have
+been for Gloria an experience at any time and in any environment. Of
+her friends in the city there were many who had never in a lifetime
+known what it was to spend half a dozen consecutive daytime, waking
+hours in perfect solitude, catching not so much as a fleeting glimpse of
+a servant, a policeman, a nurse, or a street-car conductor in the
+echoing street. Solitude rendered rippleless by an absence of any
+familiar sound; neither the whisk of a maid's broom, the clang of a
+telephone bell, the buzz of motors, or the slamming of doors. At those
+intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might
+quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied
+coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that
+the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness.
+
+She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone. Five
+minutes later she began to stir restlessly; another five minutes and
+already she was listening for his return. Never once during the day was
+there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning
+faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the
+flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude
+door through which she thought to see him returning.
+
+Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet. She
+drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances
+toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire
+between it and herself. When she peered out across the desolate world
+she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch
+miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black
+unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal,
+insensate wilderness. And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she
+saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the
+expressions of his own brutality.
+
+After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something
+to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped
+so readily. She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and
+forced herself to read. Pages eluded her, but here and there single
+lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks
+the garments of one going blindly through it. So she was arrested by the
+line: "_In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth_." And
+this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and
+walked back and forth impatiently. It was almost as though King had left
+the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told
+herself angrily that he was _not_ like that, had never been like that.
+He was a mere brute of a man, not "_such as fought and sailed and ruled
+and loved and made our world_." He was, rather, unthinkably crude and
+boorish and detestable.
+
+But, rebelling at utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to
+the only companion at hand. She read _The Explorer_, fascinated in a
+shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were
+whispering to her from the black corners of the cave: "_There's no sense
+in going further--it's the edge of cultivation._" And later: "_I faced
+the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down._" Others than she
+had gone into the last solitudes. Others who had joyed in it and sung of
+it! It was as though the dead shades of those others squatted at the
+edges of her fire and mocked at her. Then she could fancy that it was
+King himself jeering, and that he cried: "_Then He chose me for His
+Whisper, and I've found it, and it's yours!_"
+
+She snapped the book shut. Later she opened it to the tale of Tomlinson.
+She did not entirely grasp it, but she could not entirely miss what it
+said. She hurried on; she wondered vaguely at the call of the Red Gods;
+here again, seeking distraction, she was whipped back to reality. There
+were the lines, staring at her, as though King had rewritten Kipling:
+
+  "_Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight?
+    Who hath heard the birch log burning?
+    Who is quick to read the noises of the night?_"
+
+And the answer was: "Mark King." Even now it was a torturous twilight
+in the cave, even now she smelled wood-smoke; even now she was like one
+starting at the noises of the night....
+
+"Man-stuff," she thought contemptuously. She had heard such an
+expression used in connection with the verses of this uncouth scribe. It
+did not strike her that man-stuff might well enough be woman-stuff also,
+being one or the other, or both, for the sheer reason that it was human.
+She chose to consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental
+digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his
+emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers,
+unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and
+spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like
+Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like
+the explorer; the impact of a storm's buffeting and the low appreciation
+of a full stomach drew limits marking his possibilities of expansion. He
+was a beast, and she hated the whole sex sweepingly and superbly. In
+great surges of genuine sympathy her heart went out to herself.
+
+But, after all, the moments in which her thoughts were snared away from
+her fears and the oppression of loneliness were few and short. From
+wondering what kept King she passed to bitter anger that he should
+desert her so; she concluded that he was doing it with malicious intent.
+
+Repeatedly she was tempted to go forth and seek Gratton: to hunt up and
+down until at last she came to him. Again and again she went to the
+mouth of the cave and looked forth. But each time she drew back,
+terrified at the thought of making her way unaided down the sheer cliff
+wall. She sought to tell herself that she was not afraid of the snow, of
+being lost, of being unable to find Gratton. But she could not climb
+down the cliff; she knew that she would fall. Dizzy and sick, shivering
+with dread and cold, she turned back always.
+
+She let her fire die down, not noticing it. Then the cold reminded her,
+and she worked long building another. She knew where a block of matches
+was; she had seen King set it carefully away. In her excitement she
+struck dozens of matches, dropping the burnt ends about her.
+
+At last her fire blazed up and she warmed herself. Then she was
+conscious of a strange faintness and realized that she was hungry. She
+went to their food cache and ransacked it hastily. She opened a tin of
+sardines and came back to the fire with it in her hands. She had no
+clear conception of the deed when, half of the fish consumed, the smelly
+stuff revolted her and she hurled the remaining part into the bed of
+coals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King stamped the loose snow from his boots and came in. Gloria stood
+confronting him, tense, rigid, white-faced, her hands stiff at her
+sides. She wanted to cry out, to upbraid him, all of her fear of the day
+turned into molten anger, but at the moment her strength failed
+strangely, her heart seemed to be stopping, she choked up. The surge of
+her relief, like a suddenly released current, impacting with that other
+current of her unleashed anger, made of her consciousness a sort of
+wild, fuming whirlpool. Nothing was clear to her just then save that
+Mark King had come back and that, no doubt, his heart was filled with
+jeers; she could not read the expression of his shadowed face, but
+fancied it one of mockery.
+
+King was tired throughout every muscle of his body. He set down his
+rifle, tossed his hat aside, and slumped down by the fire. Coming in
+from the storm-cleansed open he sniffed at the closeness of the cave. It
+was not alone the smell of smoke; his first thought was that Gloria had
+been cooking something. Then he noted the sardine-can. With a stick he
+raked it out of the coals. And now Gloria could read his expression well
+enough as he jerked his head up.
+
+"In God's name," he demanded, "what do you mean by a thing like that?
+Are you stark, raving mad?"
+
+For a moment she was at a loss to understand what had enraged him. The
+act of tossing the distasteful food into the fire had been purely
+involuntary; her conscious mind had hardly taken cognizance of the fact.
+When it dawned upon her what he meant, her own anger was still greater
+than her sense of her act's folly. But she found no ready answer to his
+accusation. She was not without reason; in their present predicament she
+was a fool to have done a thing like that; she could hardly believe that
+she had done it. And so she stared impudently at him and held her
+silence, and finally, with an elaborate shrug of disdainful shoulders,
+she turned her back on him.
+
+But King flung to his feet and set his hands on her two shoulders and
+swung her about. Her eyes opened widely.
+
+"Listen to me," he said angrily. "I am going to talk plain to you. You
+are a fool, a downright, empty-headed silly fool. What you have
+destroyed in wanton carelessness would have kept the life in a man a
+whole day. Haven't you sense enough to see it's going to be nip and tuck
+if we ever get out of this? You've shown yourself, from start to finish,
+a miserable cheat; there's no trust to be put in either your judgment or
+your intentions. Be still," he commanded, as she sought to wriggle out
+of his grasp, to avoid the direct blaze of his eyes. "I am going to do
+what I can for you; to see you safe through this, if I can. Not because
+you are anything to me, but just because you are Ben Gaynor's, and he is
+my friend. Understand?"
+
+"You are hurting me," she said in defiance. "Take your dirty hands off."
+
+"When I am done," he returned curtly. "I am going to stick to you and
+see you through, I tell you. But I am not going to have you throw all of
+our chances away by dumping grub into the fire. If you do one other
+brainless thing like that, and I catch you at it, I am going to tie you
+up, hand and foot, and keep you out of mischief."
+
+"You wouldn't dare----"
+
+But she knew better; he would dare anything. He _was_ of the type that
+fought and sailed and ruled. Now, when having spoken his mind he turned
+away from her, she stared after him and watched him as he dropped back
+by the fire. Then she went slowly to her bed to hide her trembling, and
+lay down.
+
+Presently she heard him stirring. She did not turn her head to look at
+him. But she knew that he was busied with supper. She smelt coffee,
+heard the clash of tin cup and plate, and realized that he was eating.
+She wondered if he had forgotten her. After a while she moved just a
+trifle and furtively; he had put away his dishes and was filling his
+pipe. And he knew that she was watching him.
+
+"No," he said to her unspoken question. "I am not going to cook for you
+any more. I have had a hard day of it, doing the man's work. Had you
+done the woman's you would have had supper ready for me."
+
+He lighted his pipe with a splinter of burning pine. Then for the first
+time he saw the waste of scattered matches on the floor. From them he
+looked to her in an amazement so sheer that it left him no word of
+expostulation. The suspicion actually came to him that the girl was mad.
+It was scarcely conceivable that a perfectly sane individual could do
+the things which she had done.
+
+She saw him get up and begin gathering up all of the foodstuff. He
+carried it to the back of the cave, where he passed out of her sight in
+the dark. He was gone ten minutes and came back empty-handed. He made
+the second trip, after which there was left on a shelf of rock only half
+a dozen matches and enough food for one scanty meal. This Gloria
+ignored.
+
+"Do you think," she said contemptuously, "that what you have hidden back
+there I couldn't find?"
+
+"You could find it but you won't," he returned with quiet assurance that
+jerked the question from her:
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because," he grunted contemptuously, "you are too much of a coward to
+go back there to look for it."
+
+And in her heart she knew that here was but the mere truth. For, why
+was she not already in Gratton's camp? Her opportunity had come and
+gone--because she had been afraid.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXV_
+
+
+King awoke filled with resolve and definite purpose. It was pitch dark,
+but he sensed the coming of wintry dawn. He drew on his boots and went
+to look out. It was still snowing, heavily, steadily, implacably. He
+kicked the loose fluffy stuff underfoot.
+
+"The biggest storm in twenty years," he told himself. "And if any one of
+us in these mountains come out of them alive he'll have something to
+talk about. It's the real thing."
+
+He went grimly about his fire-making, fixed purpose crystallizing to the
+smallest detail. Again he must seek immediately to locate his horse; one
+could eat horseflesh if driven to it. He must try to get game of some
+sort. And every lost hour meant lessened chances of his killing forest
+meat; deer and bear and the smaller folk, if they had been caught
+napping, would be scurrying out of the mountains long before now; soon
+the solitudes would be utterly barren and empty. He went to Gloria's
+bed.
+
+"You'd better get up," he said briefly. "Time to start the day. While we
+eat I want to talk with you."
+
+She awoke slowly, blinked at him, and only drew her blanket higher about
+her chin.
+
+"I am tired," she answered petulantly. "Don't you realize that a
+girl..."
+
+"I realize," he cut into her sleepy expostulation, "that you are weak
+and frightened and useless. And that those are three of the many things
+you've got to get over the shortest way if you don't want to die here."
+
+"I don't know that I care to live," she began, turning with her old
+instinct toward an attitude which before now had robbed him of his
+harshness. But his plan was set in cold determination, and he cut her
+short again.
+
+"If you don't care, I do. And I am going to pull you through with me, if
+for no other reason simply because I have set out to do it, and am not
+going to lie down on the job. What's more, you've got to do your share.
+I have built the fire; will you get up?"
+
+"No," she flashed out at him, thoroughly awake now. "I won't!"
+
+He stooped, caught the corner of her blankets, and whipped them off.
+Instinctively, she sought to draw the under-bedding over her, forgetting
+that she had not undressed.
+
+"You brute!" she screamed at him.
+
+"Get up," he told her sternly, "or, by heaven, I'll make you!"
+
+She saw his face plainly now as his crackling fire burned higher. It was
+hard, his eyes were ominous. She hesitated and saw in his eyes and in a
+stir of his body that he was going to jerk her to her feet. She flung
+out of bed at that and upon the far side from him.
+
+"Get your boots on," he ordered. "I don't want you catching cold from
+idiotic carelessness, and I won't have you going sick on my hands. For
+the first and last time I'll admit that I don't enjoy driving you like a
+cursed galley-slave. But I'll do it, and do a thorough job of it, if you
+force me to it."
+
+She drew on her boots hastily and came to the fire and laced them. He
+was a new man this morning and relentless. She was afraid of him after a
+new, bewildered fashion.
+
+"I never saw a storm worse than this," he told her. He had cooked the
+breakfast because he was in a hurry, and did not care to trust her
+wasteful fingers with their already precious food. "There must be two or
+three feet on the level places by now; ploughing through snow like that
+is killing work for a man, and you wouldn't last at it ten minutes." He
+had no intention of speaking contemptuously; she knew that his thought
+was not trifling with such matters as her feelings. He was merely
+indulging in plain talk. "We have enough food for a few days. After
+that, if we stuck on here and did not find more somehow, we'd die like
+dogs. Therefore we are going to get ready to beat it out the first
+chance we get."
+
+"But if I wouldn't last ten minutes, as you so elegantly put it?"
+
+"Not as you are; not as the snow is. But I'm hoping that before it's too
+late we'll get clear weather, a sun, a thaw, and freezing nights. Then
+we could tackle it on the crust. And your job now is to get yourself
+ready for that one chance."
+
+Her anger at the indignity already done her whipped out the sarcasm:
+
+"By getting ready, I suppose you mean for me to pack my trunk and order
+the expressman at the door?"
+
+He looked at her with a long, impersonal stare which bewildered her; she
+was at utter loss to read its meaning until he spoke:
+
+"You are to pack what endurance you've got into your muscles. You are to
+make up your mind to call up all of the grit that's in you. You'll need
+both. And you are to quit lying around and getting weaker every day;
+you've got little enough time to harden yourself, so you are going to
+take on the job right now."
+
+She gasped, incredulous. He nodded sternly.
+
+"Gloria," he said tersely, "I am going to do all that I can for both of
+us. You are going to do all that you can. That is final."
+
+She bit her lips and gave him her scornful silence. The blood was red
+and hot in her cheeks.
+
+She ignored him when he called crisply that breakfast was ready. There
+were limits to her obedience, she thought rebelliously. To be told do
+this, do that, to arise when this man's body was rested, to eat when his
+stomach was empty, was intolerable. King looked at her and had the
+understanding to grasp something of her thought. So he explained:
+
+"I want you to come outside with me. You'll find it hard work. It would
+be a first-rate idea if you'd fortify your strength by the little bit
+of nourishment which we can afford to take. No? Well, I'm sorry.--Here."
+He offered her the pieces of a sack he had cut in two for her. "Tie
+those about your feet to keep them from freezing."
+
+"When I want your advice, I'll ask for it," she retorted icily.
+
+"Very well," he answered. "And I can't make you eat if you don't want
+to. After all, perhaps you are not hungry." He set aside her portion.
+"You'll have the appetite for that when we get back."
+
+She had the appetite now. But she would prefer to starve, she honestly
+thought at the moment, than eat when he told her to eat. Now he finished
+in silence. She saw him glance at his watch. Her heart seemed scarcely
+to stir in her breast; then slowly it began to beat, swifter and
+swifter, hammering wildly. He had said that she was going out with him;
+what he promised to do, she realized again, he would do, if it were
+humanly possible. She wanted to run, run anywhere, just to be lost to
+him. And yet she stood stock-still and rigid, while her heart hastened
+and leaped and her mind sought to grasp the thing to do. She must go
+with him, do what he told her like a slave, as he had said, or he would
+make her. Her reason said directly: "You will go without a word." And
+yet, when he arose to his feet and knocked his pipe out and looked at
+her, her reason fled before the flood of the passionate wilfulness of
+the old Gloria, and she cried shrilly:
+
+"I won't! I won't! I am not your slave and I am not going to jump at
+your bidding! You can't make me; you shan't make me. _I won't!_"
+
+He had hoped for better than this. He came closer and looked intently
+into her eyes, seeking to measure what endurance and steadfastness and
+stubbornness were hers. But her eyes showed him only glimpses of a
+storm-tossed soul.
+
+"I will make you," he said harshly. "So help me God, Gloria, I will make
+you. And I am through talking; I am sick of talk. Come with me."
+
+She drew back and back in white-lipped fury.
+
+"You don't _dare_...."
+
+"Listen to me! We are down to bare elementals now; can't you see it? It
+is no question of what we'd like to do or dislike. It is a question of
+life and death. If to let you have your way were anything other than
+suicide, I'd let you have it. If I thought that you would listen to
+reason, I'd stop to reason with you. But as things are, I've got nothing
+left me but tell you what to do; and you've got to do as I say."
+
+"My life is my own, to do with it as I please. I do not please to obey
+your commands."
+
+Her tortured heart surged up in wild triumph as he turned; it sank
+sickly as he came back. He had a piece of rope in his hand, the heavy
+half-inch rope which had served to tie a horse.
+
+"You would tie me!" she gasped. "Me!"
+
+"No," he said tersely. "As though you were any other fractious animal
+refusing discipline when refusal means death, I am going to whip you!"
+
+"God!" screamed Gloria. "Oh, my God!"
+
+For again he but said simply the thing which he meant to do. And she
+knew. Yet the consummation was monstrous, unthinkable. She would not
+believe it; at the last minute his lifted arm would fail him; God
+Himself would wither it; undreamed rescuers would come; the earth would
+open ... _something_ would save her from this humiliation which would
+kill her.
+
+"While I count three," said King. And steadily, though there was a
+pallor on his own face, which should have told her the terrible
+relentlessness of his intention, he counted: "One, two, three."
+
+She put her face into her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one
+under the flashing guillotine. She willed to move, to obey, at this
+tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her
+back. "_I won't!_" she screamed. The blow fell swiftly. The rope cut
+through the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped
+shoulders. The pain was immediate, hot and searing, and Gloria
+shrieked--once only--and grew still. She dropped her hands and looked at
+him, her face as white as a dead girl's, her eyes as unfathomable as a
+maniac's. She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose
+soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who
+had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess--to
+be beaten by a man! To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse's
+tie-rope. She, Gloria Gaynor, to have her bedding ripped off her, to be
+commanded to do a man's bidding--and to be whipped!
+
+She had known fear, blind, paralysing terror. She had suffered indignity
+and experienced an insulted resentment that seared through her like a
+hot iron. She had known pain, merciless bodily pain. Now she was plunged
+into stupor. But that stupor was of only the fraction of a second in
+duration. A flash as of white fire flared through her brain. In a soul
+in torment something had happened. Something had been killed within
+her--or something had been born. A blow at a man's hand had seemed to
+cut through her being; it had separated body and spirit. She was
+conscious of the body as though she stood apart and looked down at it.
+He could beat that; he was stronger. The spirit rose above it--a spirit
+bathed in floods of fire. She was in the sudden fierce grip of such
+anger as kills, of such defiance as suffers death and does not yield.
+
+"I won't go with you," she cried. "You may beat me; you may kill me if
+you like, unthinkable brute that you are. I will not follow you now; I
+will never follow one step ever. I have listened to you; now listen to
+me! I would rather die than be brought to safety by you. If I cannot
+find the way home without your help, I do not want ever to get home. I
+am not afraid of you or your rope. I had rather feel a clean rope across
+my shoulders until they were bloody than your vile hand on mine."
+
+"You will do what I tell you to do," he said thickly. "It is the only
+way. I will make you."
+
+Blazing eyes burning in a death-white face gave him his only answer.
+His own face now was no less white; iron-bodied as he was, he was
+trembling. Yet he lifted the rope. To strike the second blow. Not just
+to frighten her, but to strike. She read his purpose clearly, and she
+could not restrain a shudder of her flesh. But she did not draw back
+from him, and she did not cry out. She meant what she had said, or what
+some re-born Gloria had said for her; he might kill her, but she would
+not follow him.
+
+And then Mark King, as he was about to strike, stayed his hand at the
+last moment and hurled the rope far from him, and whirled about and left
+her.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVI_
+
+
+Someway he came to the base of the cliffs. He was outside; he was in the
+open. And yet he struggled blindly through a pit of gloom. He was
+conscious of but one fact in all the world; about it everything else
+turned and spun as sweep the bodies of the sky about the sun. He had
+lifted his hand against a woman. He, Mark King, had struck a woman. He
+had struck Gloria. His friend's daughter--Ben's daughter. He had struck
+her.... What had come over him? Had he gone mad? Stark, staring, raving
+mad? He knew all along that his nerves were on edge, raw and quivering.
+But no jangling nerves explained a thing like that. He, who had held
+himself a man, had struck a woman--a girl! A little, defenceless girl.
+
+"My God!" he groaned.
+
+He stumbled on. He did not know where he was going or why. He ran his
+hand across his eyes again and again. He didn't know why he did that;
+one couldn't thus wipe out a vision which persisted in his brain. He'd
+see her as she stood there every day and night until he died. In a
+sweeping revulsion of feeling he saw himself all that she had named him,
+a great, hulking brute. All along he had been brutal with her; he
+should have made due allowances; he should have been patient. He had
+plunged her into an existence of which she had no foreknowledge. He had
+looked to her for the sober sanity of maturity when he should have
+remembered how young she was, how little of real life she knew, how she
+had been driven to desperation by circumstances which crushed her; how
+she had gone sleepless, living on her nerves. He had held her weak and
+worthless and without spirit or character. And now he could only see her
+standing up before him, white but valiant, defying him, unafraid,
+welcoming death rather than yield to him. He would have given ten years
+off the span of his life to have the deed of one mad moment wiped clean.
+
+It was a long time before consecutive thought returned to him. And it
+brought him only increased bitterness. Gloria had said that she would
+die here rather than have him lead her to safety. Well, he did not blame
+her for that. Rather, he told himself grimly, he honoured her for it.
+And yet, now more than ever, his and his alone was the responsibility of
+seeing that she went clear of this wretched existence into which he had
+stubbornly led her. He could not take her away against her will; he
+could not pick her up in his arms and carry her over a two or three
+days' journey! Nor could he entrust her to the only other human beings
+who were near enough for her to go to. What could he do? She would
+perish without help; hence he must help her. But how?
+
+There was but one possible answer, and in due course of time he came to
+see it clearly. He must leave her, get back the shortest, quickest way
+to civilization, and send other men, trustworthy men, in for her. It
+could be done even though the storm continued. He could get a dog-team,
+Alaskan huskies, to be had in Truckee; he could load sledges with
+provisions; he could put the right man in charge and then lead the way.
+That would mean several days alone for Gloria; but what else was there?
+
+And even that solution depended upon the consideration which by now was
+the elemental, all-essential thing; first he must find some sort of
+provisions with which to eke out their small supply. There was not
+enough in camp to sustain him while he battled with the storm for a way
+out and to sustain strength in her while she waited. He must first
+replenish the larder; otherwise they died. He must get fish in plenty or
+a bear or a deer. He looked at the grey, ominous sky, at the piling
+snow, and the chill of the wilderness struck to his heart. But at last
+his eyes grew hard again with determination.
+
+In a distressed mental condition in which the only solid ground beneath
+him was his determination to do to the uttermost that lay within him for
+Gloria, he broke into mutterings, voicing aloud fragments of speech,
+forcing himself toward steadiness of forward-driving purpose.
+
+"I've got to leave her.... She won't go with me. That means I've got to
+leave with her every scrap of food we have between us. I can go two days
+without eating.... I can! A man, if he's half a man, can finish his work
+before he buckles under.... Her one danger is Brodie. Otherwise she
+would be safe enough for four or five days. She's got to stick close to
+the cave; she must not dare to set foot outside....
+
+"But that's not enough; they might come to the cave.... The way in is
+not overwide; would they see it from below? They don't know where it is
+or they would have done as I did; they would have come to it for
+shelter.... No, they don't know of it. Can I close up the entrance,
+somehow, so that they won't find it? There are loose rocks in there....
+If they _do_ come this way, up the gorge, it will be hard for them to
+see it from below.... Even if they should find it, I can show her where
+to hide. Way in the back. There's a place there.... I can get out in two
+days; back in two days. Somehow. Allow five days to cover accidents.
+Five days; she can stick it out five days. If I don't take a scrap of
+her food away from her.... Oh, I can make it; it is up to me to make
+it. I'll get a fish sooner or later--or a rabbit.... A man can eat his
+boots."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a long time he went back to the cave. He knew now just what he
+would do, since it had become clear to him that there was but one thing
+to be done. Gloria faced him as he came in; she marked how he walked,
+like a very tired man. Her head was up, there were spots of colour in
+her cheeks; in her eyes was a new look. She had found herself. Or she
+was finding herself? Her spirit had risen undaunted in a crisis; in a
+clash of wills hers had not gone down before his. Rather it had been
+hers that had triumphed. She might know fear again, but the time was
+past and dead when she would bow meekly before a man's bidding. So she
+told herself, while with head erect she awaited his speech.
+
+He began, saying very simply what he had decided must be said. He did
+not swerve for the useless words "I am sorry." He knew that she did not
+expect them, would not answer them. What he had done was monstrous and
+unpardonable; hence a man would not ask pardon. By his own act they were
+set as far apart as two beings inhabiting two widely separate worlds. It
+remained for him merely to instruct her concerning what she must do;
+then to find the way to bring her back safely to her father. Thereafter?
+There the haze crept in again; he would go away, far from the Sierra,
+far from California, to some corner of the world where no man who had
+ever known Mark King would see him again. At that moment he could have
+died very gladly, just to know that she was once more among her own
+people, and that so far as he was concerned life was a game played out
+and ended.
+
+Now that he spoke again, his voice was no longer harsh and stern, but
+gentle rather. Gentle after a steady and matter-of-fact fashion that was
+infinitely aloof. He could not know how impersonal his utterance sounded
+in her ears, since he did not fully realize how at the moment he held
+himself less an individual addressing another than as the mouthpiece of
+fate.
+
+"The first thing in the morning," he told her, "I am going over the
+ridge and to the headwaters of the other fork. I have been thinking of
+that country a good deal; it's a little far and hard going and I'll burn
+up a lot of fuel making the trip, but I've got a hunch a bear's in
+there. The one that stampeded Buck may have circled around that way. And
+I'm going to play every hunch I get, good and strong. It will probably
+be dark before I get back."
+
+She thought that he had finished. But presently, in the same strangely
+quiet voice, he continued: "I may even be gone all night. If I am it
+will be because I am playing the last card.... You have said that you
+would rather be dead than go with me. I believe you meant that." Again
+he paused. Gloria did not again lift her eyes from the fire; did not
+speak. King sighed and did not know that he had done so. "If I don't get
+back to-morrow night it will be because I am trying to break through to
+civilization. I'll outfit a party and send them in for you. I'll get
+through some way in two days; I'll get help back to you in another two
+or three at latest. You have food here to keep you alive a week, if you
+spin it out."
+
+Long before he had gotten to the end of his slow speech her heart was
+beating wildly. The old fears surged back on her, crushing her. To be
+left here alone four or five days--and nights! It was unendurable! She
+would be dead.
+
+"You have your choice," he went on, his voice grown still more gentle.
+"If you will let me help you--"
+
+But, even while in the silence that followed she heard the rapid beating
+of her own heart, something stronger, more stubborn, than the Gloria of
+another day kept her silent.
+
+And still he had not finished.
+
+"Before I go I am going to do all that I can to wall up the mouth of the
+cave. It will make it warmer in here and--and there will be less danger
+of any one finding the place. You threatened once to go to those other
+men; _no matter what happens, you must not do that_. You don't quite
+understand what some men are. These happen to be the worst of a bad
+crowd that ever got into these mountains. They respect neither God nor
+man--nor woman. They are in an ugly mood; they probably have more
+bootleg whiskey with them than food; I did not tell you, but I looked in
+on their camp and saw one of them, a dope fiend named Benny Rudge, shoot
+one of his own friends dead, suspecting him of having stolen a side of
+bacon. You would be better dead, too, than in their hands. Never forget
+that. They don't know if they'll ever get out of this alive; they are
+desperate devils.
+
+"But with the cave walled up, they won't find you. If the worst should
+happen and they came here, still you could hide. I'll show you the
+place, far back in the cave. You could run there with your blankets and
+food; you could stay there, never moving. No man could find you there.
+They would see where we had been here, but they would have to decide in
+the end that we had gone, both of us.
+
+"I'll bring you plenty of wood; I am going to make a pair of snow-shoes
+of a sort for me; I'll make a pair for you. I hope you won't need them."
+He ran his hand across his brow but continued in a moment, his voice
+unchanged: "I'll go out before daylight in the morning; it will take me
+all that is left of to-day to do what must be done first."
+
+He turned then and went about his work. She went back to the place by
+the fire, terribly moved, agitated to the depths of her soul, torn this
+way and that. But one steady fire burned in her bosom--the newly kindled
+white flame of her resentment. Just yonder, where he had hurled it, a
+grim reminder, lay the rope.
+
+He brought fragments of rock to the cave's mouth, the biggest he could
+find, boulders which he rolled from the further dark, and with which he
+struggled mightily as he piled them one on the other. Higher and higher
+he built his rude wall, placing the smaller stones at the top. And in
+time, after hours of labour, he had hidden the great hole as best he
+could, leaving only at the side a way to pass in and out which could
+hardly be seen from below. Across this he fixed the canvas; were that
+glimpsed, its grimy-white would appear but a lighter-hued streak of
+granite.
+
+"If you will come with me, I will show you your hiding-place."
+
+She lifted her head and looked at him. No word had passed between them
+during the back-breaking hours of his labouring. Again, she thought
+swiftly, he was seeking to command, to dictate. Doubtless, in the end
+she would have arisen and gone with him, since to refuse were madness.
+But he had not waited. He had gone alone into the depths of the cavern;
+she heard his slow, measured steps receding; she heard them again, slow
+and measured, as he came back.
+
+"It's only about thirty paces, straight back," he was saying. "My steps,
+remember, but shortened so that it would be about the same for you. Say
+thirty-five. There I have made a little pile of rocks; you can't miss
+it. That marks the place, just at the side of the rock pile. That's
+where I found the gold. There is a blind cave back there, just under
+this one; there's only a small entrance to it, straight down, a ragged
+hole in the floor, hardly more than big enough for a man to drop down
+through. I had it hidden by dragging a boulder over it. Now I have
+shoved the boulder just far enough to one side to let you go through.
+Also, I have set bits of stone under its outside edge so that it is
+fairly balanced; if you go through, a quick tug at it will topple it
+over to cover the hole again. There's air down there, that comes up from
+below. And it's a better place to be than here--if any one should come."
+
+She shuddered. But he had not seen. There remained much to do and the
+hours fled so swiftly. He set to work making the clumsy snow-shoes. He
+imitated a crude native shoe he had once seen in Alaska; he bent willow
+wands he had brought from along the edge of the stream, whipping them
+about with narrow strips of canvas, binding other wands crosswise,
+making, also of canvas strips, a sort of stirrup for each foot. The last
+of the weak daylight passed and died gloomily and he was still at his
+task, bending now by his fire, working on with infinite care. The
+sticks, brittle with the cold weather, broke under his strong fingers;
+patiently he inserted others or strengthened the cracking pieces with
+string. His face, ruddy in the firelight, was impassive; Gloria, looking
+at him, saw no mere man but a senseless thing of machine levers and
+steel coils; something tireless and hard and as determined as fate
+itself.
+
+They had made their scanty suppers; after it both were hungry. They had
+been hungry thus for four days. There remained coffee and sugar enough
+for another half-dozen meagre meals; here the affluence ended. The bacon
+was down to a piece of fat two inches thick and seven inches long; there
+was bacon grease a couple of inches deep in a tomato-can; there was a
+teacup of flour; there was one small tin of sardines and a smaller one
+of devilled meat. To-day they were hungry, to-morrow they would be a
+great deal hungrier, the next day they would begin to starve.... King
+got up and went out, down the cliffs in the dark, for a last load of
+wood. When he came back she was lying on her bed, her face from the
+light. He stood a moment looking at her. Then for the last time he spoke
+to her:
+
+"If I am long gone, you understand why. It would be best to save food
+all you can; not to stir about much, since exercise means burning up
+more strength, which must be renewed and by still more food.... There is
+not a chance in a thousand now that those men will find this place; if
+they do, there is not a chance in another thousand that they will find
+the middle cave. You will be safe enough.... And, if I do not get back
+to-morrow, you will know that within three days more, or four at most,
+there will be a party in here to bring you out."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVII_
+
+
+Gloria awoke with a start. She had not heard King go, yet she knew that
+she was alone in the cave. Alone! She sat up, clutching her blankets
+about her. Objects all around her were plunged into darkness, but where
+the canvas let in the morning she saw a patch of drear, chill light.
+Full morning. Then by now Mark King was far away.
+
+Oh, the pitiless loneliness of the world as she sat there in the gloom
+of the cavern, her heart as cheerless as the drear light creeping in, as
+cold as the dead charred sticks where last night's fire had burnt itself
+out. And, oh, the terrible, merciless silence about her. She sat plunged
+into a despondency beyond the bourne of tears, a slim, white-bodied,
+gaunt-eyed girl crushed, beaten by a relentless destiny, lost to the
+world, shut in between two terrors--the black unknown of the deeper
+cavern, the white menace of a waste wilderness. And far more than pinch
+of cold or bite of hunger was her utter solitude unbearable.
+
+She sprang up and built a fire. Less for the warmth, though she was cold
+to the bone, than for the sense of companionship. The homely flames were
+like flames in remembered fireplaces; their voices were as the voices of
+those other fires; their light, though showing only cold rock walls and
+rude camp equipment, was the closest thing she had to companionship. She
+came close to the fire and for a long time would not move from it.
+
+She went to the wall King had built, moving the canvas aside just enough
+to look out, and stood there a long time. A dead hush lay over the
+world. There was no wind; the snow in great unbroken, feathery crystals
+fell softly, thick in the sky, dropping ceaselessly and soundlessly. It
+clung to the limbs of trees, making of each branch a thick white arm,
+stilling the pine-needles, binding them together in the sheath which
+forbade them to shiver and rustle. It lay in sludgy messes in the pools
+of the stream and curled over the edges of the steep banks and coated
+the boulders; it lay its white command for silence upon the racing
+water. A world dead-white and dead-still. That unbroken silence which
+exists nowhere else as it does in the wastes of snow and which lies upon
+the soul like a positive inhibition against the slightest human-made
+sound. No wind to stir a dry twig; no dry twig but was manacled and
+muffled; no dead leaves to rustle, since all dead leaves lay deeper than
+death under the snow. Gloria's sensation as she stood as still as the
+wilderness all about her and stared out across the ridges was that of
+one who had suddenly and without warning gone stone-deaf. The stillness
+was so absolute that it seemed to crush the soul within her. She went
+back hastily to her fire, glad to hear the crackle of the flames,
+grateful to have the emptiness made somewhat less the yawning void by
+the small sound of a bit of wood rolling apart on the rock floor.
+
+She was hungry, but she had no heart for cooking. She ate little scraps
+of cold food left over from last night; she nibbled at a last bit of the
+slab chocolate; she filled a pot with snow gathered at the cave mouth
+and set it on the coals to get water to drink. And again, having nothing
+else to do and urged restlessly to some form of activity, she hurried
+back to the canvas flap and watched the falling snow, hearkening to the
+stillness. For in the spell of the snow country one is forced to the
+attitude of one who listens and who hears the great hush, and who, like
+the enchanted world about it, heeds and obeys, and when he moves goes
+with quiet footfalls.
+
+Endlessly long were the minutes. Hours were eternities. She stood by the
+rock wall until she was chilled; as noiselessly as a creeping shadow she
+went back to her fire and shivered before it and warmed herself, turning
+her head quickly to peer into the dark of the hidden tunnel, turning
+again as quickly to glance toward her rude door, her heart leaping at
+every crackle of her fire; she thawed some of the cold out of her and
+went to look out again. A hundred times she made the brief journey.
+
+From being lightning-swift, thought became a laborious, drugged process;
+her excited mind had harboured throngs of vivid visions; she had known a
+period of over-active mental stimulation; she had seen, as in the actual
+flesh, Mark King ploughing through the snow, going over ridges, pushing
+on and on and on. Always further away, driving on through limitless
+distances. She had seen him fall, his body crashing down a sheer
+precipice; she had seen him lying, his face turned up, the snowflakes
+falling, falling, falling, covering it.... She had seen him going on
+again; she had seen him breaking his way to the open, getting back among
+other men, falling exhausted, but calling upon them to go back to her.
+She had seen men hurrying; dog-sleds harnessed; packs of provisions; men
+on snow-shoes. She had seen them coming toward her across the miles.
+Some one else was coming, too. It was big Swen Brodie, his face
+horrible. There was a rabble at his back. It was a race between these
+men and those other men. She had felt that Brodie was putting out a
+terrible hand toward her; she had seen other men leap upon him, dragging
+him back.... King had returned; King and Brodie were struggling.... Then
+again she saw King, fighting his way through the snow, going for help.
+She had tried to reason; he could be only a few miles away....
+
+But at last a tired brain refused to create more of these swift
+pictures. She stared out and did not think. She merely felt the weight
+of the silence, the weight of utter loneliness. With dragging feet she
+returned to her fire and looked into the coals, and from them to the
+further dark, and from it back to the pale light about her canvas. She
+sank into a condition of lethargy. The silence had worked a sort of
+hypnosis in her. Briefly, in her wide-opened eyes there was no light of
+interest. Vaguely, as though she had no great personal concern in the
+matter, she wondered how long it would be before one left alone here
+would go mad. And would the mad one shout shrieking defiance at the
+silence?--or go about on tip-toe, finger laid across his lips?
+
+The morning wore on. At one moment she was plunged into a deep, chaotic
+abyss that was neither unconsciousness nor reverie, and yet which
+strangely partook of both. A moment later she was vaguely aware of a
+difference; it was as though a presence, though what sort she could not
+tell, had approached, were near her, all about her. That instant of
+uncertainty was brief, gone in a flash. She turned and a little glad cry
+broke from her lips. A streak of sunshine lay across the rocks at the
+cave's mouth.
+
+It was like the visit of an angel. More than that, like the face of a
+beloved friend. She ran to her canvas and looked out. There was a rift
+in the sombre roofing of clouds; she saw a strip of clean blue sky
+through which a splendid sun shone. And yet the snow was falling on all
+hands, snow bright with a new shining whiteness. She watched that little
+strip of heaven's blue eagerly and anxiously; was it widening? Or were
+the clouds crowding over it again?
+
+But though this seemed the one consideration of importance in all the
+world for her just now, in another instant it was swept from her mind,
+forgotten. Far below her, down in the gorge, she saw something moving!
+And that something, ploughing laboriously through depths and drifts of
+loose fluffy snow, was a man. Now her thoughts raced again. It was King.
+He was coming back to her.... No; it was not King; it was Swen Brodie!
+She began to tremble violently. She had barely strength to draw back, to
+pull the canvas closer to the rocks, to strive to hide. If Brodie came
+now, if Brodie found her here, alone----That fear which is in all
+female hearts, that boundless terror of the one creature who is her
+greatest protector, her vilest enemy, more dreaded than a wild beast,
+gripped her and shook her and swiftly beat the strength out of her. But,
+fascinated, she clung to the rocks and watched.
+
+The man struggling weakly against the pitiless wilderness, wallowing in
+the snow, seemed to make his way along the gorge inch by inch. He
+carried something on his back, something white under the falling snow
+which whitened his hat and labouring shoulders. A sack with something in
+it, something to which he clung tenaciously. How he floundered and
+battled against the high-heaped white stuff about him which held him
+back, which mounted about his legs, up to his waist; at times, when he
+floundered he was all but lost in it. He lay still like a dead man; he
+struggled, and began crawling on again. He stopped and looked about him
+--how her heart pounded then! He was looking for something, seeking
+something! Her!
+
+She was so certain it must be Brodie. Yet she remained motionless,
+powerless to move though she remembered King's word of the hiding-place
+where she would be safe; she peered out, fascinated.
+
+In time the man came closer and the first suspicion entered her mind
+that, after all, it might not be Brodie. He stopped; he was exhausted;
+he pulled off his hat and ran his hand across his face. Then, still
+bareheaded, he looked up. It was Gratton!
+
+Gratton alone; Gratton looking back over his shoulder more often than he
+quested far ahead; Gratton in a mad attempt to make haste where haste
+was impossible. Now his every gesture bespoke a frantic haste. He was
+escaping from something. Then, what? He had left the other men; he was
+running away from them. She knew it as well as if he had screamed it
+into her ears. A sudden spurt of pity for him entered her heart; he
+seemed so beaten and bewildered and frantic and terrified; who, better
+than she, could sympathize with one in Gratton's predicament? She looked
+far down the gorge; she could see, like a bluish crooked shadow, the
+trail which he had made after him. No one else in sight! Then she forgot
+everything saving that she and Gratton were alone, that they had been
+friends, that they were bound in a common fate. She leaned as far out as
+she could; he was just below now; she called to him.
+
+He stopped dead in his tracks; he jerked his head up and stared wildly;
+his mouth dropped open, and in the shock of the moment speech was denied
+him. She called again.
+
+"You!" Had not the silence been so complete his gasping voice would have
+failed to reach her; as it was she barely heard it. "You, Gloria? Here?
+My God--have I gone mad?"
+
+The man's villainy of so few days ago appeared now, in the biassed light
+of circumstance, a pardonable, a forgettable offence. He had loved her;
+he had wanted to marry her; he had, with that in mind, tricked her. He
+had taken advantage of the universal admission that in love as in war
+all things were fair. The ugliness of what he had done was chiefly ugly
+because it had lain against a background of commonplace and convention;
+here, at the time when no considerations existed save the eternal and
+vital ones, all of Gratton's futile trickery was as though it had never
+been. She was calling to him again, urging him to clamber up the cliff,
+bidding him hurry before he was seen.
+
+"How came you here?" was all that he could find words for. "You! And
+_here_!"
+
+She would tell him everything! But he must not tarry down there. He must
+make haste----
+
+Her words cleared his bewilderment away; he glanced again over his
+shoulder. The gorge was empty of other human presence. He looked back up
+at her. And then, before her eager eyes, he slumped down where he stood,
+lying in the snow.
+
+"I can't." She heard his voice as across a distance ten times that which
+separated them. In it was bleak despair. "I've gone through hell
+already. I am--nearly dead. I couldn't climb up there. I----Oh, my God,
+why did I ever come into this inferno!"
+
+She begged, she urged. But he only turned a white face up to her and lay
+where he had fallen, his body shaking visibly, what with the strain he
+had put upon it and the emotions which only his own soul knew.
+
+"But it is so easy," she cried to him, forgetful of her now terror at
+mounting up here. "I have done it. Twice. I will show you just which
+way, where to set your feet."
+
+"I can't," he said miserably. "It was all I could do to get this far.
+I--I think I am dying----"
+
+Again and again she pleaded with him. But he had either reached the
+limit of his physical endurance or, shaken and unnerved, he had not the
+courage to attempt the steep climb. He lay still; his eyes were shut,
+and to Gloria, too, came the swift fear that the man might be dying.
+
+"I am coming to you!" she called.
+
+She began making the hazardous descent. She did not take time to ask
+herself if she could make it; she knew only that she must. She set foot
+on the narrow, sloping ledge outside, brushing off the snow with her
+boot, clinging with her hands to a splinter of granite, feeling her way
+cautiously, careful to move inch by inch along the way down which she
+had gone twice with Mark King. Her fingers, already cold when she
+started, went numb; they were at all times either in pits and pockets of
+snow or gripping the rough stone that was ice-cold. Painfully but
+steadily she climbed down and down. She strove not to look down; she had
+no eyes for Gratton, who now sat upright, his jaw still sagging, and
+marvelled at her. A dozen times he was prepared to see her slip and
+fall.
+
+After a weary time she came to the base of the cliffs. Gratton was not a
+dozen paces from her. He looked to her like a sick man, gaunt,
+hollow-eyed; unkempt, unshaven, as she had never seen him before, he was
+like some caricature of the immaculate Gratton of San Francisco. He did
+not move but looked at her in a strange, bewildered fashion. Plainly he
+had had no knowledge of her being here; he could not explain her
+presence; he was every whit as dumbfounded as he would have been had she
+dropped down upon him out of the sky. Seeing that he made no attempt to
+move, she started to come to him. She was standing upon a rock; she
+stepped off into the snow, and in a flash had sunk to her breast. A cry
+broke from her as thus, for the first time in her life, she learned
+what it was to seek to force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow.
+Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste
+impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen
+paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him
+flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with
+every effort, at last reached his side.
+
+"It's you--Gloria Gaynor!" he muttered. "But I don't understand."
+
+"I came with Mark King. The storm caught us. Just as it caught you. But
+you must come with me; if you lie here you will be chilled; you will
+freeze. Later we can tell each other everything."
+
+He shook his head. "I can't," he groaned. "I am more dead than alive, I
+tell you. I have been living through days and nights of hell; hell
+populated by raging demons. I have been since before dawn getting here."
+He cast a bleak look up along the cliffs and shuddered. "I'd rather lie
+here and die than attempt it."
+
+Once more Gloria was urging and pleading. But in the end she gave over
+hopelessly, seeing that Gratton would not budge. And it was so clear to
+her that he would perish if he lay here.
+
+"There's a hole in the cliffs just yonder," Gratton said drearily. "God
+knows what wild beasts may be in it. But I was going to crawl in there
+when you called."
+
+Then Gloria saw for the first time the opening to that cave which in Gus
+Ingle's Bible had been set down as Caive number one. It was almost
+directly under King's cave, at the base of the cliffs. The snow came
+close to concealing it entirely; as it was, just a ragged black hole
+showed a couple of feet above the snow-line.
+
+"Come, then," she said. "Let's see if it's big enough for a shelter. It
+may do as well as the other."
+
+Gratton heaved himself up with a groan. Gloria did not wait for him, but
+began the tedious breaking of a path the few feet to the hole, too
+earnest in the endeavour even to note how Gratton came along behind
+without suggesting that it was the man's place to break trail. Thus
+Gloria came first to the lower cave. She hesitated and listened, her
+fancies stimulated by his suggestion of storm-driven animals, and sought
+to peer into the dark. She could see nothing; she heard nothing. Nothing
+save Gratton's hard breathing close behind her. She got a grip upon
+herself and made a step forward, paused, extended her arms to grope for
+a wall, and made another step. There was still no sound; she breathed
+more freely, assuring herself that save for herself the cavern was
+empty. She stumbled over a rock, stopped again and called to Gratton.
+Only now was he entering.
+
+"Light a match," she commanded.
+
+"My hands are dead with cold," he muttered. "I don't know if I have a
+match. Wait a minute."
+
+He began a slow search. Finally she knew that he had found a match; she
+heard it scratch against a rock. Then she heard Gratton curse nervously;
+the match had broken and his knuckles had scraped along the rock.
+
+The second match he gave to her. She struck it carefully, cupped the
+tiny flame with her hands, and strove to see what lay about her. The
+little light gave but poor assistance to her straining eyes; but she did
+see that there was a litter of dead limbs about her feet. She began
+gathering up some of the smaller branches, groping for others as her
+match burned out. Again Gratton searched his pockets; he found more
+matches and some scraps of paper. It was Gloria's hands which started
+the fire and placed the bits of dry wood upon it. The flames crackled;
+the wood caught like tinder; the flickering light retrieved much of the
+cavern about them from the utter dark.
+
+"Here I stay," said Gratton. He dropped down and began warming his
+shaking hands. A more abjectly miserable specimen of humanity Gloria had
+never looked upon. He was jaded, spiritless, cowed.
+
+But he was a human being, and she was no longer alone! Across the empty
+desolation he had come to her, one who had lived as she had lived, who
+knew another world than this, who could understand what she suffered
+because he, too, suffered. There came a space of time, all too brief,
+during which her heart sang within her. She was lifted from despair to a
+realm bright with hope. King had gone for succour; she had a companion
+to share with her the dread hours of waiting. She began a swift
+planning; she caught up a burning brand as she had seen Mark King do,
+and holding it high made a quick survey, going timidly step by step
+further from the entrance, deeper into the cavern. It was much like the
+one so high above, of what shape she could hardly guess, so many were
+the hollows in floor, roof, and walls, so many were the tunnel-like arms
+reaching further than she dared go. Gratton could not, or would not,
+climb to the higher cave; then why should they not make this their
+shelter? She would have to climb the cliffs again; but she would have to
+do that in any case. Once up there it would be so simple a matter to
+toss down blankets and food and cooking utensils; a half-hour would see
+her camp moved from one cave to the other. Eager and excited, she began
+to tell Gratton what she meant to do.
+
+"Wait a while," he urged her. "I am terribly shaken, Gloria. I have
+lived through experiences which a week ago I would have thought
+unbearable." He shuddered; she saw that when he said he was "terribly
+shaken" he had not exaggerated. And in the glare of his eyes she read
+that, utterly unnerved, he dreaded to be left alone even while she went
+up the cliffs. "I would say that a man would have died--or gone
+mad--with the strain that I have lived through."
+
+"I know," she said gently. "I can guess. But when you get good and
+warm--and rest--I will make you a hot cup of coffee----"
+
+"I have this. It's better than coffee for me now." He untied the mouth
+of the bag with shaking fingers, groped through its contents, and at
+last brought out a flask nearly full of an amber liquid. "It's the
+stuff Brodie's crowd makes," he explained, unstoppering the flask.
+"They've got more of it than food with them, curse their bestial hearts.
+Stuff which, way back in ancient history, ... which means a week ago!...
+I'd no more have thought of drinking than I'd drink poison. But it has
+saved the life in me."
+
+He put the bottle to his lips and swallowed three or four times. He sat
+afterward making a wry face, his full eyes blinking. But gradually a
+faint bit of colour made his pasty cheeks something less dead-white, and
+the powerful raw corn whiskey injected into his blood a little
+reassurance.
+
+"Let me rest a bit and get warm?" he asked of her. "I--I'd rather you
+didn't leave me just yet, Gloria."
+
+Knowing so well what it was to have raw, quivering nerves, she tried to
+smile at him, and saying as lightly as she could, "Why, of course;
+there's no hurry," began to gather what bits of wood lay about, piling
+them on the fire. Thus she noted where, evidently long ago, there had
+been another fire kindled against the wall of rock; some one else had
+camped here, perhaps during summer-time, and this explained the fuel
+wood so conveniently placed.
+
+Meanwhile Gratton took a second pull at his flask, set it carefully
+aside and stood up, swinging his arms to get the blood running, beating
+his hands against his thighs, stamping gingerly. He began looking at her
+curiously. Presently he said: "Do you think we are ever going to get out
+of this alive?"
+
+"Yes." Her voice rang with assurance. "Mark King has gone for help. All
+we have to do is wait for a few days."
+
+His pale brows flew up.
+
+"King? He has gone? He has left you alone here?"
+
+Again she said: "Yes." Gratton began plucking at his lip, striding up
+and down now. It became obvious to her that there had been nothing wrong
+within him beyond what his frantic terror had done to him. Perhaps, left
+alone, he would have died out there in the snow; now, having already
+leaned on her, having her company and the hope she held out, he began to
+look his old self.
+
+"Now I'll go for the things in the other cave," she suggested. And as an
+afterthought: "Now that you are feeling better, perhaps you will go up
+with me and help?"
+
+"Why," he said, "why--of course. Yes, we'll both go."
+
+For in his new mood, warmed by the fire and the raw whiskey, and,
+further, having seen that she had done the thing with no mishap, he was
+willing to do what before he could not do.
+
+"Come," he said. "Let's hurry."
+
+Along the paths they had already made it was a much easier matter to
+make the return trip. At the cliffs Gratton allowed Gloria to go ahead,
+since she knew the way up and he did not. He followed her closely, and
+at first with little difficulty or hesitation. The higher they climbed,
+however, the slower he went; once he hesitated so long that she began to
+believe that dizziness had overcome him and that he was coming no
+further. But at length she came to the ledge and the wall King had made,
+and Gratton, looking up and seeing her above him, began climbing again.
+
+Gloria held aside the canvas flap; he followed her into the cave. Her
+fire, though low, still burned. For the sake of more light she put on
+more dry wood from the great heap King had left for her. She began to
+look about, planning swiftly just how easiest to move the few belongings
+which must go with her. She could pile odds and ends into a blanket; she
+could remake the canvas roll as King had done so often; she and Gratton
+could drag the bundles to the front of the cave and push them over, down
+the cliffs.
+
+"First, we'll get things together, all in a heap," she said aloud.
+
+He came forward and stood warming his nervous hands at her fire, his
+eyes everywhere at once. He marked the shipshape air of the cavern, the
+parcels which were to-night's supper and to-morrow's three poor little
+meals, each set carefully apart from the others on the rock shelf. He
+saw how the firewood was piled in its place, not scattered; how Gloria's
+bed and King's looked almost comfortable because of the fir-boughs; how
+the clean pots and pans were in their places. Then he turned his full
+eyes like searchlights upon the girl.
+
+"And you," he said, marvelling, "_you_ actually came with a man like
+King into a place like this!"
+
+"I was a fool," cried Gloria. "A pitiful little fool. Oh!"
+
+Had she been thinking less of Gloria and more of this other man with
+whom she was now to cope she must have marked a certain swift change in
+his attitude. It became less furtive, more assured. His eyes left her to
+rove again, lingered with the two couches, and returned to her.
+
+"You found King wasn't your kind," he announced. "You have quarrelled!"
+
+"From the very beginning," she replied quickly. "He is unthinkable. I
+would have left him long ago, only ..."
+
+"Only there was no place to go," Gratton finished it for her. "And now,"
+he continued slowly, studying her, "you are willing to come with me."
+
+"Yes," she told him unhesitatingly.
+
+"But," he offered musingly, "you refused me once and turned to him."
+
+"Haven't I told you I was a fool? I didn't know then quite what men
+were ... some men."
+
+She was not measuring every word now. She meant simply that she was
+determined to have done with Mark King, holding bitterly that she hated
+him; that she would go to any one to be definitely through with King.
+Yet he had time to weigh her words and draw from each one his own
+significance.
+
+His eyes followed her as she gathered up her few personal and intimate
+possessions, comb, brush, little silken things of pale pink and blue. A
+faint colour seeped into the usually colourless lips at which his
+dead-white teeth were suddenly gnawing. When she saw the look in his
+eyes, she stared at him wonderingly.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, her voice puzzled.
+
+"What is what?" Gratton laughed, but the look was still there. His eyes
+did not laugh.
+
+"What makes you look like that? What are you thinking?"
+
+Now it was he who was vaguely puzzled. Then he shrugged.
+
+"I was just thinking how superb you are," he replied, not entirely
+untruthfully. For his ulterior thought had been reared upon the vital
+fact of her triumphant beauty.
+
+The compliment was too much like hundreds she had received in her life
+to alarm her. Rather, it pleased; what word of praise had she heard
+during these latter days?
+
+His voice sounded queerly, as though his breath came with difficulty.
+Maybe it did, since he was no outdoors man, and to him the climb up the
+rocks and the brief journey along the mountain flank was a painful
+labour. Certain it was that the faint flush was still in the sallow
+cheeks. Suddenly he lifted his hands, putting them out toward her. She
+saw again the strange look in his eyes.
+
+"Gloria!" he said hoarsely, "you are wonderful! And you have come to
+me!"
+
+Gloria met his rather too ardent admiration with that cool little laugh
+which had been her weapon in other days. She was not afraid of Gratton.
+To-day she had led and he had followed. She had commanded and he had
+obeyed. Here was a pleasant change from King's masterfulness, and she
+fully intended to hold Gratton well in hand.
+
+"I came to you," she said frankly, "because I was a woman in distress
+and had no alternative. That there has ever been any unpleasantness
+between us does not alter that fact. You understand me, don't you?"
+
+He hardly heard her. To his mind the situation was clearness itself.
+Gloria had come alone into the forest with Mark King. She had been with
+him all these days and nights. But she and King had quarrelled; tired of
+each other already, perhaps. Gratton did not care what the reason was;
+he was gloatingly satisfied with the outcome. He had always coveted her;
+it took much to stir his pale blood, and only the superb beauty of
+Gloria Gaynor had ever fully done so. King had stolen her away, but she
+had left him and had come straight to Gratton!
+
+He came a step closer and the firelight showed how the muscles of his
+throat were working. Gloria's eyes widened. But not yet did she fully
+understand and not yet did she fear.
+
+"Mr. Gratton," she began.
+
+"Gloria!" he cried out. "Gloria!"
+
+His hands, suddenly flung out, were upon her. She tore them away,
+wrenched herself free from him, and started back. As she did so her
+little silken bundle dropped at her feet. Gratton caught it up and
+buried his face in it. Now as he looked up at her his eyes and all that
+she could see of his face were stamped with that which lay in his heart.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, shrinking not so much from him as from the thing she
+read so plainly at last. "Surely, you do not think ... you do not
+misinterpret ... my being here at all, my being with Mr. King...."
+
+"No," cried Gratton wildly. "I misinterpret nothing. You came alone with
+him into the mountains. What chance is there for two interpretations
+there? You gave yourself to him; you saw your mistake; you hated him.
+You have come to me. I have always loved you; I want you."
+
+Her cheeks flamed red with hot anger. There was a flutter in her heart,
+a wild tremor in her blood. She drew back from him. He followed, his
+arms out. She was amazed, for the moment shocked into consternation. And
+yet she knew no such terror as had been hers when King had advanced on
+her, rope in hand. Her new contempt of Gratton was too high for that.
+Now she marked the small stature, little taller, little stronger, than
+her own; the pale face, the narrow chest, the slender body.
+
+"You know what I mean, what I want," he was muttering. "That sweet
+young-thing innocence is all right in its place but that place is not
+here alone in the mountains with a man."
+
+"Man!" she burst out scathingly. "You, _a man_! Why, you wretched little
+beast!"
+
+But Gratton, his brain reeling with hot fancy, came on.
+
+"You were afraid of King. You said that he made you do what he wanted.
+What about me? You are going to do what I tell you. I ...By God, I will
+make you! Beast, you call me? No more beast than any other man. I have
+wanted you all these years. You have wanted me, or you would not have
+been so glad to see me. Only a few days ago you were ready to marry me!
+And now ..."
+
+His arms groped for her. Gloria swept up a dead pine limb that lay by
+the fire and swung it in both hands and struck him full across the face.
+He reeled back and stood, half in the shadow, his shoulders to the rock
+wall, his hands to his face.
+
+"You beast!" she panted. "You cowardly, contemptible beast."
+
+From the way in which he brought his hand down and looked at it and laid
+it back upon his lips she knew that his mouth was bleeding. And she read
+in the gesture and in the man's whole cringing attitude that the danger
+of any physical violence from him was past and done with. In the grip of
+his passion, ugly as it was, he had risen somewhat from his essential
+weakness; in the moment he had at least thought of himself as a
+conqueror. Now he was again what he always really was at heart, a
+contemptible coward.
+
+An absolutely new sense of elation sang through Gloria's blood. She was
+fully mistress of the situation, and had found within her an unguessed
+strength. Physically superb at all times because nature had richly
+gifted her, now she was magnificent.
+
+"Mr. Gratton," she said swiftly, "you have made a mistake. Mr. King has
+never offered me violence of that sort. Remember that, though we are
+alone, and in the mountains, I am the same Gloria Gaynor that you have
+known. And be sure that you treat me as such."
+
+He nursed his battered lips and stared at her. The blow had dazed him.
+Slowly, as his mind cleared, there dawned in it the realization that he
+_had_ made a mistake. The stick was still in her hands; a shiver ran
+through him. His desire went out of him.
+
+"I wish to God I had never seen you," he groaned.
+
+She had meant from the first to take the upper hand. Now she was almost
+glad that this had happened. For now she was very sure of herself;
+Gratton had merely been bold like other young men who had sought to
+presume; he had been cruder simply because the situation seemed to his
+mind to offer the opportunity; now a blow from her had accomplished the
+work of a haughty look in drawing-room encounters with those other young
+men. She dropped the stick and wiped her hands.
+
+"We have other things to think of," she said. She might have been a
+young queen who had punished a subject and now from her exalted place
+condescended to consider that the indignity offered her royal person had
+never occurred. She began dragging the blankets from her bed, tumbling
+them to the floor. "Take these," she commanded.
+
+"I was a fool for ever leaving San Francisco," he muttered bitterly.
+"You let me think that you cared for me, and now you treat me like a
+dog. I spent time and money trying to be the one to find gold in these
+infernal mountains, and I find nothing but storm and starvation. I don't
+believe there ever was gold here."
+
+_Gold!_ He stopped at his own words, his eyes flying wide open. During
+these later hours, fleeing from Brodie's men, stumbling upon Gloria,
+swirled away by mad longings, he had not thought of gold. But here was
+King's camp; straight here had King come after Gloria had brought him
+her father's message and old Honeycutt's secret. Then the gold was here!
+The cupidity which in the man never slept long was awake on the instant.
+He began looking about him eagerly. King was gone? Then not for men to
+bring help to Gloria but to aid him in carrying off the gold. Having
+brought Gloria here so that she could not tell others what she knew, he
+left her here with the same purpose; so Gratton would have done! King
+would have hidden it here; at least some of it. He began questing
+feverishly, shuffling about in the shadows while Gloria, busy with her
+plans for moving, wondered at him. He was striking matches, running back
+and forth; she could hear his mutterings. And presently, when Gloria had
+called and he had not heard, he came upon the bag which King had meant
+to take out with him that day the horse was lost. He hovered over it; he
+struck other matches, he came hastening back dragging it after him.
+
+He went down on his knees by the sack, got a heavy lump in his hands,
+rubbed at it, held it closer to the firelight, rubbed again more
+excitedly, and finally sat back, staring up at her with new flames of
+another sort leaping in his eyes.
+
+"It's next thing to solid gold!" he gasped. "There are
+thousands--thousands----Millions!"
+
+She looked at him and marvelled. In his shallow soul no emotion lived
+long; greed of gold now obliterated the little ripples that another
+greed had fleetingly made. How had she thought well of him down in the
+city? How had she so much as tolerated him? On the instant it struck her
+that there was small justice in Gratton reaping any reward, having done
+nothing to earn it. "We have the things to move. Come; hurry."
+
+"Why should we move, after all?" he demanded sharply. "Now that I have
+got up here, why not stay? There's wood here; everything is fixed up
+after a fashion. King would know where to send for us, and--and those
+cursed dogs of Brodie's would never think of looking up here, even if
+chance did lead them along the gorge."
+
+Gloria, recalling King's warning, remembering Brodie's brute face, said
+hastily:
+
+"Do you think there is any real danger that they will come this way?"
+
+"I hope not," he groaned. "They couldn't follow my trail if they tried
+to. You see, I left them last night, as early as I dared; I struck out
+in a straight line down the slope; then I made a turn off to the side
+and along the ridge where there was but little snow. By now all those
+tracks are wiped out, what with wind and new snow. There's nothing to
+lead them this way."
+
+"Then, if we go down quickly, if we get your bag of food and put out the
+fire down there, and come right back up, it won't be very long before
+our tracks will be gone. And we'll not budge from here until help comes.
+Come; let's hurry."
+
+"Coming," said Gratton. "Yes; we must hurry."
+
+She went ahead and began to clamber down the cliffs. Half-way down she
+wondered why he was not following. She found a place where she could
+cling and look up. Thus she was just in time to see him, standing at the
+mouth of the cave, clutching a heavy bag; he had been tying the mouth of
+it. Now he cast it outward so that it fell, striking against the
+cliff-side, and then rolling and dropping to disappear at last in the
+snow-bank below. And then he began, though hesitantly, to follow her.
+
+"That's one thing Mark King won't get," he announced with emphasis. At
+last he stood beside her in the snow. "No matter how the game breaks,
+whether he comes back or not, and no matter who gets away with the rest,
+that bagful is mine! There's a fortune in it, and it's mine." He began
+tossing double handfuls of loose snow into the hole which the bag of
+gold had made. "When I get a chance," he muttered, "I'll move it
+somewhere else."
+
+His avarice disgusted her. Just now the thought of gold sickened.
+
+"We are wasting time," she reminded him.
+
+He followed her again, casting a last look behind him, then looking up
+at the sky, grey everywhere except for a long patch of blue.
+
+"What we want is another three or four hours of steady snowing," he was
+saying when they slipped into the mouth of the lower cave. "Enough to
+hide that and to cover up our paths."
+
+Gloria was already trying to put out the fire; if ill fortune should
+lead Brodie's crowd here, it would be just as well if they found no
+smouldering sticks to tell them that the fugitives had been here so
+short a time ago and could not be far off. She called to Gratton to help
+her. He stamped out burning brands while she hastened back and forth,
+bringing handfuls of snow with which to extinguish the last glowing
+coals. She worked vigorously and swiftly; he only half-heartedly, since
+his thoughts were elsewhere.
+
+"Maybe," he said thoughtfully, "I'd better bring that bag in here and
+hide it somewhere--far back in the dark."
+
+"No," she said. "Leave it where it is. We must hurry back to the other
+cave."
+
+But he grew stubborn over it. The storm might end at any time; the sun
+might melt all this fluffy snow; the bag then would be for any one to
+see. Heedless of her expostulations, he left her extinguishing the fire
+and went back for the gold. He was gone several minutes, digging after
+it. She had finished her task when he reappeared, dragging the heavy
+sack after him. He disappeared swiftly, going into the deeper dark of
+the further end of the cave; she heard him moving with shuffling feet.
+What a treacherous, thieving, petty animal he was----
+
+She started and whirled about. There was a new sound in the air, a low
+mumble, a vague murmur. Men's voices. Outside, coming nearer swiftly,
+were men. Her first thought was of King; then she knew that it was too
+soon for him to have gotten out of the mountains, found assistance, and
+returned. A deep, heavy bass voice drowned out the others; it was like a
+low-throated growl, ominous, sinister.
+
+Gloria whirled again, this time toward the dark into which Gratton had
+gone. Blindly she hurried after him; she stumbled but kept on. She could
+hear him at work, hiding his gold. At last she was at his side; she
+clutched at his sleeve.
+
+"Listen!" she whispered. "They are outside. They have followed you!"
+
+She felt his arm stiffen as from head to foot he grew rigid. She heard
+his breath whistling through his nostrils. She could hear the beating of
+his heart--or was it her own? The voices came nearer, rose higher.
+Gratton began to shake as with a terrible chill.
+
+"If they find me--oh, my God, if they find me--Benny killed a man he
+thought had the bacon--I had it all the time! My God, Gloria, if they
+find me----"
+
+"Sh!" she commanded. "Be still! Maybe they will go by----"
+
+The voices came nearer--passed on. Two or three men out there were
+speaking at once; then all were silent. The silence lasted so long that
+Gloria began to breathe again. Surely, surely Brodie and his men had
+gone----
+
+Then again came Brodie's deep, sinister voice:
+
+"Back this way, boys," he shouted. "He's gone in here. We've trapped the
+dirty white rat."
+
+Gloria and Gratton clung to each other, too terrified to move.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVIII_
+
+
+Gratton, had he been left to his own devices, would have stood
+stock-still where he was, frozen to the ground in terror. Gloria tugged
+at him, whispering over and over: "They are coming! Don't you hear them?
+Quick! We must try to hide."
+
+At last he seemed to awaken from a trance; he started and began hurrying
+with her, crowding by her, stumbling on ahead in the darkness, seeking
+the cave's unfathomed depths of darkness. She heard him stumble and
+fall; she ran blindly and caught him by the arm again, whispering
+fiercely:
+
+"You must be silent! If they once hear us we have no chance. If we are
+still, maybe they won't find us."
+
+After that he moved more guardedly. But still he crowded ahead; once in
+his excitement, when she brushed against him and he thought that she was
+going to get in his way, he shoved her violently aside. It was then
+that Gloria, looking back, saw Brodie's great bulk outlined against the
+snow outside. He came in; she saw his rifle; his figure was absorbed in
+the shadows. She saw other men following him; how many she did not know.
+One by one they bulked black against the daylight; one by one, as they
+entered, they were lost among the shadows. She had bumped into a wall of
+rock. Gratton was there, groping in all directions with his hands; she
+could hear his quick, dry breathing.
+
+They could go no further. This was the end. Brodie called out loudly,
+his speech dripping with his habitual vileness; he shouted: "Gratton!
+Better step out lively like a man now. We got you anyway." Then he began
+to gather the scattered firewood; a match flared in his hand; his face
+leaped out of the dark like a devil's. Or a madman's, a man's mad with a
+rage which lusted for the killing of another man. Gloria's heart sank in
+despair; she felt as though she were going to faint.
+
+But all the time her hands, like Gratton's, had been groping. At the
+moment when she felt that her knees were giving way under her, she found
+where an arm of the cave continued, narrow, slanting upward steeply,
+cluttered with blocks of stone. She tugged at Gratton's sleeve; she
+crept into this place and felt him close behind her, crowding, trying to
+press by her. She gave way briefly, felt him scrape past, and began
+crawling, following. Again only a few feet further on she came up with
+him again; once more he had come to the end of the tunnel. He was
+crouching, flattened against the rock wall. They were in a pocket with
+no outlet save the way they had come. She stood, turned toward the front
+of the cave, and waited.
+
+"Get a fire going, boys," Brodie's rumbling bass was calling. Assured
+now of having run his quarry to earth, he took a wolfish joy from the
+moment. There was a horrible note in his laughter, booming out suddenly.
+"The little skunk's run to a hole; we'll smoke him out."
+
+He spoke of Gratton as though he were a frightened animal, and like a
+frightened animal Gloria felt. She stooped and looked toward the
+pursuers; thus only could she see them, since when she stood erect the
+irregularities of the rocks above hid them from her.
+
+Brodie lighted his fire. The other men--dully she counted them now;
+there were five of them all told--were gathering wood, heaping it on.
+The flames leaped, crackled, lifted their voices into a roar; volumes of
+white smoke shot out, thinned, were gone. The light flared higher,
+brighter. Dark corners and crevices were made palely fight. She could
+see the faces of the men now, their eyes reflecting the fire, looking
+like the eyes of wolves. Brodie carried his rifle as though he fully
+intended using it. At his side Benny Rudge fidgeted and blinked. By
+Benny stood that scarecrow of a man, Brail. Close by, interested
+spectators, were the squat Italian and the man who had brought the
+"judge" to marry her to Gratton, the leering Steve Jarrold.
+
+"More fire, boys," called Brodie. Again his ugly laughter boomed out. "I
+think I see where he is."
+
+Whether or not Brodie already saw them, it appeared clear that immediate
+discovery was inevitable. For there was no further hiding-place here to
+creep into; no such refuge as King had urged Gloria to hasten to if
+Brodie came. She remembered the caution all too late; she thought of
+King with wild longing, while Gratton cringed and pulled back and tried
+to screen his body with hers.
+
+"Here's the grub he stole!" It was Benny's cracked, nervous voice, full
+of wrath.
+
+She could feel Gratton shiver as he crouched against her. Sudden disgust
+filled her. They knew that he was here; they would take him in a minute;
+his seeking further to hide was so futile. And yet he was not man enough
+to stand forth at the end; he was the type who must be dragged
+whimpering and pulling back, pleading for mercy even when he knew so
+well that he deserved no mercy, and would have none meted out to him.
+Gratton had his one last chance to show if there was the spark of
+manhood in him; they did not yet know of Gloria's presence, and had he
+stepped out now, he might have given her a chance to remain unseen. But
+no such heroism suggested itself to Gratton.
+
+"Come on, Gratton," shouted Brodie. "Or do you want me to begin shooting
+from here?"
+
+The light of the fire flared higher, brighter. The eyes of the men who
+had just entered from the outside were growing accustomed to this place
+of shadows. Suddenly the man Jarrold called sharply:
+
+"There's some one with him. There's two of 'em, Brodie. Go easy!"
+
+Brodie cursed him for a fool.
+
+"I don't care how many's with him or who they are," he bellowed. "The
+grub-stealing thief has got his coming to him. Step out, you
+lily-livered sneak, and take your medicine."
+
+"That's all right," muttered Jarrold. "But it won't hurt to see who they
+are first, Brodie."
+
+"Gratton's got no gun with him," cackled Benny Rudge. "Neither's that
+other guy. Come ahead, Steve. Me an' you'll pull 'em out."
+
+Gloria pressed back against the rock, her flesh quivering. She saw two
+men and then another two coming toward her. The first sound broke from
+Gratton's lips now, a little gurgling moan. The men came on; one had
+heard and laughed. Then Gloria, with more shuddersome thought of rough
+hands upon her than of a rifle-ball, broke away from her cowering
+companion and came hastily to meet them.
+
+"I'm coming out," she cried out to them.
+
+It was all that she could do to hold herself erect and come back into
+the more open cave. Jarrold and Benny and the men after them came to a
+dead halt and stared at her. In the flickering half-light she looked a
+slim frightened boy.
+
+"All of a sudden the woods is gettin' all cluttered up with folks,"
+grunted Benny. "Who in blazes are you, kid? An' where's your mamma?"
+
+His companions laughed; they laughed at anything. One of them, Steve
+Jarrold, came closer to look into her face. She saw that his steps were
+uncertain; she had heard how thick was his vocal utterance; now she
+smelled the whiskey with which he reeked.
+
+A shout broke from Jarrold. He clutched her shoulder with a great claw
+of a hand and drew her closer to him, his face thrust down to hers.
+
+"Let me go!" she cried, trying to jerk away from him.
+
+"Easy does it," said Jarrold. "Easy--_kid_! I'm of a notion I've seen
+that face of yours somewheres."
+
+"Never mind the kid," Brodie was growling savagely. "It's Gratton first.
+Out with him, Benny."
+
+The others bore down upon Gratton. He had found his voice now; he
+shrieked at them; he begged shrilly; he battered them with his fists,
+striking weak, vain blows. Benny, though the smaller man, had him by the
+collar. The Italian caught an arm, and as they dragged him half-fainting
+toward the fire, Brail struck at him with a heavy boot.
+
+"So," said Brodie heavily.
+
+Gratton began an incoherent pleading, arrested impatiently by Brodie's
+great voice.
+
+"Shut up! You've had your innings; it's mine now. You swiped grub when
+it's the same thing as slitting a man's gullet. You let another man be
+killed for what you done. Now you get yours!"
+
+He jerked up his rifle. Benny and the Italian let Gratton go and jumped
+nimbly aside. Gratton stumbled and sagged, staggering like a drunken
+man. Brodie, with his rifle-barrel not six feet from Gratton's
+terror-stricken body, laughed again.
+
+"Stop!" Gloria shrilled. She broke away from Jarrold's grasp and ran
+toward Brodie. "You don't know what you are doing. You----"
+
+"Close your trap, kid," Brodie thundered at her. "Unless you want the
+second bullet."
+
+Jarrold's big boots came clumping noisily across the rock floor.
+
+"Easy does it, Brodie," he shouted. "She ain't no kid, I tell you. She's
+a girl. That's Ben Gaynor's girl, the one Gratton wanted to marry, the
+one King took away from him. Keep your eye peeled; King would be around
+somewhere!"
+
+"Hidin' back there in the dark somewhere," muttered Benny.
+
+Brodie, though his rifle had not swerved, was listening.
+
+"No, not hiding in the dark corners," he said ponderously. "Not Mark
+King, rot him.... Ben Gaynor's girl, you say? Then we're red hot on the
+right trail, boys! You know what her and King would be after!"
+
+Gratton's stunned brain began to function wildly.
+
+"The gold is here, Brodie!" he cried out wildly. "King had got to it
+before us, but I've found it. I was coming back to tell you----"
+
+Brodie had small liking for a coward and now his bull's voice cut
+Gratton's chatter short.
+
+"No solid mountain of gold is going to save your hide----"
+
+Benny began to jig up and down in a frenzy of excitement.
+
+"Hold your hand, Brodie, you big fool," he shouted. He even jumped to
+Brodie's side and caught the rifle-barrel, shoving it downward. "If he
+does know where it is, give him a show to lead us to it. Ain't you got
+any sense? Before King gets back. If you popped him off now, how would
+we know where to look?"
+
+Brodie snarled at Benny and whipped the rifle clear of the nervous
+clutch. But he understood what Benny had in mind and saw wisdom in
+obeying the command to hold his hand. His gross, heavy-muscled face,
+half in light, half in darkness, showed a look of hesitation. Gratton
+began a rapid, vehement talking, explaining, arguing, pleading; he had
+not meant to steal the food; he could lead them to the gold; he wanted
+none of it; all that he asked was to be allowed to live----
+
+"Shut up!" Brodie cried again disgustedly. "You ain't dead yet, are you?
+So's you keep your lying face closed I'll give you one show. Step
+lively; _where is it_?"
+
+Gratton, like a hound in leash suddenly freed, turned and sped toward
+the spot where he had hid the gold. Brodie, his rifle shifting in his
+hands, leaped after him, keeping close to him. Gratton was down on his
+hands and knees, scratching among the loose stones like a dog digging
+for a buried bone. Brodie put a heavy hand on his shoulder and jerked
+him back, hurling him to one side. Thus it was Brodie who found the bag
+and dragged it forward to the fire, dumping its contents on the ground.
+Benny was with him now, pawing over the heavy lumps. Brail, the Italian,
+Steve Jarrold--all rushed forward and snatched up bits of the ore that
+had rolled from the sack; one of them shouted in wonder; another seized
+the nugget from his hands; they all talked at once; Benny squealed in
+high rage as Jarrold shoved him backward; the Italian trod in the fire
+and cursed and kicked at it savagely, sending burning brands in all
+directions.
+
+Gloria had stood powerless to move. Now she saw that in their flush of
+excitement no one was looking toward her. She began slowly, silently,
+edging toward the side of the cave, toward the way out. Her one thought
+was to slip away while none noted her; to dart out and hurry up the
+cliff to come to the hiding-place of which Mark King had told her.
+
+"I never see such gold, and me an old-timer in the mines." It was Steve
+Jarrold muttering. "It's like they'd took clean gold down to the mint
+and rolled it and lumped it into nuggets. _This was broke off the mother
+lode_. Oh, my Gawd!"
+
+Gloria made another quiet step--and another. Still no one saw her. If
+she could only make half a dozen more steps before these men awoke from
+the first moments of a spell that had made them oblivious of everything
+on earth except that little heap of rock! Another step; she went
+quicker; their backs were toward her. And still no one saw. Yes, Gratton
+alone had seen. She made a quick frightened gesture. His jaw sagged
+open; he watched her with bulging eyes. She could read his thought so
+plainly: he was thinking of his own ultimate chances for life, he was
+screwing up his courage to make a dash for the open himself. His eyes
+followed her step by step. Oh, if only he would look in some other
+direction! If any one of them saw Gratton's tell-tale face----
+
+Then Gratton began a slow withdrawal from the others; he meant to do as
+he saw her doing.
+
+"Heavy laka hell," the Italian was saying. "Justa da gold do that!"
+
+"Give me that, Tony," snarled Brodie. He snatched the mass from the
+other's hands. "That's the biggest nugget any man living ever saw."
+
+Gloria tasted the clean fresh outside air; she was within three paces of
+the line of snow. Then there was a sudden noise; Gratton, inching off
+backward, had stumbled over a dead stick. The men by the fire were
+startled out of their oblivion. Steve Jarrold, the one nearest Gloria,
+swung about, saw her, dropped what was in his hands, and lunged towards
+her. She made a dash for the exit. In two great strides Jarrold was upon
+her and had caught her by the shoulders, dragging her back. And Gratton
+stood again, his feet glued to the ground; she could see the flash of
+his teeth gnawing at his fingers.
+
+"Trying to make a sneak for it!" boomed Brodie. "I'll show you----"
+
+"Not yet, Brodie, you big fool!" yelled Benny. "This is only a sackful,
+and not full at that. It's the rest of it we're after--the whole lousy
+mess. He's got to show us where this come from."
+
+"I am not trying to get away," said Gratton, though his tone did not
+convince. "Haven't I made good already? Haven't I kept my promise? Am I
+not ready to do whatever I can?"
+
+"Talk's cheap," retorted Brodie. "Get busy, then."
+
+Gratton, struggling already in the meshes of the net drawing ever
+tighter about him, pointed to Gloria with shaking finger. He swallowed
+twice and moistened his lips to speak.
+
+"King found it first. She was with him. I made her show me the sack of
+gold. I was going to go back to your camp, to tell you----"
+
+"Cut it," commanded Brodie. "Leave out the lies and talk straight and
+fast. Where is the rest of it? Where did this come from?"
+
+"I'm trying to tell you," said Gratton hurriedly. "There--there's
+another cave; up above. That's where King had his camp; that where's I
+got the sack. It's up there----"
+
+"No wonder she wanted to skip out," jeered Steve Jarrold, his great
+bony hand locked about Gloria's shrinking shoulder. His ill-featured
+face, the small, pig eyes, always jeering, the black bristle of beard,
+not unlike a hog's bristles, were thrust close to her face. "Where's
+King all this time?" he demanded. "Up in the other cave, maybe?"
+
+"No," she said dismally, seeking to jerk away from his evil glance and
+whiskey-laden breath. "He has gone----"
+
+"That's good; let him go. We don't care, do we? Eh, girlie?" But again
+his hand tightened until the hard fingers hurt her. "But gone where?"
+
+"We were short of food--he is hunting--maybe he has gone for help----"
+
+"And you showed Gratton where he hid his gold? That's a nice little
+she-trick, ain't it? Well, while the showing's good, lead us to the rest
+of it."
+
+"That's the eye, Steve," said Brodie. He stepped forward, shoved his
+rifle-muzzle against Gratton's body, and commanded: "You, too. Go ahead,
+you and her, and show us the way. And no monkey business, either of you,
+or I'll blow a hole square through you."
+
+Gratton, grown nimble, darted ahead with Brodie always close at his
+heels. Gloria, forced on by Jarrold, came next, and after them the
+others. Benny was the last; he had taken time to put the gold back into
+the sack and set it aside among the shadows. For Benny believed in
+making sure of what they had, even while they quested better things.
+Then he caught up his rifle, the only other gun besides Brodie's, and
+came hurrying after them.
+
+They went up the cliff in a long file, clawing their way, cursing the
+steepness, now and then one or another of them fumbling uncertainly,
+close to a slip and a fall. It was clear that, with the possible
+exception of Swen Brodie, not a man of them was entirely sober. But they
+made the climb safely and hastened into the upper cave eagerly.
+
+"It's somewhere back there," said Gratton.
+
+"More fire," shouted Brodie. His voice exulted; his blood would be
+running now with the gold fever. He tossed on an armful of dry wood; the
+flames caught and roared; shadows quivered and danced. Already Benny was
+at the far end of the cave; the others ran after him. Even Jarrold
+relinquished Gloria's arm, eager to be in at the finding. But he called
+to her as he went:
+
+"You stick where you are. I'm not forgetting you this time."
+
+Fascinated, she watched them. They ran like blood-lusting dogs that had
+briefly lost their quarry, that were seeking everywhere, in every
+cranny, with slavering jaws. They turned aside into side-pockets of the
+main cavern; they got torches and looked high and low; they went back
+and forth, up and down; they stumbled against one another and cursed
+angrily; they caught up bits of stone, ran back to the fire to see if
+the fragments were shot with gold; cursed and hurled the useless things
+from them, and ran back again, to jostle and seek and be first; they
+were not so much like dogs now as human hogs, fighting to get first into
+the trough.
+
+But they did not forget Gratton, and they did not forget Gloria. All the
+time both Brodie and Benny kept their guns in their hands; two
+significant looks had been all that was needed to keep their two
+prisoners in mind of the fact that no escape now was possible.
+
+To Gloria it seemed inevitable that in this quest which overlooked
+nothing, and which as time wore on grew less frenzied and more
+systematic, they would find what King had found before them. She tried
+to think consecutively; she recalled all that King had told her of these
+men, all that Gratton had hinted at. She recalled with a shudder the
+look in the moist eyes of Steve Jarrold. It seemed to her that her only
+slim chance for safety lay in their finding the gold. For only gold,
+gold unlimited, could cause them to forget her.
+
+For an hour they sought tirelessly. It appeared that there were many
+fingers to the further end of the cave, narrow, irregular channels into
+which they pressed. Their faggots burned out; the smoke choked them;
+they coughed and cursed, came out for fresh air, dived into the dark
+again. The short day was passing; the entering light, where they had
+torn the canvas aside, grew dimmer. And still they searched.
+
+At last Brodie returned and stood looking from Gloria to Gratton.
+
+"One of you knows," he said shortly. "Which one?"
+
+"I swear to God----" began Gratton.
+
+"Shut up! Then it's you?" The little, shiny blue eyes, never so coldly
+evil, drew her own frightened eyes, fascinated and held them. "You know"
+
+"I don't know! All I know----"
+
+"Don't lie to me! It'll do you no good." He lifted a hand and held it
+over her, the enormous fingers apart and rigid. "I'll make you tell!"
+
+"Listen to me," she managed to cry out. "I don't know, I tell you. But I
+know where it might be. In a place you would never think of looking. Not
+in a thousand years----"
+
+Blue fire sprang up in the gleaming eyes. The other men, drawn close,
+watched and listened, their eyes alive with many lights.
+
+"What you know I'll know. I'll choke it out of you----"
+
+"I'll tell you--if you will keep your hands off me! I'll make a bargain
+with you. I'll show you the place; if there's gold there, I don't care
+what happens to it--if you'll only agree to let me alone--to let me
+go----"
+
+Brodie laughed at her. But Benny cried out:
+
+"Of course we'll let you go! What do you suppose we want of you? Once we
+get our hands on it she can go, Brodie. Tell her so, you big----"
+
+"Sure," said Brodie, with a wide grin. "It ain't women we're after this
+trick; it's something better. And--and it would be very nice of you to
+show us--Miss Gaynor." He treated her to a grinning mock respect, so
+obviously spurious that her fear of him rose higher, choking her. "Very
+nice, ain't it, boys?"
+
+"I--I am not sure what you'll find," whispered Gloria. "I only know
+that----Oh, dear God, I hope you find all the gold in the world!"
+
+Hastily she ran by Brodie toward the dark end of the cave. Then she
+stopped and tried to think; how many paces had King said? She came back
+to the fire; thirty, thirty-five? She began counting as she walked while
+they watched her wondering and following slowly after her. She found
+several boulders in her path; but she had not gone far enough. She kept
+on; thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three----She could hardly see about her.
+She stumbled against a rock in her way.
+
+"Try here," she said. Already Brodie and Steve Jarrold were at her side.
+"This rock. See if it will move----"
+
+They thrust her roughly aside. Brodie set down his rifle, laid his big
+hands on the boulder, and as if it had weighed only ten pounds, tossed
+it out of the way. He knelt, feeling along the ground. A sudden shout
+burst from him:
+
+"Down here! There's a big hole; there's a dark cave underneath. That's
+where it is?"
+
+They brought faggots; at the edge of the hole they hastily built another
+fire. They crowded round, peering down. Brodie tossed a brand through;
+it dropped a short distance, a few feet only, struck, and began to roll;
+it caught against a rock, smoked and smouldered, and went out. Brodie
+set his legs over the opening, called to the Italian to grab his rifle
+and keep an eye on Gloria and Gratton, and went down. The others crowded
+about the hole, waiting impatiently for him to go through, and then
+began piling down after him. Gloria could see their figures dimly; they
+went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had
+smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit.
+She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still
+downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see
+them. Suddenly they were silent. Then there were swift mutterings. And
+then a great, triumphant, many-voiced shout. In Gus Ingle's
+treasure-cache they had at last come to Gus Ingle's treasure. And, among
+other things, to the skeleton of Gus Ingle himself, sprawling here for
+sixty years in the dark over a great heap of gold.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIX_
+
+
+Swen Brodie, whose will had at all times directed, was now absolute
+dictator. Big and brutal and fearless, drunken with gold, he loomed
+above his companions, driving them, commanding them, swearing violently
+that they would do what he told them to do or he'd dash their brains
+out.
+
+"I led you to it," he reminded them in a great shouting voice. "But for
+me never a man of you would of smelled it. There's enough here to make a
+thousand men rich, and that's lucky for you! But we've got to hold what
+we got, and we got to get out of here with it--somehow. That somehow is
+for me to figure out. And, being as one man's got to run any job and the
+rest has got to take orders and take 'em on the jump, you're doing what
+I say! If any man jack of you don't like that, let him open his head
+right now!"
+
+"There's no sense scrappin'," muttered Benny. "An' we're all satisfied,
+I'd say. But there's no call to start wavin' a red flag."
+
+"We're going down to the lower cave," said Brodie. "Everything we can
+pry loose is going down with us. We'll pitch the loose chunks of gold
+over the cliff and we'll stow 'em away somewhere else--where King, if
+things break some way we don't look for, won't find 'em! We start right
+now, while there's daylight. What's more, we move our camp from down the
+canon to the cave below. Steve Jarrold, you and Tony are elected to that
+job, and you'd better get a move on. Bring up what grub's left, and the
+blankets and stuff. The rest of us will start in firing gold overboard
+and putting it somewhere more safe--all that's loose. And at that, think
+of the great, big, wide, yellow, rotten-soft seam of it down below!"
+
+"Where are you goin' to put it?" demanded Jarrold.
+
+"Not hiding it from you and Tony, Steve," cried Brodie sharply. "Put
+your suspicious ways in your pocket. And, if you're on the jump, you'll
+have our camp truck moved before we're done. Look alive, will you? A
+man never knows what's going to happen."
+
+"Why not leave it here until we know----?"
+
+"For one thing, because Mark King knows this place. Now, move! Come
+ahead, you other fellows. You, too, Gratton; we ain't forgot you." An
+uglier note crept into the harsh voice. "You can help. And so can you,"
+whirling on Gloria. "Woman or no woman, you got hands and feet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Night, pitch-black, had come when they had done. Gloria, scarcely able
+to stand from exhaustion, her body bruised, her hands and arms wounded
+from many a jagged rock as she had gone back and forth carrying heavy
+loads, went with the others into the lowest cave in which already the
+gold had been stowed away. She sank down wearily; she closed her eyes
+rather than watch the men about their fire, eating noisily, drinking
+noisily from the bottles which Steve and Tony had brought from their
+other camp. Trying to remain unnoticed in the shadows was Gratton.
+Brodie, having commanded that a rude rock wall like King's be built
+across the mouth of the cave to shut out the cold, and having laboured
+with the others at the task, came back to the fire. He took a long pull
+at a bottle, emptying it and smashing it to tinkling fragments as he
+hurled it behind him. He caught up a big piece of dried beef and gnawed
+at it like a dog; though Gloria kept her eyes away from him she could
+hear the tearing and grinding of the monstrous teeth.
+
+"It's been a day's work, at that," he said with a full mouth. "But we
+ain't done. I noticed how no man has said a word about how we split what
+we found."
+
+"There's five of us," said Benny quickly. "We split it five ways, even,
+like pardners."
+
+Brodie turned on him slowly, still rending at his meat, still clutching
+his rifle and holding it so that no man might forget that he held it.
+
+"Think so, Benny?" he said ponderously. "Being as I've worked on this
+lay a long time, since I let you others in on it, since I led you to
+it--think that's the fair way to split it? Now suppose you listen to
+me. You boys ain't mentioned a split because it was none of your say and
+you knew it. Say, in round numbers--but there's ten times that--that
+there's a million dollars tucked away here. Why, there's mines all
+through these mountains that never thought of stopping at a million;
+that was just a fair start! Well, to get going, say there's an even
+million. I get just half that; that leaves half a million, don't it?
+Now, shut up a minute!" he commanded truculently as more than one man
+stirred. "Listen to me. That's five hundred thousand to split between
+four of you; that's over a hundred thousand for every man jack of you.
+And that's what I call a fair split."
+
+They growled in their throats at that, but no man took it upon himself
+to speak out definitely, though they glanced sidewise among themselves.
+Benny, who always had a thought of his own, said quietly:
+
+"What are you doin' about Gratton? He'll claim his share, won't he? And,
+if you say him no, he'll shoot his face off, won't he?"
+
+"No," said Brodie. "He won't." He paused, swallowed the last of his
+beef, caught up a bottle from Benny's side, and drank deeply. Benny,
+afraid that this bottle, too, still nearly full, would be broken,
+hastily snatched it back when Brodie had done.
+
+"No," said Brodie heavily. "Gratton won't talk." He grew suddenly
+quick-spoken--he broke into a volley of accusation; his tongue lent
+itself to such a rush of vileness that Gloria, shrinking back, covered
+her ears with her hands. "Gratton stole grub. When grub-stealing was the
+same as slitting a man's throat. And what next does he plan? Why, to
+make trouble; to swear that Benny killed a man; that we was all in it;
+to get us all hung, if he can, or in the pen; then to grab what's ours.
+Look at him. You can see it in his frog eyes! He's done, that's what he
+is!" With a swift gesture his gun was at his shoulder.
+
+Gratton scrambled to his feet with a choking cry. Gloria, too, had
+sprung up, sick with horror. She looked from Brodie to Gratton, who was
+not two feet from her. She saw that he was panic-stricken; his fear was
+choking him, stopping his heart, paralysing his muscles. He wanted to
+run and could not; he tried to speak but now not even a whisper came
+from between his writhing lips.
+
+Slowly, an unshaken, senseless piece of machinery, Brodie raised his
+rifle. Now Gratton's voice returned to him; a strangling cry broke from
+his agonized soul. A hand, wildly outthrown, caught at Gloria's sleeve.
+
+"You, there," called Brodie, "stand aside. Unless you're wanting yours
+too!"
+
+Her own heart was stopping, her feet were leaded. She understood what he
+said--she knew that it was to her that he spoke--but she wouldn't
+believe, couldn't believe that he meant--_that_!
+
+Gratton was pressing tight to Gloria, seeking futilely to get behind
+her. He began to articulate--to beg--to promise----
+
+Brodie fired. A great reverberating roar filled the cavern. Gloria, her
+brain gone suddenly numb, felt the grip on her arm tighten convulsively.
+Then it relaxed--slowly. Gratton, his eyes bulging, his mouth wide open,
+was sinking----
+
+Gloria put her hands over her eyes and screamed. Again and again her
+scream broke from her. She tried to draw back, to run. But all her
+strength was gone. She crumpled and settled down almost as Gratton had
+done, and so close to him that she brushed him with her knee. She felt
+the body twitch. She leaped to her feet and ran blindly, screaming. She
+struck against the rock wall and sank down again.
+
+The wonder was that she did not swoon outright. As it was, her soul
+seemed to float dizzily out of her body and through an utter dark. She
+thought that she was dying. As though across a vast distance she heard
+voices.
+
+"Well?" It was the man who had done the shooting, his voice truculent.
+"Anybody got anything to say? Say it quick, if you have."
+
+There was a silence. Then a shuffling of feet. Then an answering voice,
+thin and querulous. It was Benny; he, too, had killed his man.
+
+"He had it coming," he said eagerly. "Any judge would say so. Stole
+every bit of grub when stealing grub is the same as cutting a man's
+throat, just like you said, Brodie. He had it coming. You done right."
+
+"You, Jarrold," demanded Brodie. "Got anything to say?"
+
+Again silence. Then again a voice, Jarrold's, saying hurriedly:
+
+"No. Benny's right. He had it coming. Damn fool."
+
+"And you, Brail? And you, Tony? Got anything to say? Talk lively!"
+
+Brail and Tony, like the others before them, were quick to excuse
+Brodie's act. They spoke briefly and relapsed into silence. Then,
+beginning far away and coming closer with the speed of an onrushing
+hurricane, Gloria heard heavy feet crunching in the dirt and gravel. A
+hard hand gripped her shoulder, jerking her to her feet.
+
+"You, friend," said Brodie. "What have you got to say about it?"
+
+She hung limp in his powerful hand, speechless.
+
+He dragged her closer to the firelight, peering at her with his
+red-flecked eyes.
+
+"Don't forget who she is," another voice was saying. Steve Jarrold's.
+"Remember what I told you."
+
+It was as though he prided himself on the fact that he alone knew her
+for Gaynor's daughter, and from it derived a sort of ownership of her;
+for while the others had never caught a glimpse of her until now, he had
+filled his eyes with her before. "We got to think this out. She came
+along with King. Got enough of him and switched to Gratton. That's like
+a woman."
+
+Brodie let her slip down and turned away from her. His mood was not so
+soon for a woman.
+
+"See she keeps her mouth shut," he said threateningly. "If she ain't got
+sense enough for that she ain't got sense to go on living."
+
+Benny stooped and feasted his eyes on her. Then, straightening up, he
+turned to Jarrold with nodding approval.
+
+"She skins anything _I_ ever saw," he admitted.
+
+In some strange way it seemed to Gloria that both Benny and Brodie had
+consigned her to Jarrold as though they admitted his prior claim; as
+though, among these three, she was looked upon as the property of one.
+She struggled to her feet.
+
+"Don't let her go," said Brodie. "That's all I got to say about her
+right now."
+
+She made an uncertain step toward the mouth of the cave. Jarrold moved
+at her side. She went faster. He put his hand on her.
+
+"Didn't you hear what he said?" he asked.
+
+She tried to break away and run. He held her One clear thought and only
+one formed in her mind. As she had never longed for anything in her
+life, she yearned for Mark King.
+
+"Mark!" she screamed, "Mark King! Save me."
+
+Jarrold clapped a big dirty hand over her mouth. He put a wiry arm about
+her and lifted her and carried her back to the fireside.
+
+"None of that," he growled in her ear. She shrank away as she felt the
+tensing of his arm and was conscious of the contact of his rag-clothed
+body. She grew silent, cowering. She heard a sound of something dragging
+and could not hide her fascinated eyes. Thus she watched as Brodie
+gripped the slack of Gratton's coat shoulders and shoved the body out
+into the snow. She even marked how the living man spat after the dead.
+
+"Go to the coyotes," he muttered. "They're your kind."
+
+Gloria knew that if she took a step Jarrold would clutch her again. So
+she stood very still. Brodie came back and threw some wood on the fire
+and squatted down over the provisions, seeming to be taking stock of
+them. Perhaps he was but strengthening his heart, digesting the evidence
+of the case, assuring himself again after the accomplished fact that the
+deed was just. Still squatting, he drank again, this time from the
+bottle which had been Gratton's. As he tilted it up she saw that it was
+two-thirds full. When he put it down with a long sigh and wiped his wet
+mouth it was not over half-full. He brooded over the fire, he gave no
+sign of noticing her.
+
+"Let me go," she said to Jarrold. "I am sick. I'd die here. Please let
+me go."
+
+Jarrold shifted and looked to his companions. Benny shook his head.
+
+"There ain't no hurry," he stated judicially. "What sort is she, Steve?"
+
+"She come up to Gaynor's place along with Gratton," answered Jarrold as
+though he knew all about her. "He was crazy gone on her, crazy enough to
+want to marry her, even. Sent me for the judge. Then Mark King showed
+up. She fell for him and gave Gratton the go-by. Then she comes into the
+mountains with King, I guess. Next she gets tired of him and goes back
+to Gratton."
+
+"'Frisco woman?" asked Benny.
+
+Jarrold nodded. Benny clacked his tongue. Brodie still brooded at his
+fire, his eyes sullen upon the fitful flame and red embers.
+
+"Where is King?" asked Brodie.
+
+"Where is King?" repeated Jarrold to Gloria.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, speaking with difficulty. "I ... Oh, for
+God's sake, let me go. I won't say anything about what I saw; I promise.
+If you will only let me go."
+
+"They promise easy and break promises easier," said Jarrold.
+
+Benny came up and touched Brodie on the shoulder. The squatting man
+started and scowled. Benny stooped and whispered. Brodie got up heavily
+and together the two withdrew, going further back in the cave. They
+talked, but Gloria could not catch the words. She saw the flare of one
+match after the other as they fell to smoking; the smell of strong
+tobacco came to her. She looked appealingly to Jarrold. He sidled
+closer, standing between her and the open.
+
+"I'll pay you a thousand dollars when I get back to San Francisco," she
+whispered eagerly. "Ten thousand! If you'll let me go now."
+
+Jarrold pondered, his stupid little eyes steady and unwinking on her.
+
+"A thousand dollars," he returned slowly, "wouldn't do me any good if I
+never got it: as I wouldn't if none of us got clear of this damn' snow;
+neither would ten I And it wouldn't do me any good if Benny and Brodie
+shot me full of lead. And it wouldn't be much, anyhow, if we got away
+with what we found to-day! Everything being as it is, I ain't half as
+strong for a thousand dollars, nor yet ten, right now as I am for you!
+And you know it, don't you?"
+
+He tried to ogle her, and her sick dread nearly overwhelmed her.
+
+"And you got sense, too," went on Jarrold, leering meaningly. "It won't
+be bad to have a man stuck on you that's got all kind of kale, will it,
+girlie?"
+
+As he poured out his wretched insinuations she was trembling; in her
+heart she thought that she had spoken truly and would die if they kept
+her here.
+
+"I am married. To Mr. King," she said as steadily as she could. "I want
+to go to him. You have no right to keep me here."
+
+"But you don't even know where he is," Jarrold reminded her slyly.
+
+Brodie and Benny had given over their whispering and came back to the
+fire, where Brail and the Italian looked up at them sharply. Here was
+another guarded conference among the four; Gloria, though she could
+watch them, was unable to hear what they were saying. Jarrold began to
+grow uneasy, so soon is distrust bred amongst those who have found
+treasure.
+
+Brodie made a last remark and laughed; the others laughed after him, and
+the four looked toward Jarrold and Gloria. Brodie, leaning back, caught
+up a bottle and drank, and thereafter passed the bottle to the man
+nearest him. Gloria was quick to see that he had set his rifle away
+somewhere against the rock wall in the shadows. Only Brail still clung
+to his gun; if he should set it aside--if there should come a moment
+when she could slip to the cave's mouth--in the outside dark, despite
+the deep snow, she would at least have a chance to escape from them.
+Even though she had nowhere to go, she longed wildly to be away from
+them. When their eyes roved toward her she thought that she would rather
+be dead, out in the clean, white snow, than here.
+
+She wondered if these men were as utterly callous as they seemed.
+Gratton, so newly dead, appeared forgotten. They laughed and drank, they
+smoked and spat, they soiled her with their eyes and their talk, quite
+as though they had neither knowledge nor memory of manslaughter done.
+Benny alone, for a brief period, appeared nervous. She wondered what he
+was doing; he had rolled back his coat-sleeve; he was jabbing at his
+bare forearm with something which now and then caught and reflected the
+firelight. After a long time she heard a long sigh from Benny; he pulled
+down his coat-sleeve. The others laughed again.
+
+"It's time we had a little talk," said Brodie out of a short silence.
+"Without anybody's skirt listening in. Leave her back there, further
+from the front door, Jarrold. Where she can't get an earful, and where
+she can't make a getaway; you come on over here a minute."
+
+Gloria made no resistance but sank down limply where Jarrold left her
+and watched him as he slouched over to the fire. She sought to hear
+their words, to read the looks on their faces. But she caught only a
+monotonous mutter, unintelligible but evil, and saw only the bottle
+passing from one to the other. Brodie finished it and hurled it from him
+so that it broke noisily. A few times she heard them laugh; she could
+distinguish Brodie's throaty, bull tone and Benny's nervous cackle.
+Jarrold did not appear made for mirth, and him she feared most of all;
+yes, even more than Brodie, whom she had seen do murder, and Benny who,
+she knew, had done murder. Brail and the Italian said little; they were
+men to follow where other men led. She fancied that several times Steve
+Jarrold's little eyes left the bottle, the faces of his companions, and
+even the pile of gold to quest for her face in the dark.
+
+"Come here," commanded Brodie.
+
+She started. He was calling to her! She got up and moved forward slowly.
+It was obey or be dragged to him. In the pale light by the fire,
+standing so that the blaze was between the five men and herself, she
+stopped. Until now she had been very white; suddenly she knew that her
+face must be flooded with bright red; she could feel the burn of it.
+The eyes of the men seemed veritably to disregard her clothes, to make
+her feel another Lady Godiva.
+
+"Gratton's, then King's, then Gratton's again?" Brodie chuckled. "I
+don't care whose before Gratton's the first time; but whose after
+Gratton's the last time, that's it! Who are you for, Bright-Eyes? Me or
+Steve?"
+
+"No!" she cried, her hands at her breast. "No! I am not like that! I was
+not Gratton's; I am ... I am Mark King's wife!"
+
+"So?" admitted Brodie good-humouredly. "Well, that cuts no ice; it's
+open and shut you'd gone back to Gratton. Now, come over here. Closer."
+
+"I won't," she shuddered. "You don't dare make me! I ... Oh, won't you
+let me go? You have your gold there; you have gold and whiskey; you
+don't want me...."
+
+"Whiskey, gold, and women," muttered Brodie. "They go together fine. And
+quit that little schoolgirl dodge; you make me sick. If you wasn't what
+you are, you wouldn't be where you are. Come over here and give us a
+kiss." He jerked from his pocket a dull lump, one of the smaller, richer
+nuggets. "I'm no pincher; come across and I'll give you a whole handful
+of gold!" His tone was playful.
+
+But Jarrold cut in less playfully:
+
+"Leave her alone, Brodie," he advised. "She don't cotton to you, and,
+what's more, whose gold is it, anyhow? We ain't divided yet. And
+she.... Well, if she belongs to anybody, she's mine!"
+
+"So?" Brodie's monosyllable was expressionless. "Well, I was asking
+_her_. And she ain't answered yet."
+
+Fast as the girl's heart beat, her thoughts sought to fly faster. These
+men were brutes; here she began, and, alas, here she ended. She had
+never known what brute meant; she had called Mark King that! And now, if
+only Mark King could hear her call, could come to her.... But that was
+less thought than prayer. These were brute beasts; their bestiality when
+they had first come upon her was terrifying; now, as the alcohol burned
+in their half-starved stomachs and the further intoxication of gold
+crept into their blood, her terror was boundless. In a moment she would
+feel upon her either the hands of Brodie or the hands of Jarrold. And
+she was helpless and hopeless. Until, since life connotes hope, there
+came a faint flicker of light. And with it came a sudden, compelling,
+swift longing. If she might set them to quarrelling over her, to send a
+snarling man at a snarling man's throat.... Her hands dropped to her
+sides, and were clenched; she lifted her chin; with all that strength
+that lay in the innermost soul of Gloria King she strove to drive her
+great fear out of her eyes, to hide it from their wolfish regard, to
+summon up in its stead a mocking inscrutability. There was but one thing
+left to do, but one part to play----Oh, God, if she could play the
+part! She stood motionless, silent; she battled with herself; she
+struggled mightily for a calm utterance. And in the end she said in a
+tone which she managed to make full of challenge:
+
+"Which of you is the better man?"
+
+They stared at her, all of them puzzled by her change of attitude as by
+her words. Then Brodie, with a noisy explosion of laughter, smote his
+thigh and, after him, Benny giggled foolishly.
+
+"The better man!" Brodie shouted. "Hear her, Steve, old horse? The
+better man!" He lunged to his feet; he stood solidly, unswerving though
+more than ever slow and ponderous. "I'll go you, Steve. The lady's
+right; she goes to the man who's man enough to get her. That's big Swen
+Brodie, the best man in these mountains! I'll go you for her, Steve. By
+God, she's worth it, too."
+
+But Steve Jarrold sat where he was, glaring.
+
+"She's sly," he grunted, cursing before and after. "Can't you see what
+she's up to? She wants us to fight one another; she'd be glad if we both
+killed one another. You don't understand women, Brodie; they're sly like
+cats."
+
+"Make a auction out'n it!" was Benny's mirthful suggestion. "Why just
+you two guys, anyway? Where do you get that stuff? Free for all, that's
+what I say!" He waved his bottle. "Auction her off, that's what I say!
+I'll give a bottle of whiskey for her; hey, Brodie?"
+
+Brodie had laughed when Jarrold spoke; he laughed now. But he looked to
+Jarrold and not Benny as he spoke; he extended his great hands, the
+fingers crooked, curving slowly inward, like steel hooks.
+
+"I can eat you alive, and you know it, Steve," he mocked. "What's more,
+_she_ knows it! That's what she wants; she's picked me, Steve! That's
+just her way of letting you down easy; she don't aim to hurt your
+feelings. Will you come on and take a fall for her? Or is the lady mine?
+What's the word? Speak up, man!"
+
+Gloria saw that Jarrold, though he sent a black, scowling look at the
+bigger man, was afraid. And yet they must fight--they must be driven to
+blows--she must somehow set them at each others' throats. It was so hard
+to think at all! Yet she could think forward to one occurrence only that
+could give her respite and a frail chance for freedom: if they would
+only fight as, in some dim instinctive way, it was given her to
+understand that such men would fight once a wrathful blow had been given
+and taken--if the others would only watch them and not her, if she could
+come to one of the rifles--or outside----
+
+She turned to Jarrold. She gathered herself for the final supreme
+effort. She made her eyes grow bright through sheer force of will; she
+made her lips cease trembling and curve to a smile at the man; she even
+concealed her loathing and put a ringing note, almost of laughter, into
+her voice as she said softly:
+
+"I know you are not afraid--and I think--yes, I am sure, that you could
+whip him!"
+
+Steve Jarrold's eyes flashed. Then they left hers lingeringly; Brodie
+was stamping impatiently, calling to him.
+
+"Take her!" snapped Jarrold. "Hell take both of you."
+
+The laughter and challenge went out of Swen Brodie's bloodshot eyes; a
+new red surged all of a sudden into them. He turned and came slowly
+about the fire, his arms still uplifted, the crooking fingers toward
+Gloria.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXX_
+
+
+Scream after scream burst from Gloria's lips; taut nerves seemed to snap
+all through her body like over-stressed violin strings. She ran, ran
+anywhere, ran blindly. She ran into Benny, who clutched at her; she fled
+away from him, back toward the darker end of the cave. The low rumble of
+a man's laughter answered her; drunken laughter from Brodie. Whether
+drunk with whiskey or with gold or with lust did not matter; drunk he
+was. Gloria's shriek rose like a madwoman's; Brodie's thick laughter was
+its sinister echo. Another man called out something; the slow, heavy
+feet of Swen Brodie were following, following. Boots scuffling, Brodie
+pursuing with a wide, patient grin; he was in no hurry, he was so sure
+of her!
+
+His hands were almost on her. Gloria whipped aside and ran again. He
+kept between her and the front of the cave; with all of his grinning
+patience he was as watchful as a cat. She was driven back and back,
+deeper and deeper into the narrowing tunnel. He came on. He would be
+upon her in another half-dozen slow, ponderous strides. She could not
+pass him; she could not dart forward and out; his arms were widely
+extended on either side. He was expecting that. She could only save
+herself from him second by second--and the seconds were running out
+swiftly.
+
+She prayed to God in wild passionate supplication. She prayed for sudden
+death, death before those horrid, crooked fingers touched her. But while
+she prayed to God it was of Mark King that she thought. And Mark King,
+because of her usage of him, was miles and miles away, so far that her
+despairing shrieks died without penetrating one-millionth part of the
+empty wastes across which he had trudged. And still she drew back and
+back and still she prayed for the miracle as she had done that day when
+she had seen King coming toward her with a rope in his hand, prayed for
+the earth to split asunder, for a flame to leap out and consume the
+beast crowding closer upon her--to consume him or herself.
+
+At last she was at the end. The end of the passage-way, the end of hope.
+Brodie came on, his arms out. She could hear him breathing. She could
+smell the whiskey he reeked with.... Beyond him she saw Jarrold
+squatting by the fire; Brail leaning on his rifle, guarding the
+entrance; Benny and the Italian lounging in the shadows. Figures of
+hell, watching Brodie's actions with aloof interest ...Brodie made the
+last step; she felt his hand on her arm, closing, drawing her forward;
+the last agonized shriek burst from her....
+
+"Oh, God--oh, dear God----"
+
+She did not hear and Brodie did not hearken to a sudden new sound in the
+cave grown suddenly still; the sound of a cascade of loose stones. They
+came with a rush, they piled up near the middle of the open cave,
+dropping from the shadowy rock roof above. But Benny, always on nerve
+edge, shrilled:
+
+"Look out! A cave-in"
+
+She heard--God had heard----Better crushed under a falling mountain
+than in those brute arms.
+
+And then she saw. From ten feet above, straight down dropped something
+else. Taut nerves of those who saw fancied it a great boulder falling.
+But no boulder this, which, striking the little pile of rocks, became
+animated, rose, whirled, and----
+
+"Mark!" screamed Gloria. "Mark!"
+
+Turned to stone, incredulous of their eyes, bewildered beyond the power
+to move, were those who saw. It was Brail who first understood, Brail
+the one man with a gun in his hands. He whipped it up and began firing,
+nervous and excited. It was after the second shot that King's rifle
+answered him; it roared out like the crash of doom in Gloria's ears; she
+saw the stabbing spurt of fire. Brail sagged where he stood, crumpled
+and pitched forward, his rifle clattering loudly against the rocks.
+
+But by now the brief stupor that had locked the other men in staring
+inaction was gone. Gloria saw figures leaping forward; she knew that
+Brodie's hands had relinquished her; she saw Brodie bearing down on
+King, roaring inarticulately as he went; she saw Benny and Jarrold and
+the Italian bearing down upon him; King was in the midst of all that.
+They were upon him before Brail's head had struck the ground. They gave
+him no time, no space for another shot. He swept his clubbed rifle high
+over his head; she heard the blow when he struck, the hideous sound of a
+crushing skull. A man went down, she did not know which one. Only it was
+not Mark--thank God it was not Mark King!
+
+And now King had a little room and an instant of his own as two other
+men swerved widely about the falling figure. He fired again, not putting
+the rifle to his shoulder. Another man fell, lay screaming, rolled
+aside--was forgotten.
+
+"Where's my rifle?" Brodie was yelling.
+
+He couldn't find it in the dark; he couldn't stop to grope for it. But
+Gloria knew; she remembered. She ran for it, found it, straightened up
+with it in her shaking hands.
+
+Again King was using his weapon as a club, since they pressed him so
+closely. Again came that terrible sound; Steve Jarrold it was who went
+down. And with it another sound, that of hard wood splintering. The
+rifle was broken over his head, the stock whirled close to Gloria, King
+had only the short heavy steel barrel in his hands.
+
+Benny had circled to the far side; Brodie had caught up a great thick
+limb of wood. They were coming at King from two sides at once.... Gloria
+tried to aim, pulled the trigger, tugging frantically. Only then she
+remembered to draw the hammer back; it was Brodie's ancient rifle and
+she struggled to get it cocked. She shuddered at the report. The bullet
+sang in front of Benny, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He was near
+the cave's mouth. Gloria pointed, forgot the hammer remembered, got the
+gun cocked and fired again. Benny plunged wildly forward; she did not
+know if she had hit him. He hurled himself headlong toward the narrow
+exit and through.
+
+She had forgotten Brodie and King! She turned toward them. She did not
+dare shoot now; King was in the way. He moved aside as if he understood
+her trouble; Brodie, grown unthinkably quick of foot, moved with him.
+Brodie, too, understood. She saw him leap in and strike. The blow
+landed, a glancing blow. King seemed to have grown tired; he moved so
+slowly. But he did move and toward Brodie; he swung his clubbed
+rifle-barrel and beat at Brodie's great face with it. Beat and missed
+and almost fell forward. Again Brodie struck; again King beat at him.
+They moved up and down, back and forth; Brodie was cursing under his
+breath, and at last jeering. King was moving more and more slowly; his
+left arm swung as if it were useless; Brodie swept up his club in both
+hands, grunting audibly with every blow.... Oh, if she could only
+shoot ... if she only dared shoot! But Brodie, nimble on his feet that
+had been so patiently slow just now, kept King always in front of him,
+between him and Gloria's rifle.
+
+"I'll get you, King. I'll get you," shouted Brodie, his voice exulting.
+"I always wanted to get you--right!"
+
+There was a crash, the splintering of wood against steel. Both men had
+struck together; Brodie's club had broken to splinters. And the
+rifle-barrel in King's hands flew out of his grip and across the cave,
+ringing out as it struck. The two men, their hands empty, stood a moment
+staring at each other. Then Brodie shouted, a great shout of triumph,
+and sprang forward. And Mark King, steadying himself, ignoring the hot
+trickle of blood down his side where Benny's second bullet had torn his
+flesh, met him with a cry that was like Brodie's own. In his hot brain
+there was no thought of handicap, of odds, of Brodie's advantage. There
+was only the mad rage which had hurled him here, one man against five in
+a girl's defence, that and a raving, unleashed blood lust, the desire,
+overshadowing all else, to have Brodie's brute throat in his hands, to
+batter Brodie's brute face into the rocks. They met in their onrush like
+two bodies hurled from catapults; they struck and grappled and fell and
+rolled together, one now as they strove, locked in the embrace of death.
+An embrace in which Brodie's was the greater weight, the greater girth,
+the greater strength--and Mark King's the greater sheer, clean manhood.
+
+Gloria ran toward them, the rifle shaking in her hands. Brodie feared
+her and strove to turn and twist so that she could not shoot. King saw
+her and shouted in a terrible voice which was not like Mark King's
+voice:
+
+"Don't shoot--let me--"
+
+She did not heed; she would shoot--if ever she could be sure that she
+would not shoot him. But she did not dare--they thrashed about so madly.
+They were like octopuses in mortal combat; their arms flailing seemed
+more than four arms----
+
+Brodie had his hands at King's throat--King's hands were at Brodie's
+throat. She saw Brodie's bestial face gloating. He was so confident now.
+She saw his great hands shut down, sinking into the flesh. King's face,
+when she got one swift glimpse of it, was set, void of expression.
+King's hands, with tendons bursting, sank deeper and deeper. Then she
+understood that each man had the grip that he wanted; that it was a mere
+matter now of strength and endurance and will--and that glorious thing,
+sheer, clean manhood.
+
+They were breathing terribly; they lay stiller, stiller. They did not
+thrash about so much. Their eyes were starting out of their sockets;
+their faces were turning purple--or was it the firelight? Men's faces
+could not look like that--not while the men lived. They gasped now; they
+did not breathe.
+
+One of Brodie's hands came away hastily. He began battering at King's
+face, battering like a steam-piston. The blows sounded loudly; blood
+broke out under the terrific pounding. King's grip did not alter, did
+not shift. His eyes were shut but he clung on, grim, looking a dead man,
+but a man whose will lasted on after death. Brodie wrenched; they rolled
+over. Still King's hands did not leave their grip.
+
+They were on their feet, staggering up and down, two men moulded
+together like one man. Brodie struck blow after blow, and with every
+thud Gloria winced and felt a pain through her own body. And still King
+held his grip, both hands sunk deep into the thick throat.
+
+They were apart, two blind, staggering men. What parted them they did
+not know and Gloria could not see. Thus they stood for a second only.
+Brodie lifted his hands--weak hands rising slowly, slowly--uncertainly.
+King saw him through a gathering mist; Brodie opened his mouth to draw
+in great sobbing breaths of air. King, the primal rage upon him, saw the
+great double teeth bared, and thought that his enemy was laughing at
+him. It was King who gathered himself first and struck first. All of the
+will he had, all of the endurance left in his battered body, all of the
+strength God gave him, he put into that blow. He struck Brodie full in
+the face, between the little battered blue eyes. And Brodie fell. He
+rose; he got to his knees and sagged up and forward. King's shout then
+was to ring through Gloria's memory for days to come; he bore down on
+Swen Brodie, caught him about the great body, lifted him clear of the
+floor and hurled him downward. Brodie struck heavily, his head against
+the rocks. And where he fell he lay--stunned or dead.
+
+"Come," said King to Gloria. "Come quick."
+
+He turned toward the cave's mouth and with one hand began to drag away
+the stones so that they could go out. His other hand was pressed to his
+side. His work done, he picked up the rifle at his feet and went out.
+Gloria, swaying and stumbling, came after him. Neither spoke a word as
+they made a slow way through the snow. King went unsteadily with
+dragging feet. They climbed the cliff laboriously. They were in their
+cave--it was like home. She dropped down on the fir-boughs, stumbling to
+them in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXI_
+
+
+Gloria did not know if she had slept or fainted. When she regained
+consciousness, though it was pitch dark and dead still, there was no
+first puzzled moment of uncertainty. That last wonderfully glad thought
+which had filled brain and heart when she sank down on her fir-boughs
+had persisted throughout her moments or hours of unconsciousness,
+pervading her subconscious self gloriously, flowering spontaneously in
+an awakening mind: Mark King had come back to her in her moment of
+peril; he had battled for her like the great-hearted hero that he was,
+he had saved her and had brought her home. Back home! She had prayed to
+God when utter undoing seemed inevitable, when death had seemed more
+desirable than life, and He had answered. He had sent Mark King to her!
+
+She was saved, and though it was cold and dark and still, she felt her
+heart singing within her. Having lived through all that she had endured,
+having been brought safely through it, she was as confident of the
+future as though never had evil menaced her. She felt new strength
+coursing through her blood, new hope rising within her, new certainty
+that all was right with her and Mark King, that all would be right
+eternally. Terror and anguish and despair that had surged over her in so
+many great flooding waves now receded and were gone; in their place
+shone the great flame of life triumphant; she thrilled through with the
+largeness of life.
+
+Never, thank God, would she forget how Mark King, forgetful of self,
+contemptuous of the frightful odds against him, had hurled himself into
+the midst of those drunken brutes; never would she forget how godlike he
+had stood forth in her eyes as those others leaped upon him and he beat
+them back. Forgetful of self--he had always been forgetful of self! She
+could not think of him as she had ever thought of any other man she had
+ever known--for what other man would have come to her as he had done,
+courting death gladly if only he could stand between her and the hideous
+thing that attacked her? The rush of great events had swept her mind
+clear of pettiness and prejudice; they bore her on from familiar
+view-points and to new levels; like roaring winds out of a tempestuous
+north they cleared away the wretched fogs that had enwrapped a
+self-centred girl; they made her see a man in the naked glory of his
+sheer, clean manhood.
+
+To her now he stood forth clothed in magnificence. She could think upon
+him only in superlatives. He was fearless and he was unselfish; he was
+kind and generous and as honest-hearted as God's own clear sunshine.
+She knew now, suddenly and for the first time, because he had shown her,
+what the simple word _man_ meant. How far apart he stood from such as
+Brodie, the beast! How high above such as Gratton!--And once, in the
+city, she had been ashamed of him and had turned to Gratton! Because he
+had appeared to her without just so much black cloth upon his back cut
+in just such a style! And now how bitterly she was ashamed of her shame.
+But for only an instant. Thereafter she forgot shame of any sort and
+exulted in her pride of him and in her pride that she was proud.
+
+Yes, in glad defiance of a Gloria that had been, she was proud of the
+manhood of a man who had beaten her! He had been right; he had done that
+as the last argument with an empty-headed, selfish girl who deserved no
+better at his hands, a girl who had been like the Gratton whom she so
+abhorred and despised--despised even in death. She had been like Gratton
+the cowardly, contemptible, petty, selfish--dishonourable! All along
+Mark King had been right and she had been wrong, at every step. He had
+been gentle and patient after a fashion which now set her wondering and,
+in the end, lifted him to new heights in her esteem. When, without
+loving him, she had lied with her eyes and married him, that had been a
+Gratton sort of trick--like stealing his partners' food----
+
+_Without loving him_! No, thank God; not that! She had always loved him;
+she loved him now with her whole heart and soul, with an adoration she
+had saved for him. When in the springtime she had ridden with him
+through the forest-lands, when their hands had touched, when he had held
+her in his arms--when she had seen him that first time from the stairway
+and had looked down into his clear eyes and through them into his
+heart--she had always loved him! She wanted suddenly to go to him, to
+slip into his arms, to make herself humble in pleading for his
+forgiveness. She was not afraid that he would not forgive; he was so big
+of heart that he would understand.
+
+"Mark!" she called softly.
+
+In the utter dark she could see nothing. The absolute stillness was
+unbroken. She called anxiously: "Mark, where are you?" There was no
+answer. She sprang up and called to him over and over. When still there
+was no reply she began a hurried search for a match; there were still
+some upon the rock shelf. Then it was that she stumbled over something
+sprawling on the floor.
+
+"Mark!" she cried again. "Oh--Mark----"
+
+She found a match; she got some dry twigs blazing. In their light she
+saw him. He lay on his back like a dead man, his arms outflung, his
+white face turned up toward hers. There was a great smear of blood
+across his brow, the track of a bloody hand as it had sought to wipe a
+gathering dimness out of his eyes. The fire burned brighter; she saw it
+glisten upon a little pool of blood at her side. She knelt and bent over
+him, scarcely breathing. If he were dead--if, after all this, Mark King
+were dead----His eyes were closed; his face was deathly white, looking
+the more ghastly from the dark stain across it. She lifted her own hand
+that had touched his side and looked at it with wide frightened eyes;
+it, too, was red. At that moment King's face was no ghastlier than hers.
+
+For a little while she sat motionless, her brain reeling. But almost
+immediately her brain cleared and there stood forth as in a white light
+the one thought: _Mark King was about to die, and he must not die_! For
+he was Mark King, valiant and full of vigour and vitality, a man strong
+and hardy and lusty, a man who would not be beaten! He was the victor,
+not the vanquished. And, further, she, Gloria King, Mark King's wife,
+would not let him die! He was hers, her own; she would hold him back to
+her. Had he not come to her when she needed him, and done his uttermost
+for her? If now she was filled with life and the pulsating love of life,
+it was his doing. And now it was her task--her glorious, God-given
+privilege!--to do for him, to fight for him, ignoring the odds against
+her, to save him. She sprang up filled with stubborn, confident
+determination. He was hers and she would not let him die. She had
+learned to fight; she had fought against Gratton, against Brodie; she
+would fight as she had never done until now against death itself.
+
+He was big and she little, yet she dragged his bed close to his side and
+got her arms about him and lifted him enough to get him upon the
+blankets. She ran to her fire and piled and piled wood on it until the
+flames roared noisily and brightened everything about her. She ran back
+to him and knelt again and slipped her hand inside his shirt, seeking
+his heart. The deep chest was barely warmer than death; the heart
+stirred only faintly. But it did beat. She sought the wound Brail's
+bullet had made and found it in his side. There was blood on her hands
+but she did not notice it now. She found where the bullet had entered
+and where it had torn its way out through his flesh. She did not know if
+any vital organ lay in that narrow span or if any major artery had been
+severed or if the rifle-ball had merely glanced along the ribs and been
+deflected by them; she only knew that he had lost much blood, that it
+must have gushed freely while he strove with Swen Brodie, and that now
+it must be stopped utterly. There seemed to be so little blood left in
+the pale, battered body! She did see how in the intense cold it had
+coagulated over the wounds, checking its own flow. But she did not mean
+for him to lose another precious drop. And then it was that Gloria's
+hands achieved the first really important work they had ever done in her
+life. She tore bits away from her own under-garments and made soft pads
+over each wound; with their butcher-knife she cut a long strip from a
+blanket. This she wound about his limp body, making a long, tight
+bandage. All this time he had not moved; she had to bend close to be
+sure that he still breathed. She got snow and wiped his face clean of
+blood, touching the closed eyelids gently.
+
+When still the eyes remained shut and he looked like one already dead,
+she longed wildly for some stimulant. There was coffee; she would make
+hot coffee do. She got the coffee-pot among the coals, filled it with
+snow to melt, recklessly poured coffee into it. Then, while she awaited
+the slow heating, she returned to him and for the first time saw how wet
+his boots were.
+
+She got the boots off and felt his feet; she stooped over them until
+for an instant she laid her cheek against a bare foot. It was like ice.
+She recalled how he had ministered to her. She heated a blanket and
+wrapped it about his feet and ankles. She heated other blankets and put
+them about him. The canvas at the cave's mouth had been torn down; she
+got it back into place to make it warmer for him. She put fresh wood on
+the fire. She hastened the coffee boiling all that she could by placing
+bits of dry wood close all about the pot.
+
+She knelt at King's side; she got an arm under his shoulders and managed
+to lift him a little; she rolled up a blanket and put it under his head.
+Then she brought the cup of black coffee and with a spoon got some of it
+between his teeth. She spilled more than went into his mouth but she was
+rewarded by seeing the throat muscles contract as involuntarily he
+swallowed. Thus, patient and determined and very, very gentle with him,
+she got several spoonfuls of coffee down him. Thereafter she let him lie
+back again while she sought to plan cool-thoughtedly just how she must
+care for him, just what she could do for him. She knew little of nursing
+and yet knew instinctively that his condition was precarious, that he
+must be kept warm and still, that what strength remained in him must be
+saved by proper nourishment. _Proper nourishment_!
+
+There were scraps of food left; Brodie and his men, in their gold fever,
+had not so much as thought to gather up the few bits of scanty
+provisions. She began taking careful stock; she found a scrap of bread
+that had been knocked to the floor and kicked aside; she picked it up
+and, carrying a torch with her, began seeking any other fallen morsels.
+In this search she came once to the hole in the floor through which
+Brodie and the others had gone down into Gus Ingle's treasure-chamber.
+And at its side she found something which at this moment was a thousand
+times more precious in her staring eyes than if it had been so much
+solid gold. It was a great hunk of fresh meat. Instantly she knew how it
+had come here. King had killed his bear! That was why he had returned
+to-night. He had brought it here; had missed her; had dropped it here.
+And then? She understood now, too, how he had come so unexpectedly into
+the lowest cave. He had gone down through this hole and had known a
+passage-way which led on down. She stood by the hole, bending over it,
+listening, wondering if any man stirred down there. But that was but for
+a moment. She caught up the bear meat, carrying it in both arms, and
+hurried back to her fire.
+
+Though she knew little more of cookery than of nursing, she set about
+the very sensible task of making a strong broth. The proper nourishment
+that had seemed so impossible a moment ago was now ready at hand.
+
+"God is good," she whispered, a sudden new gush of love and reverence in
+her heart. "He will help me now."
+
+For herself, since her own strength must be kept up, she cooked a strip
+of the meat on the coals. Then she went to King and for a long time sat
+at his side, her eyes upon his white face, her hand clasping his. Again
+and again she stooped and laid her cheek against the strong but now lax
+fingers; once she put her lips to his forehead; when she sat back her
+eyes were wet and the slow tears welled up and trickled unnoticed down
+her cheeks. But they were tears which left the heart sweetened, tears of
+tenderness, of gratitude, of sympathy and love.
+
+As the night wore on, since she was determined that King should not be
+chilled, her fire consumed a great part of the wood. More wood must be
+brought; to-night or in the morning. She went to the canvas flap and
+looked out. There were clouds, but also there were wide rifts through
+which the stars blazed in all of that glorious crystalline beauty of the
+stars of the winter Sierra. While she stood looking out the moon, almost
+at the full, gilded a cloud edge, and after a moment broke through like
+an augury of joy. Stars and moon made the wilderness over into a land of
+fairy; at ten million points the snow caught the light, flashing it back
+as though the white robe spread over the solitudes were sewn with gems.
+Never had the world looked so white as now with a rare light shining
+upon its smooth purity; it was clean and fresh, gloriously spotless.
+Where black shadows lay they but accentuated the whiteness across which
+they fell.
+
+Out of this sleeping, enchanted land, rising above it, sweeping across
+it, a low voice like a whisper came to her, a whisper in her ears that
+became a song in her heart. The snow that had, clung to the pines,
+muting their needles and stilling their branches, had dropped on during
+the day. Now the night wind which drove the clouds lingered through the
+pine tops and set them swaying gently in the vast, harmonic rhythm which
+is like the surging of a distant ocean. The everlasting whisper of the
+pines, that ancient hushed voice which through the countless centuries
+has never been still save when briefly silenced by the snow; which had
+borne its message to Gloria when on that first day she went with Mark
+King into the mountains; which many a time had mingled with her fancies,
+tingeing them, leading her to dream of another life than that of city
+streets; which now, suddenly, set chords vibrating softly in her own
+bosom. All these days it had been stilled; had it called her ears would
+have been deaf to it. But now insistently it bore a message to her, such
+a message as from now on she would hear in the quiet voices of her
+little camp-fire. To her, attuned by those varying emotions which
+latterly had had their wills with her, it was the ancient call; the
+summons back to the real things of his, to the bigness and the true
+meaning of life. Rising in response to it, awakening in her own breast,
+were the old human, instinctive influences, sprouting seeds in the blood
+of her forbears. It was the eternal call of the mother earth that one
+like Gloria must hear and hearken to and understand before she could set
+firm feet upon the ashes of a vanquished self to rise to the true things
+of womanhood. It was the
+
+  "... one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated--so:
+  Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
+  Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"
+
+Gloria understood. In her heart, lifting her eyes from the white glory
+of the earth to the bright glory of the sky, she thanked God that she
+understood.
+
+Benny and the Italian were still alive and might be near? That did not
+in any way affect the fact that there must be wood brought for King's
+fire. She turned back for the rifle and the rope. She saw that King had
+not stirred; that he seemed plunged in a deep, quiet sleep. She stood
+over him, looking down at him with her love for him softening her eyes.
+He was going to get well--_if she did her part_. And her part was so
+clearly indicated; to give him broth and to keep his fire going. She did
+not hesitate and she was not afraid as she went down the cliffs. She
+meant to be Mark King's mate; she meant to be worthy of being his mate.
+He had not hesitated, he had not been afraid, when one man against five
+he dropped down into the lowest cave. She, like him, was of pioneer
+stock. She remembered that impressive monument to pioneer fortitude
+which stands in the mountains where the highway runs by Donner Lake; as
+in a vision she saw the little group that crowns the rugged pile. The
+woman, the pioneer mother, holding her baby to her breast, pressing on
+with her own mate, looking fearlessly ahead, daring what might come, not
+lagging behind the man, rather ready to lead the way should he falter.
+It was a glorious thing to have blood like that in her veins; it was the
+finest thing in the world to be a woman like that woman.
+
+She stepped down into the packed snow at the base of the cliffs. Here
+she stood looking up and down the gorge for any sign of Benny or of the
+Italian or of any other of Brodie's crowd who might be alive and astir.
+But she saw no one; even Gratton's body, where it had been tumbled out
+into the snow, was hidden. She heard the deep, quiet breathing of the
+pines; the canon stream rushed and gurgled and babbled, shouting as it
+leaped over fails, flinging spray which the moonlight and starlight made
+over into jewels.
+
+Gloria worked at her fuel-gathering, working in the snow until her hands
+and feet were nearly frozen. But her heart was warm. Though she made
+haste and was ever watchful and on the alert, her mind filled with such
+thoughts as had never come trooping into it before. Fragmentary, they
+were like bright bits spinning about a common centre. She looked up at
+the wide sky and it was borne in upon her that the universe was mighty
+and wonderful and infinite; she looked into her own heart and saw where
+she had been small and silly and finite. She saw that the snow-covered
+ridges stretching endlessly were like a concrete symbol of that infinity
+which extended above and about her; that they were clothed in beauty.
+She knew that when Mark King was made whole again and had forgiven her
+and they stood together, hand locked in hand, she would have no fear any
+more for his mountains, but rather a great, abiding love. She saw that
+her life had been empty; that only love could fill it, love and service
+such as she was rendering to-night. Pretty clothes, dress suits, did not
+matter, and strong, loyal hearts did matter. To-night she would rather
+have Mark King hold her in his arms and say "I love you" than to have
+all of the red gold in all of the world.
+
+Three times that night she made the trip up and down the cliffs,
+bringing wood. At the end, though near exhaustion, she sank down by the
+fire for but a few minutes. The bear meat was boiling and bubbling; she
+poured off a little of the broth, cooled it, and then, as she had given
+King the coffee, she forced some of the strong soup between his teeth.
+She touched his cheek and dared hope that it was not so icy cold; she
+chafed his feet and wrapped them again in a not blanket. And then, with
+all of her covers given to him, she drew a coat about her shoulders and
+sat down at his side, on the edge of his blankets. And here, throughout
+the night, she sat, dozing and waking, rising again and again to keep
+the fire burning.
+
+She started up to find it full day; she had been asleep, her head
+against his knee. The fire was dying down; she jumped up and replenished
+it, setting the broth back among the coals. King lay as he had lain last
+night; his continued coma was like a profound quiet sleep. He was very
+pale, and yet certainly not paler than when she had first looked upon
+his blood-smeared face.
+
+She went to the canvas screen and looked out. The sun was shining. And
+oh, the glory of the sun after these long dark days! The sky was a deep,
+serene, perfect blue. The snow shone and glittered and sparkled
+everywhere. Down in the gorge she saw a little bird in quick flight. It
+skimmed the water; it Lighted on a rock in the spray; it put back its
+head and seemed to be bursting with a joy of song. A water-ouzel! A
+friend from out a happy past----To Gloria it seemed that the world was
+full of promise.
+
+All day long she ministered to King, going back and forth tirelessly,
+since love and hope inspired every step she made. None of Brodie's men
+had come; she felt a strange confidence that they would not come. They
+were afraid of King as jackals are afraid of a lion; further, they did
+not know that he was wounded. She thought little of them, having much
+else to think of. She wound King's watch, guessing at the time; she
+judged it sensible to force a little nourishment upon him at regular
+intervals and brought him his broth every two hours.
+
+At a little before noon Gloria, stooping over the fire, started erect
+and whirled about. King's eyes were open! She ran to him, dropping on
+her knees beside him, catching up his hand, whispering:
+
+"Mark! Oh, Mark--thank God!"
+
+He looked at her strangely. There was a puzzled, bewildered expression
+in his eyes. He strove to move and again looked at her with that strange
+bewilderment. She saw his lips move--he wanted to say something, to ask
+something and, deserted now by all of that magnificent strength on which
+he had always leaned, was as weak as a baby.
+
+"Don't try to talk, Mark," she cried softly. "Please; not yet. You are
+better; everything is all right."
+
+She gave his hand a last squeeze and hurried back to the fire; his eyes,
+still shadow-filled, followed her curiously. She came back to him with
+cup and spoon. This he could understand; he opened his lips for the
+spoon, he accepted what she gave him and when she had finished lay
+looking up at her wonderingly.
+
+"You mustn't talk, Mark," she commanded him gently as, again, she knelt
+by him. "You are getting so much stronger! I'll tell you everything. It
+was last night; you have been unconscious ever since. None of the other
+men have been near; I haven't even seen one of them."
+
+She saw his eyes clear.
+
+"Mark," she whispered, "we are safe here because--because you are so
+wonderful! You were like a god--the bravest, noblest, best man in, all
+the world! You came in time; you saved me, Mark; they had not put hand
+upon me. And I am well and strong now; I am going to take care of you;
+you must just lie still and get well--_Oh, Mark_----"
+
+His eyes closed again; he seemed very faint, very weary. Hushed, she sat
+tense, her eyes never moving from his face. After a long time he opened
+his eyes again; he tried again to speak; when the words did not come he
+managed a strange, shadowy smile with his bloodless lips and in another
+moment had sunk again into that heavy sleep that was so like death.
+
+When next, two hours later, she again brought his broth, he stirred at
+her touch and awoke. This time his eyes cleared swiftly; he remembered
+the other awakening and her words. He looked at her long and searchingly
+and she understood what lay back of that look; he was wondering how she
+managed, how she endured to care for them both, how without his active
+aid she withstood hardship. And this time she smiled at him.
+
+"I have been dining sumptuously on bear steaks," she told him lightly.
+"And I have slept and kept warm. There has been no one near. And the
+days are fine again. It was clear last night; the sun has been shining
+all day. Now, when you've had your own lunch, I'll tell you anything you
+want to know. Only you must not try to talk yet, Mark; not until
+to-morrow. I want you strong and well again, you know; it's lonesome
+without you."
+
+She gave him, for the first time, a whole cup of broth, glorying in the
+certainty that already he was stronger. But even yet his weakness was so
+great that, before she had spoken a dozen sentences, he was asleep
+again. Clearly, even to Gloria, if but a little more blood had ebbed
+out of the wounded side, he would never have awakened; clearly to
+Gloria, triumphant, it had been she who had held him back from death.
+She, Gloria King, alone, had fought the great grim battle; hers was the
+victory. For at last she knew with her brain, as all along she had known
+in her heart, that it was to be victory.
+
+So the hours passed. For the most part King slept, lapsing into the deep
+stupor of a drugged man. But at times he stirred restlessly; with slowly
+returning strength his wounds pained him; in his sleep he muttered;
+Gloria, watching him, winced as she saw his brow contract and saw how he
+tried to shift his body as though to pull away from something that hurt
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King was awake. Awakening, he tried to move. His utter weakness, like a
+great weight bearing down upon him, held him powerless. But his mind,
+slowly freeing itself from the shadows of sleep, was suddenly very
+clear. He could turn his head a little. It was late afternoon; outside
+the sun was still shining, for a patch of light lay at the side of the
+canvas flap. At first he did not see Gloria; but his eyes quested until
+at last they found her. She lay by the fire, her head upon her arm,
+sleeping. The little huddled body looked weary beyond expression.
+
+For a long time his haggard eyes remained with her. She lay on the
+rocks, without a blanket. His hand moved weakly; there were blankets
+under him, blankets covering him; his feet were wrapped in a blanket. He
+remembered that a long, long time ago she had said to him: "It was last
+night." All this long, long time he had had all the blankets.... He
+looked again at Gloria, at the fire; he saw wood piled near by. For many
+minutes he puzzled the matter; in the end it was obvious, even to a man
+as sick as King, that she must have gone for wood. Perhaps more than
+once. He closed his eyes and lay very still. He knew now that he had
+been desperately hurt; that, wounded, his fight with Brodie had brought
+him very near a weakness from blood loss that was pale twin to death.
+And yet he was alive and warm; he had had broth and blankets and the
+fire had been kept blazing. He managed to slip a hand inside his shirt;
+before his fingers found it he knew that the bandage was there. Gloria
+had done all this ... Gloria, whom he had struck ...
+
+Ever since that blow, the one act of his life which he would have given
+so much to have undone, he had been ashamed. He had rejoiced in his
+battle with the men who had threatened Gloria with worse than death,
+rejoiced that in some way he might make reparation. But now, beginning
+to understand all that Gloria had done for him, how great were the
+sacrifices she had made for him, lying unconscious of all she did, it
+seemed to him that the thing that he had done was a very small thing set
+in the scales against her own acts. He wanted to get up and go to her;
+to put his blankets about her; to play the man's part and protect and
+shelter. But he could not so much as raise his voice to call her to
+him.... Ever since that blow, upbraiding himself, he had said: "She was
+only a little, terrified girl and you were a brute to her." And now he
+thought wonderingly: "After that, she has worked for you, has nursed
+you, has saved the worthless life in you when she should have let you
+die." Again his eyes flew open; now they clung to her with a strange
+look in them, born of many emotions.
+
+Gloria, as though she felt his eyes upon her, stirred, rose, pushed the
+hair back from her eyes and came quickly to him. And as she came, she
+smiled. She went down on her knees beside him and took his hand in her
+two and held it tight. She had never seen in his eyes a look like the
+one now burning in them. She could not understand its mute message, but
+she spoke softly:
+
+"Everything is all right, Mark. And you are better every time you wake."
+
+His lips strove to frame words. She bent close to them and heard his
+wondering whisper:
+
+"Every--thing--all right?"
+
+"Yes, thank God," she whispered back to him. "Everything in all the
+wide, wide world!"
+
+No, he could not understand that. She saw perplexity in his eyes now.
+But she did not mean to let him talk yet and it was time for broth
+again. But again he was whispering:
+
+"Blankets--yours----"
+
+"Yes, Mark. After you have had your nourishment. When I need them."
+
+But when he had taken his cup of hot broth he slipped off to sleep again
+and Gloria, smiling a tender smile, sat by her fire watching him as a
+mother watches a sick baby who, the doctor has just told her, will live.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXII_
+
+
+That night Gloria, listening now to King's breathing, now to the
+crackling of her fire, grew restless, restless. Again and again she went
+to look out into the quiet moonlight night, across the glittering
+expanses of pure white glistening snow. It was the restlessness of one
+who had taken a giant determination; who but awaited impatiently for the
+time to do what she was bent upon doing. In her heart was still that
+new-born gladness; in her bosom there was still something singing like
+the liquid voice of a bird. It had sung for the first time when first
+she had ministered to King, when she had understood what love's service
+was, when she had gone down the cliffs for firewood, when, because of
+her tireless nursing, she had been rewarded by his opening eyes; as the
+hours wore on it had grown into a chant triumphant. She, Gloria, had
+lived to do something that was noble and unselfish and brave; she,
+Gloria, had been unafraid and unswerving; she had saved a man's life.
+And that life was Mark King's! She had made amends; she had set her feet
+unfalteringly in a new trail; throughout her being she was aglow with
+the consciousness of one who had gladly done love's labour.
+
+Now she waited only for the hour when again King must have his broth.
+She gave it to him, smiled at him, commanded him to go back to sleep,
+promising to talk with him in the morning. And then, when again he
+breathed with the quiet regularity of one sleeping, she went eagerly
+about her task.
+
+Now, at her hour of need, she was buoyed up by a great and wonderful
+confidence that she could not fail. Thus far she had accomplished each
+duty as it had stood before her, and from successes achieved grew the
+new faith that in to-night's task, perhaps the supreme and final labour,
+she would succeed again. They must have more meat; to-morrow or the next
+day, at latest, for the steaks which she had eaten and the strong broths
+to maintain and rebuild strength in. King had cut deeply into their
+supply. And she knew Mark King well enough to be very certain that, the
+moment he could summon strength enough to command his tottering body to
+stand on two legs, he would go. Now, while he was still too weak to
+observe greatly what went on about him and while he slept most of the
+time, it was for her to be before him. Fortunately--and were not all
+omens bright with hope?--it had not snowed since King made his kill; she
+could follow in the trail he had made and it would lead her unerringly
+to the spot where he had left the rest of the meat. She had everything
+ready, rifle, small packet of food, knife, even matches and strips torn
+from the sack for her feet. Down in the gorge, clutching her rifle, she
+stood looking, listening. Always the thought of Benny and the other man
+was on the rim of her consciousness, and fear is a basic and elemental
+emotion. But, though the moon set forth all details in clear relief
+against the snow, there was no man in sight, and, in the intense
+determination possessing her, she throttled down all fear-thoughts. She
+clung with a deep fervour to the thoughts that she and Mark King had put
+disaster behind them, that ahead lay hope and happiness, that God was
+with her and about her, and that all danger was gone. Down the canon she
+saw the broken, uneven snow where Brodie and his men had left their
+tracks, irregular trails up which Gratton had come, down which Benny and
+the Italian had fled. Upward along the gorge was one deep, straight
+path, wide and hard packed, the track of Mark King's crude snow-shoes.
+Into this she stepped, thinking even at the time how even Mark King's
+trail was characteristic of him and different from that of the other
+men; it looked purposeful and confident and, like the man himself,
+driving straight on. There was a sense of comfort in treading where he
+had trodden before her.
+
+The world slept, but its quiet breathing she seemed to hear as the air
+drew through the pines. She turned up the gorge, a tiny dark figure in
+an immense white wilderness. The stars shone and she loved them; they
+were like bright companionable candles. The moon shed its soft lustre
+and she loved it; it thrust shadows back and drove out the dark. The
+night was all quiet splendour and peace and serenity. The snow was
+crisp, crunching underfoot; sunny days had thawed, clear, cold nights
+had frozen, and the crust had begun to form. Before she had gone a dozen
+feet she discovered this and its importance to her; where King's weight
+on the snow-shoes, along a twice-travelled trail, had packed the snow
+and where now the sun and cold had done their work, there was a crust
+which upbore her slight weight; she could walk swiftly; there was to be
+no more floundering. She could run!
+
+And run she did, when she had crested the first ridge and had started
+down the far side. It was like flying! The crisp air cut her glowing
+cheeks; her blood leaped along her veins; she breathed deeply, a great,
+uplifting elation bore her along. Love--God is love--smoothed the way
+before her; the stars ran with her, the great blazing stars to which
+again and again she lifted her eyes. They spoke to her; they came close
+to her; when she stopped, resting, they were all about her, bending
+down, and she was lifted up among them. Fervour and the ecstasy of the
+hour in which was doing to the uttermost, forgetful of pettiness and
+selfishness and cowardice--she prayed mutely that she was done with them
+for ever, that never again would she be such a woman as Gratton had been
+a man--made her over into a radiant, glorious Gloria. The night stamped
+itself upon her for all time; out of the night she drew, as one draws
+air into his lungs, a new faith that was akin to the man's whom she
+served. For one cannot be alone with the stars and be unmoved by them;
+they are serene with eternity, refulgent with the perfect beauty of a
+perfect creation, eloquent to the heart of man and woman of true values.
+Under the fields of their vastitude, confronted by their infinity,
+Gloria, like thousands before, understood that man in fevered times is
+prone to turn to false gods. Gus Ingle's gold--her own gold, one
+day--was a thing to smile at. Or, at best, not a thing to expend wildly
+for gowns and gowns and shoes and stockings and limousines; to-night
+Gloria felt that she had had her fill of vanities like those, that she
+was done with them; that if, for every moan and agony and slow death and
+thought of envy Gus Ingle's gold had brought into the world, she could
+create a smile here and a hope fulfilled there and a glow yonder, she
+would ask nothing else of the yellow dirt. For dirt or rock or dross it
+was, and that was as clear as starlight. If her hand but lay in the hand
+of Mark King, what did gold matter? Or dresses--or what people thought
+or said of her or him? A strange little smile touched her lips.
+
+"I love you," she whispered, as though Mark were with her--as in her
+soul he was.
+
+Had there not been a great, glowing love in her heart she would have
+been afraid. But there was no room for fear. Had she not felt that he
+was with her and that God was with her she must have felt an
+unutterable, dreary loneliness; but she was upborne at every step and
+gloried in every exertion.
+
+And exertion, until she came close to the limits of endurance, was to be
+hers that white night; hers the knowledge of supreme endeavour. On and
+on she went across the immense glistening smooth fields through which
+the trail ahead was the only scar, through groves of black pines
+whispering, whispering, whispering, down into shadow-filled canons, out
+into the open again, up and down and on and on, a tiny dot upon the
+endless wastes. Fatigue came upon her suddenly, when she had forgotten
+to save her strength and had gone over-fast. She rested, lying on her
+back, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes, she saw the stars, she rose
+and went on. She had gone miles; how many she could not guess. Always,
+after for a little while she had dropped down wearily, she rose again
+and went on; she learned that, though beaten down, one might rise again.
+That was Mark King's way; it would be her way. Despite the rags about
+her boots her feet were soon dangerously cold. She passed into the
+embrace of a forest of black trees casting blacker shadows. Their
+branches seemed motionless, but they sang to her with hushed voices. And
+always there was the trail King had made, leading her on; where he had
+gone before, she followed.
+
+Where he had made slow progress, seeking game and breaking trail, she
+went swiftly on the packed snow. So, in the full splendour of the moon,
+she came at last to the final ridge, whence, looking down into the
+canon, she saw the end of her trail: hanging from a bent pine sapling
+was what she knew must be his bear. Down the steep slope she went, half
+sliding, half rolling. In the bed of the ravine she landed softly in the
+drift; here she rested, sitting in a nest of snow. And before she had
+stirred to begin the last short span of her journey, there came suddenly
+out of the silence a strange, quivering cry, bursting out upon her; a
+sobbing, throbbing scream.
+
+"A woman!" cried Gloria, aghast.
+
+A woman in an agony of terror, she thought. Or a lost soul, the
+wandering spirit of the dead, or God knew what impossible thing. Sudden
+terror leaped out upon her, striking like a knife into her heart. Fear,
+banished all this time, surprised her and clutched at her throat and
+paralysed her muscles. Blind panic gripped her. Then came the piercing
+scream again, and with it enlightenment, and Gloria sank back, seeming
+to melt into the snow about her. Yonder, just upon the next ridge where
+the moonlight carved in fine details the outline of a big bare boulder,
+stood the thing that had screamed; in this light its great body was
+weirdly magnified, so that the entire length of seven or eight feet
+appeared to Gloria's frightened eyes twice that. Long-bodied and lithe,
+small-headed and merciless, steel-muscled and chisel-clawed, the big cat
+in silhouette twitched its restless tail back and forth nervously, and
+from snarling jaws sent forth its almost human call to cut across vast,
+still distances.
+
+Gloria drew back and back where she crouched, her body pressed into the
+snow-bank, in a panicky desire to hide. The big cat had smelled the
+meat, she guessed swiftly. When it leaped upward, seeking to snatch down
+the swinging weight, or clambered up the pine, then she must spring up
+and run, run as she had never run in her life, away from this terrible,
+murderous thing, back to King. Unconscious of cold and wet, she cowered
+and waited, scarce breathing. She saw how the big beast put up its head
+and sniffed; did it in reality smell the meat? Or had it sensed her
+presence?
+
+For what seemed a very long time the gaunt-bodied animal stood as still
+as the rock beneath it; then, silent and swift, it turned and, like a
+cat at home leaping down from a table, dropped into the shadows at the
+base of the rock, and was lost to Gloria's sight in a little hollow. She
+waited, her eyes staring.
+
+Again, all of a sudden, she saw it. Moving with the stealthy caution
+which is its birthright, it appeared fleetingly a score of feet lower on
+the steep slope, the body and its shadow, a twin for stealthy silence,
+gone in a flash, reappearing once more still lower on the slope and just
+beyond the pine sapling. It was coming on. Fascinated, Gloria sat like
+stone, with never a thought of the rifle lying across her knees.
+
+The mountain-lion leaped downward softly from stage to stage of the
+canon-side, paused under the pine, lifted its head, and sent forth again
+its hunger-cry. All this time Gloria sat breathless; the
+fear-fascination still held her powerless. She watched the animal crouch
+and gather its strength and hurl its lean body upward. The lion fell
+back, the ripping claws having missed the meat by some two or three
+feet, and Gloria heard the low, rumbling growl. Again it sprang; again
+it missed. And then, for a weary time of silence it sat still, its head
+back, its eyes on the desired meal. In the moonlight Gloria saw the
+glistening saliva from the half-parted jaws.
+
+But in the end feline craft found the way, and the cat set its paws
+against the tree trunk, and began to climb. Limbs broke under the two
+hundred pounds of weight; the bark was torn under slipping paws, but
+upward the sinuous body writhed. Swiftly now it would come to King's
+kill.
+
+King's! Gloria started; this was Mark's kill: he had stalked it, he had
+ploughed many miles through deep snow to get it. To get it for her as
+well as for him. To keep the life in her--now, without it, King would
+die. And now the lion was going to take it, while she watched and did
+nothing!
+
+"Oh, God, help me!" She sprang to her feet, she jerked up her rifle and
+fired at the black bulk crawling upward in the pine. "It shall not have
+Mark's meat! It shall not!"
+
+At the first shot the mountain-lion dropped through crashing branches.
+She had shot it--she had driven a bullet through its heart. God had
+heard her. That was her first wild thought. But in a flash she saw that
+it was on its feet again, and that with red mouth snarling it had swung
+about, facing her; she saw the cruel white teeth, wet and glistening.
+
+Incoherently Gloria cried out, again sick and shaken with terror. In
+another moment she would have the lean powerful body leaping upon her.
+She fired again and again, taking no time for aim, as fast as she could
+work the lever and pull the trigger; she was trembling so that it was
+all that she could do to hold the gun at all. She prayed and called on
+Mark and fired, all at once.
+
+Never did bullets fly wider of the mark, but never did the roar of
+exploding shells do better service. The lion, though ravenous, was not
+yet starved to the degree to whip it to the supreme desperation of
+attacking a human being and defying a rifle; it whirled and went
+flashing across the snow, seeking the shadows, gone in the drifts,
+vanishing.
+
+Gloria gasped, stared after its wild flight a paralysed moment and then
+ran to the tree where the bear hung. She was shaking like a leaf in a
+storm; she was still terrified, filled with horror at the thought that
+at any second the lean body might come flashing back upon her. But
+through the emotions storming through her there lived on that one
+determination that would live while she lived: that was Mark's meat and
+she was going to save it for him. She began climbing the young pine; she
+fought wildly to get up into its branches; she was handicapped by the
+rifle which she clung to desperately. She got the gun in a crotch above
+her head; she pulled herself upward; she slipped, and tore the skin of
+hands and arms; but hastening frantically she climbed up and up. She got
+the rifle into her hands again, nearly dropped it, thrust it above her,
+jammed it into a fork of a limb and kept on climbing. At last she was
+where she could reach out and touch the swinging carcass. With King's
+keen-edged butcher knife she hacked and cut at the frozen meat, panting
+with every effort. The task seemed endless; the bear swung away from
+her; a branch broke under her foot and she almost fell; she was sobbing
+aloud brokenly before it was done, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
+But at last there was the thud of the falling meat; below her it lay on
+the snow crust. In wild haste she snatched her rifle; holding it in one
+hand, afraid to let it slip out of her grasp for a moment, casting a
+last fearful look in the direction whither the lion had gone, she began
+slipping down. And in another moment, with the precious burden caught up
+with the gun in her arms, she was running back up the ridge, her feet in
+King's trail. _The home trail_!
+
+She looked behind her at every step, picturing the snarling cat
+springing out from every shadow, starting upward from every drift and
+snow-bank. But she clutched her meat tight and struggled on up the
+slope.
+
+Her whole body was shaking; she closed her eyes, overcome with
+faintness. There was a faint wind stirring and it cut like a knife,
+probing through her garments where they were damp. She shivered and
+struggled on and on. She felt that she could run all night without
+stopping. She stumbled and fell and arose, panting and sobbing, and ran
+on. She no longer looked behind her: she had fallen when she did that.
+Again and again from far behind her came the clear, merciless scream of
+the mountain-lion. Time passed; half-hour or hour or two hours, she had
+little idea. Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising,
+staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples,
+drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before--nearer?
+Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the
+stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. Cautious
+now, would its caution slowly subside as its hunger grew and as she
+always fled from it? The thought came to her that such a menace would
+follow one day after day; that it would wait and wait; that in the end
+it knew its time would come when sleep or exhaustion broke down its
+prey's guard. Then it would leap and strike.
+
+Her rifle had grown a heart-breaking weight, until it seemed that it
+would drag her arms from their sockets to hold it up; the pack of meat
+on her back was like lead.
+
+She wondered if King had missed her; if he were awake and wondering at
+her absence. She wondered if he would miss her soon; how soon? At the
+first glint of dawn? Would he begin to see, that she was at least, and
+at last, trying? Well, she had tried; though she died, still she had
+tried. She was cold to the bone; her teeth chattered, her body quaked.
+Yet she kept on. She fell; she lay with the tears of exhaustion rolling
+down her face; she struggled to get to her feet; she fell again. But
+always she rose and always she kept on. And so, in the fulness of time,
+after long frightful, hellish hours, §he came to the last terror of the
+night.
+
+The new day was bright on the mountain tops when she felt at first a
+dull sort of surprise and then a sudden, stimulating gladness, noting
+the familiar look of the ridge ahead. Yonder the cave would be. The cave
+and King, success and rest. She straightened up a little, brushing her
+hand across her straining eyes, making sure that she was right. She
+heard the insistent scream behind her, but now she did not heed it, for
+in front of her, stock-still in the trail, was a man. It was Benny.
+
+To-night she had thrilled to an ecstasy descending from the stars,
+welling up in her own heart, and she had shivered with fear and had
+dropped with weariness akin to despair. Now suddenly all emotions were
+upgathered into searing anger. Her thought was: "He will take the meat
+from me! The meat I have brought for Mark." She grew rigid in her
+tracks. She jerked up her rifle in front of her; her tired eyes
+hardened. She had gone to the limits of endurance in a labour of love;
+she had succeeded; and now she would fight for what she had brought
+back.
+
+Then she noted that Benny had not seen her. Though he was in full view
+on the ridge, he had had no eyes for her. He was stooping. She saw that
+he had a small pack on his back; food, no doubt. On the ground by him
+was a second pack, something in a crash sack; Benny was struggling to
+lift it to his shoulders. It must be very heavy. Gloria drew back
+hastily, glancing about her, found the only hiding-place offered, and
+slipped behind the big rock.
+
+Presently Benny came on. She heard him from a distance; he was talking
+to himself excitedly, jabbering broken fragments of sentences, twice
+breaking into his hideous dry cackle of laughter. She shivered; his
+utterances sounded mad.
+
+And mad they were. Perhaps his drug had run out; certainly for a nervous
+man there had been ample cause for jangling nerves. He jabbered
+constantly, his mutterings at last coming to her in jumbled words as
+Benny drew on.
+
+He was talking about "gold," and he chuckled. He mentioned names,
+Brodie's and Jarrold's and Gratton's and another name, and he chuckled
+again. Gloria peered cautiously from the shelter of her rock. He was
+very near now, struggling with the smaller pack and his rifle and the
+heavy bundle in his sack. She thought that he was going to pass without
+seeing her. But just as he passed abreast of her hiding-place something
+prompted Benny to jerk up his head. He saw her and stopped suddenly; she
+saw his eyes. And she knew on the instant that if the man were not stark
+mad, at least he was not entirely sane. She lifted her rifle, cold all
+over; if he came another step nearer she would shoot....
+
+"It's mine!" Benny shrieked at her. "Mine, I tell you!"
+
+He broke into a run, passing her, leaving the trail, floundering down
+the ridge the shortest way. His rifle encumbered him; she saw it fall
+into the snow, while Benny, clutching his gunny-sack in both arms,
+stumbled on. He fell; he rose, shrieking curses. She watched,
+fascinated. The pack on his back slipped around in front of him; Benny
+tore at it and cursed it and hurled it from him. Still hugging his gold
+he was gone, far down the steep slope. Gloria shuddered and stepped back
+into her own trail. She could hear Benny cursing faintly. Like an echo
+came another cry across the ridges; the cry of a starving cat.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXIII_
+
+
+Mark King awakened to a sensation of piercing cold. In his weakened
+condition the chill struck deep, the pain of it sore in his wound. He
+moved a little to draw his blankets closer about him and, as an awaking
+impression, found that his strength, even though slowly, was surely
+returning to him. He was still terribly weak, but, thank God--and
+Gloria!--that hideous faintness in which he had been unable to stir hand
+or foot or to speak above a whisper had passed. He filled his lungs with
+a deep and grateful breath of satisfaction. In a day or two he would be
+able to carry on again, to do his part.
+
+He turned his head, lifting it a trifle; already he had thought of
+Gloria, and now he sought her. The fire had burned down to a handful of
+glowing coals; Gloria, then, must be asleep. For that, too, he was
+grateful. He had but faint remembrance and dim knowledge of what tasks
+must have fallen to her lot, but his mind, active from the moment his
+eyes flew open, was quick to understand that the burdens had fallen upon
+her shoulders and that she must have been in dire need of rest and
+sleep.
+
+He could not see her anywhere; no doubt she lay in the shadowy dark
+beyond the dying fire. He lay back, staring up into the gloom above
+him. It was thinning; day was coming or had come already. A day with
+sunshine! They could go out on the crust by the time that he was able to
+be about----
+
+Then he remembered the blankets! Last night he had had all of them,
+Gloria's as well as his own. He had wanted to make her take her covers
+and she had put him off, and he had gone to sleep, forgetting! He
+stirred again, hastily, his hands groping, even his feet moving. He had
+them yet, his and hers. And she had slept through the cold night with no
+covering while he, never waking until now, had lain warm and
+comfortable. He struggled to turn on his side and got himself raised a
+little despite the pain from the exertion, seeking her. She must be
+frozen----
+
+Gloria was not in the cave. He sank back, sure of that. For she should
+be sleeping close by the fire. Then she had gone down again for wood. He
+frowned and lay staring upward again. Gloria bringing wood while he lay
+here like a confounded log. He grew nervously restive at the thought; it
+was unthinkable that she should do work like that. He saw her in his
+mind, struggling with the unaccustomed labour. And always he saw her as
+he had first seen her, a fragile-looking girl, a girl with sweet little
+hands as soft as rose petals. He remembered her as he had seen her that
+first day, a vision of loveliness in her fluffy pink dress, her skin
+like the skin of a baby, her eyes the soft, tender grey eyes of the girl
+to whom he had given his heart without reservation. The glorious Gloria,
+all slender delicacy, like a little mountain flower, the Gloria for whom
+it had been his duty and his high privilege to labour. He must fight to
+get his strength back, to get on his feet again, to save her from such
+toil as was no woman's work in the world, certainly never the work for a
+girl like Gloria.
+
+He heard a sound at the cave's mouth. Gloria was coming back. He found
+no words with which to greet her, but lay very still, waiting for her to
+come in. An emotion of which he was ashamed and yet which was infinitely
+sweet swept over him: it was so wonderful a thing to have Gloria come to
+him, nurse him, put her hand so tenderly on his. A thrill shot down his
+faintly stirring pulses as already he fancied her stealing softly to his
+side. So he waited and, when she came where he could at last see her,
+watched.
+
+She set her gun down; at first he wondered at that. Poor little Gloria,
+he thought; taking her rifle with her when she went down for wood,
+frightened and yet strong-hearted enough to go in spite of fear. She
+came on, not to him but to the smouldering coals. She had turned toward
+him, but, no doubt, thought him still asleep. He watched her, still
+knowing that presently she would come, awaiting her coming. And again he
+was perplexed; he did not understand why Gloria walked like that. He had
+never seen her walk so before; she had always been so light of foot, so
+graceful--so like a fairy creature, scarcely touching the ground. Now
+her feet dragged; she groped uncertainly; she was like one gone suddenly
+dizzy.
+
+She dropped down by the coals, her face in her hands. The light was bad;
+he could hardly see her now. He heard a sigh that ended in a sob. She
+rose, oh, so wearily. He saw her sway as she walked; she was throwing
+wood on the fire. It caught; a flame flared out; other flames followed
+with their merry crackling and leaping lights. And now he saw Gloria's
+face. It was drawn and haggard; it had been washed with tears; her eyes
+looked enormous and unnaturally bright. He saw her hair; it was in wild
+disarray, a tumble of disorder. He saw that she had sacks wrapped about
+her lagging feet; that her clothes were torn, that her sleeves were
+ragged, that her arms were covered with long scratches! His first
+thought, making his body tense with anger, was that he had not come in
+time to save her from Brodie's hands....
+
+What was Gloria doing? Struggling with something on her back. Something
+which was tied across her shoulders. She got it free; it fell close to
+the fire, played over by the light of the flames. He craned his neck and
+saw; it was a great chunk of bear meat--he could see bits of the hide
+still on it!
+
+He could not understand. Not yet. All that he could do was stare at her
+and wonder and grope confusedly for the explanation. It was clear that
+something was wrong with Gloria; she dropped down by the fire, she
+slumped forward, she lay her face upon her crossed arms. He could see
+the frail body shaking--he could hear her sudden wild sobbing.
+
+The truth came upon him at last, dawning slowly, slowly.
+
+"Gloria!" It was a gasp of more than amazement; consternation was in his
+heart. "_Gloria_!"
+
+She lifted her head and sat up. He saw her great wide-open eyes and the
+tears gushing from them. She fought to control herself, a sob in her
+throat. She rose and came toward him in strange, wildly uncertain steps.
+
+"Gloria! You----"
+
+"Sh, Mark; you mustn't----"
+
+But he couldn't lie still. He lifted himself upon his elbow and looked
+at her with wondering eyes. She stood over him, looking on the verge of
+collapse. Slowly she came down to him, half kneeling, half falling.
+
+"My God," he cried hoarsely. "You went for my bear? _You did it_."
+
+She tried to smile at him, and into his own eyes there broke a sudden
+gush of tears.
+
+"You wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Gloria!" he cried out. "There is no
+girl in all the world could have done that--there is no girl like you."
+
+Her hand was questing his; he caught it and gripped it with all the
+strength in him; he hurt her, and at last, with the pain, her smile
+broke through.
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+"Mark?"
+
+"Can you--not so soon, but some day--forgive me?"
+
+She found only a faint whisper with which to answer him; her eyes were
+as hungry as his.
+
+"Can you forgive, Mark?"
+
+And now, when their eyes clung together as their hands were already
+clinging, each was marvelling that the other could forgive and love one
+who had erred so.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Everlasting Whisper, by Jackson Gregory
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Everlasting Whisper, by Jackson Gregory
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Everlasting Whisper
+
+Author: Jackson Gregory
+
+Release Date: November 22, 2003 [EBook #10213]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVERLASTING WHISPER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dave Morgan and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+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 canon 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 canons 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 canon. 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 _tete-a-tete_ 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 _tete-a-tete_ 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 canon, 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 canon 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 canons 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 canon 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 canons 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 canon 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-stricken by something her mother had said, cried:
+
+"You have phoned _everybody!_ Oh, mamma! What--_what_ do you mean?"
+
+"When you didn't come in last night--I have been crazy with worry! I
+thought you might be spending the night with one of your friends; I
+thought that maybe something had happened and it was being kept from me.
+I rang up Georgia Stark and Mildred Carter and the Farrilees--and even
+the emergency hospitals. I thought----"
+
+The rest was only a meaningless buzzing in Gloria's ears; she sat
+speechless herself, bereft of all reason for a dull moment, then
+harbouring quick, clear thoughts, as swift, as vivid as lightning, and
+in the end as blinding by their very quality of blazing light. _The
+newspapers!_
+
+Still, dominated subconsciously by the thought which had brought her to
+the telephone, Gloria managed before the connection was broken to beg
+her mother to come immediately to her at the log house; to tell every
+one that Gloria was with her father. Her mother promised; began asking
+questions, and Gloria said a bleak "good-bye" and hung up.
+
+_The newspapers_. She sat there staring into space and seeing the San
+Francisco _Chronicle_ and _Examiner_, hawked by newsboys, on stands,
+thrust under doors, going like spreading snowflakes of a big storm into
+post-offices, to racing trains, all over the land. Her mother had
+telephoned the emergency hospitals! Gloria could have wept in rage,
+screamed, thrown herself down and given over to paroxysms of weeping.
+But she only sat on, her face whiter and whiter, looking into emptiness
+and seeing headlines that towered as high as immense black cliffs. Her
+mother had telephoned Mildred Carter, that hateful, hateful,
+thrice-hateful Mildred Carter; had confessed that Gloria had gone out
+with Mr. Gratton; was gone all night, no one knew where; Mildred Carter
+who was as good as married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_! And the
+emergency hospitals--Gloria with never a tear coming in her hour of
+greatest distress sat rocking back and forth on her chair, crying: "Oh,
+I wish I were dead!"
+
+As one hears noises through a dream, long powerless to connect them
+logically with familiar happenings, so now did Gloria absently hearken
+to Gratton calling from the foot of the stairs. She jumped up only when
+she heard him start to mount them. Then, galvanized, she sprang to her
+feet, cried to him, "I'll be down in just a second," and ran to her
+room. She stood again looking at herself in her glass.
+
+"Gloria Gaynor," she heard her own pale lips say, "you have gotten
+yourself into a nasty, nasty mess." The lips began to tremble; then,
+with a great struggle for will-power, they steadied. "And," said Gloria
+in a cold, harsh little voice, "it's up to you, and no one else, to get
+out the best you can this time."
+
+She bathed her face and hands; she rubbed her cheeks with a towel,
+determined to bring some vestige of colour back; she took down her hair.
+Only then, so distrait to-day was Gloria, did she think of changing from
+her boyish suit into a house dress. Her eyes, which had harboured only
+bewilderment and terror, now grew speculative. She brought from her
+closet half a dozen dresses; chose a certain pink one without analysing
+the reasons of her selection, found silk stockings and pumps, and
+dressed from top to toe. She would have to have it out with Gratton, one
+way or the other--she began to know which way it would be. But always a
+girl should be at her best. Also, she decided, by the time that she was
+becomingly gowned and her hair arranged tastefully, it was as well to
+let Gratton wait for her a while; waiting always, to some extent,
+brought to the one cooling his heels a sense of disadvantage. In short,
+Gloria had gone through the most panicky of her moments and was getting
+a grip on herself again. When, after Gratton had waited and fumed for
+upward of an hour, she went downstairs she looked cool and pretty, and
+quite unembarrassed. He flashed a look at her that was eloquent of
+nervous excitement.
+
+"I want to explain everything to you, Gloria----"
+
+"It will take a good deal of explaining, won't it, Mr. Gratton?"
+
+They went into the living-room and Gloria sat in a big chair while he
+stood before her, his fingers tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.
+
+"You listened-in while I talked with mamma, didn't you?" she said
+carelessly.
+
+"No!" said Gratton, but so promptly that she knew he lied.
+
+"Well?" she said indifferently. "Suppose we have the explanations now? I
+am sure that they will prove interesting."
+
+"I am afraid," he began, talking swiftly, "that I have been instrumental
+in placing you in a false position. Last night I told you I had
+telephoned to your mother. I did try; they reported the line out of
+order. What could I do? I didn't want to alarm you. It was only a lark;
+I meant innocently, you know that, don't you, Gloria?"
+
+"Did you?" she said, and managed to keep her lips smiling.
+
+"It is only since coming here that I have realized how things will look;
+what people will think--and say, curse them. Our being out so long
+together; my buying clothing for you----"
+
+"Our being registered as Mr. and Mrs. Gratton----"
+
+His eyes burned, his lips clamped tight.
+
+"Forgive me, Gloria! It was the mad impulse of a moment. I thought as we
+went in that it would look strange--a young, unmarried couple; that if I
+put down man and wife no one would think anything at all. And we'd be
+gone in a few hours; and probably you'd never go back there; and no one
+would know who you were."
+
+"I see." Gloria's tone, devoid of expression, gave no clue to her racing
+thoughts. "You did that for my sake!"
+
+"Yes," he said eagerly. "As I would do anything on earth for your sake.
+You know that, Gloria; you know, and have known for a long
+time--always--that I love you. I was going to ask you soon to--to marry
+me, Gloria. And now, now you will marry me, won't you?"
+
+"Yes." But Gloria did not say it aloud; not yet. She merely made it
+perfectly clear to Miss Gloria Gaynor that she was going to marry
+Gratton, and that there was to be no further question of it. And, oh,
+God! at this fateful moment, how she hated him! How she loathed and
+detested him! While a week ago--yesterday--she had wondered, dreamily,
+if she were in love with him! But that was when he was in the city, at
+home in his own wilderness. But now! She was in a trap. This man had
+made it, cunningly using in his work all that he knew of Gloria Gaynor.
+There was no way out, save through the gate of matrimony. And--in her
+heart she laughed at him--through that other wider gate beyond, the
+gate of divorce. She would accept his name; the name of Gratton stood
+high in San Francisco. Then she would tell him how she loathed him; she
+would laugh at him, for physically she had no fear of him. And he would
+never have her for his own, despite all of his money and his position
+and his hideous trickery. Gratton, with all of his shrewdness, had not
+taken into consideration one thing: how in the city, on his native
+heath, he attracted Gloria; how in the woods he impressed her, in his
+unbecoming outdoor togs, as contemptible.
+
+"You know how I love you," he was repeating. And he was sincere; she saw
+that in his eyes, in the unaccustomed colour in his face. He loved her
+as such an unclean animal could love. Oh, how he sickened her! "Will you
+marry me, Gloria? Will you forgive me for having, however
+unintentionally, placed you in a wrong light? Will you give me the right
+to protect you, to defend your good name? Oh, Gloria----"
+
+Strange that the man had never revolted her as he did now! She wanted to
+get up and run from him. Meantime she was telling herself, almost
+calmly: "Yes, you'll marry him. The little beast!" She did get to her
+feet; he followed her into the hall.
+
+"Let me be alone for a little while," she said quietly. She went to the
+stairway. "I am going upstairs; wait here for me----"
+
+"You will come to me? You will marry me?"
+
+"I--think--so. Don't!" she cried sharply as he moved to come to her.
+"Wait----"
+
+He swallowed nervously. "I--I hoped you would. And I saw how terribly
+the events of the last few hours might be misconstrued. So, Gloria,
+daring to hope, I sent word for a justice of the peace. He will be here
+this afternoon or this evening----"
+
+"Justice of the peace!" Gloria's nerves jangled loose in her
+irrepressible laughter.
+
+"We'll have a priest later, of course," he ran on hurriedly. "But I
+couldn't arrange for one so soon."
+
+Gloria went slowly upstairs, walking backward, looking down on him with
+unfathomable eyes.
+
+"Tell me, Gloria. I'll promise not to come near you until you say I
+may. Is it _yes_?"
+
+"Yes," said Gloria, and was gone in a flash, turning, running up and out
+of sight.
+
+He stood looking after her, tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIII_
+
+
+To Gloria the sluggish moments were fraught with despondency or
+pulsating terror. All arrangements were made; she was powerless, in a
+trap; a justice was coming; she was going to marry Gratton. She lay on
+her bed with her door bolted and wept bitterly, moaning over and over:
+"Oh, I wish I were dead!" She heard Gratton stirring restlessly
+downstairs. She herself grew restless; she sprang up, tiptoed to her
+door, and slipped out as silent as a shadow. She went into the little
+room where the telephone was and through it to the sun-porch. For a long
+time she stood looking out across the mountains, her hand pressed to
+lips which trembled. She thought of her mother who, coming as fast as
+she could, no doubt by automobile, since she would not have the patience
+for trains, would not arrive before to-morrow morning. A night
+here--alone, worse than alone----
+
+But great as was the emotional tension, lusty and now wearied youth must
+be served. She had danced and ridden all through the night; she had not
+had over an hour or so of broken sleep; she had been going all day. She
+dropped to sleep on the swing-couch on the porch. It was so very silent
+all about her; the shadows were creeping, creeping among the pines.
+
+She awoke with a start. It was quite dark; the first stars burned with
+steadily growing brilliancy. Some one was standing above her, looking
+down at her. She could see only the vague outline----
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+A little cry of fear broke from her.
+
+"Gloria," pleaded Gratton. "Don't you know I wouldn't----?"
+
+"I'll be down in a minute," she told him, drawing as far away as she
+could, speaking with nervous haste. "Go down, please. Wait for me."
+
+"The justice is downstairs," he said, his own voice agitated despite his
+effort for mastery. "Are you ready?"
+
+"Yes, yes! In a minute I'll be down. Go. Please go."
+
+He hesitated; she could have screamed at him. But presently he began
+withdrawing. Slowly, hideously slowly----
+
+"When you are ready. And--he has a long ride back, Gloria. We should not
+keep him waiting."
+
+She watched until he had gone. Then she crouched, staring with wide,
+unseeing eyes into the outside dark. The man would go right away; she
+would not have even him to mitigate the horrible condition of aloneness
+with Gratton.
+
+"I won't marry him!" she cried out. "I won't. I hate him. He is a beast,
+and--I won't!"
+
+There was, after all, nothing to force her. Nothing--save that she had
+been away all this time with Gratton, that he had bought clothing for
+her, that he had registered himself and wife. _And the newspapers_! She
+heard a door slam and sprang up; if the justice went away now without
+marrying them! She _would_ marry him; why, if he had been of a notion to
+demur she would have made him marry her!
+
+"I can't think clearly. I wonder if I am insane?" She went with heavy,
+leaden steps back to her room. A pale, weary face looked at her from her
+glass. She began arranging her hair. Her fingers, with wills of their
+own, refused to obey her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly
+to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding
+to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers
+raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and
+urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the
+justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing,
+but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She
+guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent to bring the justice.
+
+"Gloria!" Gratton was calling from the foot of the steps.
+
+The voice that answered for her was clear and steady and, downstairs,
+must have sounded untroubled:
+
+"I'm coming. Just a minute."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two hours ago, while Gloria had been watching the shadows creeping among
+the pines, Mark King had arrived. He had come down the ridge from the
+rear and thus to the outbuilding by the stable which housed the
+caretaker, old Jim Spalding.
+
+"Hello, Mark," Jim had said, a trifle startled by King's sudden
+appearance. "Here you come again, like a Injun out'n the woods."
+
+Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench. King paused, saying:
+
+"Hello, Jim. Has Ben showed up yet?"
+
+"No, he ain't showed, Mark. Expectin' him?"
+
+"Yes. Who's in the house, then?"
+
+"Why, some of 'em come on ahead. Ben's girl, for one, and that city guy,
+Gratton, for another. She didn't say anything about Ben comin'; she did
+say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon."
+
+Gloria and Gratton here? King frowned. He had had ample time during the
+long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to
+say to Gloria Gaynor. And now she was here--with Gratton. He turned into
+Jim's quarters. He had no desire--or at least so he told himself very
+emphatically--to see either one of them.
+
+"I've hit the trail hard to-day, Jim," he said as Jim followed him and
+King closed the door. "And I'm dead tired and as hungry as a bear. What
+shape's the cupboard in?"
+
+"Fine," returned Spalding hospitably. "You know me, Mark."
+
+So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone,
+Mark King sat at Spalding's table, not a hundred yards away, and made a
+silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim's crude baking, and a dubious,
+warmed-over stew. Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim's bunk and
+the two smoked their pipes. With nothing in particular to be said,
+virtually nothing was said.
+
+"Needn't tell anybody I'm here, Jim." King was knocking the ashes out of
+his pipe. "I haven't any business with the folks in there. But keep your
+eye peeled for Ben, will you? The minute he comes I want to see him."
+
+"Maybe," suggested Spalding, "his girl brought word?"
+
+"No. Ben is in Coloma. Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would
+have come up from the city, you know. That means they would have come
+through Placerville or Truckee."
+
+"Guess so," agreed Spalding. "That's right. I'll set outside where I can
+watch for Ben. Goin' to take a snooze?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And after lying ten minutes staring up at the ceiling above him King
+went to sleep.
+
+"Must of been goin' some to-day," meditated the man who was once more on
+his bench outside the door. "King looks tuckered."
+
+He sat through the thickening shadows watching the stars come trooping
+into the darkening sky, hearkening to the night breeze among the trees,
+and the thin singing noises of insects. An hour or so later he heard
+horses. "That would be Ben, now," was his first thought. His second was
+that it might be some one else, and that there was no sense waking a
+tired man for nothing. So he went down toward the house. He saw two men
+dismount and tie their horses; he saw the door open and Gratton come
+out. The horsemen went up to the porch. Neither was Ben Gaynor. One, as
+he passed in through the light-filled doorway, was a little grey man
+whom Jim had never seen before; the other man, it happened, he knew.
+Rather well by sight and reputation, a good-for-nothin' scalawag, as
+Jim catalogued him, name of Steve Jarrold. The door closed after them
+and Jim went back to his bench.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the house they were waiting for Gloria. The little grey man whom they
+called "judge," and who had a way of clearing his throat before and
+after the most trifling remark, went up and down with his hands under
+his coat-tails, peering near-sightedly at pictures and books and
+wall-paper.
+
+"Quite a tidy little place Ben Gaynor's got here," he said
+patronizingly. "Quite a tidy little place."
+
+Gratton paced back and forth, whirling always abreast of the stairs,
+looking up expectantly. Steve Jarrold, the man whom Gloria had heard
+laugh, never budged from the spot where he had landed when entering the
+living-room; his wide, spraddled legs seemed rooted through the big feet
+into the floor. Big-framed and bony, with startlingly black restless
+eyes and a three or four days' growth of wiry beard no less lustrously
+black, he was ragged, unkempt, and unthinkably dirty. His eyes roved all
+about the room; they came back to Gratton, sped up the steps, came back
+to Gratton with a leer in them, and all the while he turned and turned
+his black dusty hat like a man doing a job he was being paid for.
+
+At last, since no delay holds back for ever the rolling of the great
+wheels of time, Gloria came. Slowly she descended the stairs, one hand
+at her breast, one gripping the banister. Her pallor was so great that
+her lips, though pale also, looked unnaturally red in contrast. They
+were just a little apart; she seemed to breathe with difficulty. Her
+eyes, glancing wildly about the room and at the men to be seen in the
+hallway, were the eyes of one in a trap, seeking frantically for escape,
+knowing that there was no escape. Her brain, like one's in a fever, was
+quick to impressions, alive with broken fragments of thought like so
+many flashes of vari-coloured light. She noted trifles; she saw a
+painting over Gratton's head--a seascape her father had given her for
+her fourteenth birthday. She saw three pairs of eyes staring at her,
+men's eyes, to her the eyes of wild animals; she read as clearly as if
+their messages had been in large, printed letters what lay in the mind
+of each: in the little grey man's, the judge's, speculation; in Steve
+Jarrold's, the jeers of a man of Jarrold's type at such a moment when
+they fall upon the bride; in Gratton's, quickened desire of her and
+triumphant cunning.
+
+"My dear," said Gratton, coming forward as though to meet her and then
+pausing abruptly and holding back, "this is Judge--Judge Summerling. He
+will--perform the ceremony, you know. And this is Mr. Jarrold. He
+brought the judge and will be a witness."
+
+Gloria from the last step regarded the three men as a prisoner might
+have looked upon jailers coming to drag her to execution. Her lips moved
+but no sound issued. "Judge" Summerling bowed stiffly and cleared his
+throat. Steve Jarrold's hat ceased revolving an instant, then fairly
+spun as though to make up for lost time.
+
+Suddenly Gloria began to laugh hysterically, uncontrollably. Gratton
+whipped back and stared at her; Summerling and Jarrold were mystified.
+She looked so little like laughter! And, as both had cause to regard the
+situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no
+clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little
+grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven,
+leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding!
+She was near madness with the hideous, cruel travesty of such weddings
+as are dear to the hearts of San Francisco "society" girls.
+
+The "judge" was clearing his throat again. She looked at him curiously,
+with the odd sensation that while Gloria Gaynor was asleep, drugged into
+a deep stupor, there was within her another Gloria who took a keen
+interest in the smallest happenings.
+
+"This affair ain't any more regular than it ought to be," he was saying.
+"Now, just the matter of the licence----"
+
+Gratton jerked about and glared at him. The "judge" broke off with a
+vehement clearing of his throat. In a moment he spoke again.
+
+"Seein' as both parties _want_ to get married," he said hastily, "and as
+circumstances is what they is--keepin' in mind how circumstances does
+alter cases--well then--are you ready?"
+
+That "Are you ready?" seemed to explode like a pistol shot in Gloria's
+ears. Something within her shrieked: "No, no, no!" Gratton had said a
+quiet "Yes," and was looking at her. She heard herself saying faintly:
+"Yes."
+
+Gratton put out his hand as though to help her down the last step. She
+made a little gesture, motioning him back. He bit at his lip and obeyed,
+though with a quick flash of the eyes. Gloria looked down at the step.
+About six inches high, and yet--and yet where she stood was as high as
+heaven, down there as deep as hell. She seemed powerless to achieve that
+last step. But Gratton was stirring restlessly; he would put out his
+hand again to help her. She shuddered and moved quickly. Now she stood
+on the same level as Gratton and the others; the physical fact was
+sinister as though symbolical of the psychical.
+
+The "judge" began to grow vastly businesslike. He must have the full
+names correctly, ages, birthplaces. Gratton answered for himself and for
+Gloria, who stood now with her hand on the back of a chair just within
+the living-room door. Across the room was the fireplace; over it an
+ornamental mirror. She wondered dully what she looked like; the "bride"!
+But from where she stood she could see only the reflection of the window
+across the room, the strip of curtain at the side stirring softly in the
+evening breeze. That breeze came down through the pines; it wandered
+free; why couldn't she, Gloria, be like that? She thought poignantly of
+her few days among the pines with Mark King. Oh, the remembered glory of
+it, the clean, sweet freedom of it.
+
+"Now, folks, if you're ready. Stand side by side--"
+
+"Oh!" cried Gloria.
+
+"Eh? What's that?" demanded the "judge."
+
+She tried to smile.
+
+"I--I think----" She saw Steve Jarrold leering. "The witness," she said
+wildly. "There is only one, and----"
+
+"It's usual to have two, anyhow," admitted the "judge." "But, being as
+things _is_ a bit irregular and everything, why we'll make one do."
+
+"There's Jim," said Gloria. She did not look toward Gratton, but he
+understood that she addressed him. "Jim Spalding. I'd feel better if
+some one I knew--if you'd get Jim to come, please."
+
+She knew that she did not care whether Jim Spalding came or did not
+come; that she was fighting for delay and could not help snatching at
+any straw, though she knew that in the end she would go down,
+overwhelmed by circumstance. Circumstance and--Gratton. Gratton also
+knew and frowned.
+
+"Gloria," he said smoothly, "that isn't necessary, is it?"
+
+"Yes, it is!" she flared out at him hotly. "Go, get him."
+
+"It will take only a minute," Gratton said over his shoulder as he went.
+He would see to it that it took no great amount of time. Spalding on his
+bench saw Gratton running toward him.
+
+"You're wanted in the house a minute, Spalding," he said curtly. "Step
+lively, will you?"
+
+Spalding, not given to stepping lively at other men's commands, was slow
+in answering, and then spoke drawlingly:
+
+"Wanted, am I? Well, that's interestin'. By who? I'm wonderin'."
+
+"Miss Gloria. She wants you right away."
+
+"That's different," said old Jim, getting to his feet.
+
+Gratton turned and hastened back to the house, Jim quickening his own
+pace as he sensed something out of the ordinary. The house door stood
+open as Gratton had left it, and the two entered hastily. Jim looked
+from face to face with keen, shrewd eyes, ignored Jarrold, who said a
+mirthful "Evenin', Jim," and turned to Gloria for explanation.
+
+"Miss Gloria wanted----" began Gratton. But Jim Spalding lifted a big
+hand as though to ward off the words.
+
+"I'm here, miss," he said when Gloria's white face only stared at him."
+You ain't sick, are you?"
+
+"No, Jim, I--I am going to be married, and----"
+
+"Married!" Jim looked incredulous and then puzzled as again his eyes
+went swiftly from one to the other of the three men's faces.
+
+"Yes, Jim. And I want you to be a witness."
+
+Jim flushed up and shifted uneasily. He had never been at a wedding; he
+did not know what a "witness" had to do. And to witness the wedding of
+Miss Gloria, who had never appeared to come down to earth long enough to
+know that there was such a man as Jim Spalding on the same sphere with
+her----He managed an uneasy "Yes'm," and backed off toward the door.
+
+"Now, if you folks is ready," began the "judge" again.
+
+"Right now?" muttered Jim. "You're gettin' married right now?"
+
+"Yes," said Gloria wearily. And to Summerling: "I am ready."
+
+"But I ain't!" cried Spalding. He got to the door and started down the
+hall. "Wait a minute, will you?"
+
+Gratton hurried after him, his face hot with rage, while Steve Jarrold
+guffawed loudly and then, under Gloria's startled look, dropped his
+eyes.
+
+"Come back here, Spalding," commanded Gratton angrily. "Whatever you've
+got to do can wait a minute----"
+
+"_You_ wait," growled Jim. "I'll be back quick enough."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mark King was awakened by old Jim rushing into the room, lighting a lamp
+hastily, and making a deal of clatter. He sat up, demanding:
+
+"Has Ben come?"
+
+Jim began chuckling. After all, a wedding was a wedding, and therefore
+a matter well worth a man's allowing himself to get a bit excited. From
+a cupboard he began dragging forth his one and only serviceable suit of
+clothes, dingy black, shiny affairs, but Jim's "best." He kicked off his
+breeches, drew on the black trousers, and caught up the coat.
+
+"No, Ben ain't back," he grinned at King. "Guess he'll be surprised when
+he does come. His girl's gettin' herself married. To that city guy,
+Gratton. Right now in the house!"
+
+"What!" King had heard well enough, but that "What!" broke from him
+explosively.
+
+"An' me, I'm a witness," said old Jim. "Steve Jarrold's another. They
+got the preacher there an' everything." He paused a moment and
+reflected, with puckered brows. "What do you think of her marryin' that
+swab, now? Think Ben's goin' to be pleased? Kind of surprising ain't it,
+Mark?"
+
+King managed a laugh which escaped critical notice only because old Jim
+was only half listening.
+
+"Oh, it's been open and shut all along that she'd marry Gratton," he
+said, keeping his head down as he drew a match across the floor as
+though to like a pipe whose bowl was empty. "If it suits his womenfolk,
+I guess Ben will stand for it."
+
+By now Jim had drawn his coat on and was back at the door.
+
+"Better come along, Mark," he invited. "You don't see a weddin' every
+day. Comin'?"
+
+"No, thanks," said King. He broke his match between nervous fingers. He
+raised his head to watch Jim go.
+
+"Lord, Mark," said Spalding, holding on his heel a moment. "You must of
+made one all-mighty day of it! You sure do look tuckered!"
+
+King rose and went to the door and stood looking after the swiftly
+departing figure. He saw the house, the windows bright with lights,
+light streaming out through the door to the porch. There was Gloria.
+Just there. And he had slept, and Gloria was marrying. And here was the
+end of it--the end of everything, it dawned on him. He, who had never
+looked twice on a woman, had looked thrice on her and again. He, the
+one-woman man, had found the one woman--and had lost her. He looked out
+toward the house and through its thick log walls saw Gloria; Gloria as
+she had come down the stairs to him that first day, floating down like a
+pink thistledown, putting her two hands into his, looking up into his
+eyes with eyes which he would never forget; he saw her in the woods,
+riding with him; by the spring waiting eagerly for the little
+water-ouzel, she so like a bird herself; crossing a stream on
+boulders--she had slipped; he had caught her into his arms--close. Her
+hair had blown across his face. He stood with her on the highest crest
+of a ridge; the world lay below them, they were alone in the blue
+heavens. And he loved her. He groaned and ran his hand across his eyes
+as though to wipe the pictures out--pictures which would never pass
+away.
+
+Gloria was marrying. Gratton. Now. He looked up into the sky bright with
+stars; its great message to him was "Emptiness." The world was empty,
+life was empty. There was nothing. Simply because Gloria had come, had
+laughed into his eyes, and had gone on. She was like the springtime
+which came dancing into the mountains which softened them and brightened
+them--and laughed and passed on and away. She would be laughing
+now--into Gratton's eyes.
+
+He would never see her again after to-night. Other men had loved and
+their loves had crumbled to ashes, blown away by the winds of time. But
+to-night he _would_ see her. The last time. While still she was Gloria
+Gaynor and not Gratton's wife----
+
+He started and hurried toward the house. They were waiting for Jim and
+Jim had hurried. He came to the porch and, with never a board to creak
+under his careful tread, he made his way silently around to the
+living-room side of the house. There was a window there; the shade was
+not drawn; the curtains were blowing back and forth. He drew close and
+stood, watching. He would look at Gloria one last time, turning away
+just before the preacher said the last words; it was like looking for
+the last time on a beloved face before the sod fell----
+
+He saw her. Her back was turned to him; her head was down. He watched
+her fingers moving nervously at her sides and his brow contracted with a
+sudden access of pain. Those fingers had touched his and he had thrilled
+to the soft, warm contact; he loved them better than he loved life. And
+soon they would find their way into Gratton's.
+
+Not once did he move his eyes from her. She did not turn toward him, but
+as the "judge" began talking she lifted her head and King saw her
+throat, her cheek. How pale she was----
+
+Though her head was up, her slim body drooped. Like a little wildwood
+flower wilting. So she remained for what seemed a very long time. Then
+suddenly he saw her body stiffen; her hands flew to her breast. The
+"judge," hurrying along, had asked:
+
+"And do you take this man to be your wedded husband?"
+
+King did not want to hear the answer; he turned to go. But hear now he
+must, for though until now responses had been low-voiced, hardly above a
+murmur, he heard Gloria crying:
+
+"_No! No and no and no_!"
+
+King stopped like a man paralysed. Had he gone mad? Then his pulses
+leaped and hammered. Gloria had cried "_No_!" A tremor shook him; he
+could no longer see her, but he stood where he was, his senses keyed to
+hear a falling pin within.
+
+"He is a beast and I hate him!" cried Gloria wildly. "He tried to trick
+me and trap me. He tried to make me marry him But I won't! I won't! I'd
+rather die."
+
+Her voice died chokingly away, and for five seconds it was deathly
+still. Still King did not move. He heard Gratton's exclamation,
+Gratton's hurried step. The man was excited, was expostulating. Other
+voices; the other men had drawn aside, amazed, leaving Gratton a clear
+field with his unwilling bride.
+
+"Have you gone mad, Gloria?" King could hear the words now. "Think what
+you are saying----"
+
+"I have thought. I hate you. Go away. Let me go."
+
+Gratton's pale eyes must be ablaze with wrath now; his tone told that.
+
+"There's no way out for you. You've got to marry me. I----"
+
+"Take your hand off----"
+
+Her voice broke into a scream.
+
+"You're hurting me----"
+
+And now Mark King moved at last. Before the last word had done vibrating
+through the still room he was through the window, taking the shortest
+way. Gratton's hand was on Gloria's shoulder; King threw it off, hurling
+the man backward across the room. Gloria turned to him----
+
+"Mark!" she cried. "Oh, Mark King!"
+
+He put his arms about her, thinking that she was going to fall. For an
+instant he held her tight; he felt her heart beating as though it would
+burst through her bosom.
+
+"You won't let him----?"
+
+He moved with her to a chair, placed her in it, and turned toward
+Gratton, a look like a naked knife in his eyes.
+
+"By jings!" muttered old Jim under his breath. "By jings!"
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIV_
+
+
+At this, the most critical moment of her life, it would appear
+inevitable that Gloria must bend every mental faculty to grappling with
+the vital issues. And yet, as she sat swallowed up in the big chair, for
+a space of time she was in a spell, caught up and whirled away from
+those about her; she forgot Gratton with the white, angry face; she had
+no eyes for Mark King or for Summerling, Steve Jarrold or Jim Spalding.
+She was thinking of another day, two years ago, when she and her mother
+had been alone in this room. They had been busied with the last touches
+of furniture arrangement; they had discussed locations for chairs and
+had argued over pictures. Both tired out with a day of effort, they had
+come near tears in a verbal battle over the best place for the sole
+article remaining unplaced. Gloria wanted it in the hallway; Mrs. Gaynor
+pleaded for it over the mantel in the living-room. Finally it was Gloria
+who cried with sudden laughter:
+
+"Oh, what _difference_ does it make? We're getting silly over trifles.
+Have it your way, mamma."
+
+Trifles! Gloria wondered if any other act of her life had had the
+tremendous import of that sudden yielding to her mother's wishes. If the
+mirror had been placed anywhere else in the universe, even by a few
+inches removed from its present abiding-place, would there be a _Gloria
+Gaynor_ in all the world right now? Or would her chair hold quite
+another sort of person--Mrs. Gratton? If she had not lifted her
+desperate eyes and seen Mark King reflected at the window, how would she
+have answered that one final question the "judge" propounded? Would she
+have said "Yes"? Or would it have been "No"? She did not know; she would
+never know. She had been on the verge, dizzy with profitless
+speculation. And now, only the extent of one little word stood between
+her and an unthinkable condition. That a whole life should be steered
+down one channel or another--oh, what immeasurably separated
+channels!--by one's breath in a single-syllabled word----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You don't answer!" a voice was saying irritably.
+
+She started. They were talking to her, they had been talking to her, and
+now she realized that she had heard voices across a great distance, and
+by no means as clear to her consciousness as the remembered voice of her
+mother two years ago arguing for a mirror over the fireplace. She turned
+her eyes on Gratton, since obviously it was he who insisted on an
+answer. But King spoke for her.
+
+"Look here, Gratton," he said bluntly, "as far as I can see there is no
+reason why Miss Gaynor should pay the least attention to your
+effervescings if she doesn't care to. She is a free agent and under no
+obligations to you."
+
+"I'll ask your opinion when I want it," snapped Gratton. "Miss
+Gloria----"
+
+"You asked me something?" said Gloria. "Pardon me. I didn't hear."
+
+Her aloof reply disconcerted him. Her attitude was spontaneous,
+unaffected, and hence unconsciously one of polite indifference. Suddenly
+Gratton, fume as he would, had become of not the least importance.
+
+"You said that you would marry me. Not a dozen minutes ago."
+
+"Did I?" she demanded coolly. "Are you quite sure I said that?"
+
+"Look here, Miss Gloria." It was Jim Spalding, who had been ill at ease
+all along and now had the brains and perhaps the delicacy to understand
+that this was no place for him. "If you don't need me after all, I'll
+go."
+
+"And the rest of us with you," said King. "If Miss Gaynor cares to talk
+things over with Gratton----"
+
+Gloria put out her hand impulsively, touching King's arm.
+
+"_You_ stay. Please. Until--he goes."
+
+King inclined his head gravely, not realizing that his body stiffened
+under her light touch.
+
+"What about _me_?" demanded the "judge" sharply. "Am I needed or ain't
+I?"
+
+"I'd say not this evening," King's dry voice answered him. "Good-night
+to you."
+
+"That's a fine way to treat a man," cried Summerling truculently. "Here
+I ride all this way in the dark, and without stoppin' for so much as
+supper; here I ain't had a bite to eat since dinner-time, and it's
+good-night and get out! And that hundred dollars I was to get so fast,
+how about that? Think I'm the man to let folks trample on me and----"
+
+"Maybe Jim will give you a hand-out at his cabin," King told him. "As
+for your money, get it out of Gratton if he promised it to you--or," he
+added with a flash of heat, "take it out of his hide, for all I care."
+
+"Wait for me outside, Summerling," muttered Gratton. "_I_ haven't said
+you won't be needed, have I?"
+
+"Just the same, I wouldn't mind takin' what's comin' to me now----"
+
+"Man alive!" shouted Gratton, whirling on him. "Haven't I got enough on
+my hands without you yelping at me?"
+
+"Just the same----"
+
+"Jim," called King above the incoherent mouthings, "slip your arm
+through Summerling's and lead him off with you. Feed him if you feel
+like it, and let him stick around for a word with Gratton if he wants.
+And you, Steve Jarrold, Ben Gaynor isn't here, but just the same you can
+take it from me that neither you nor any other of Swen Brodie's hangdogs
+is wanted in Ben Gaynor's house. Out you go."
+
+Jarrold's eyes slanted off to Gratton. Then, seeing himself ignored and
+forgotten, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his hat, and went out.
+Behind him, arm in arm, one smiling widely and the other pulling back
+and still sputtering, went Jim and the "judge."
+
+To all this Gloria had given scant attention. The spell no longer lay
+over her; she was keenly awake to the demands of the present; she was
+thinking, thinking, thinking! It seemed that she had walked on
+quicksands; that a hand had drawn her up and placed her where she was
+now, with solid ground underfoot; but that still all about her were
+quicksands. What temporary sense of security was hers was due to Mark
+King, to his presence. As long as he stood there, where she could put
+out a hand and touch him, she could rest calmly, assured of safety. But
+when he went, there remained Gratton and his venom. Quicksands all about
+her in which she would be floundering at this moment but for Mark
+King----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which
+became delicately flushed. Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and
+once more almost childlike--eyes to remind a man that here, after all,
+was no woman of the world, but only a young girl--rose to King's and met
+his long and searchingly. Yet there was that in their expression that
+made him understand that she was not looking at him, the physical man,
+so much as through him. For the first time in her pampered life the day
+had come when she was face to face with vital issues; when there was no
+mamma and no papa to turn to; when there were no shoulders other than
+her own to feel the weight of events. She must do her own thinking, come
+to her own decisions. Here was no time for a misstep. The one great step
+she had already taken; she had cried "No!" That step could be
+reconsidered, retraced; she looked at Gratton's face and saw that. But
+now she would not do that; she could not. In the city, seeing the two
+men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father's log
+house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did
+men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to
+another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon?
+A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know
+more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within
+her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl
+who was very young, spoiled, vain, and selfish; a girl who was older,
+who looked above and beyond the confines of her own self, who was
+warmhearted and impulsive, and could be generous. There was the Gloria
+who was the product of her mother's teaching and pampering; there was
+that other Gloria who was the true daughter of a pioneer stock, a girl
+linked to the city through tradition, bound to the outdoors through
+instinct. There was the Gloria who was ashamed of Mark King at a formal
+gathering in her own home; there was the Gloria who was thrilled to the
+depths of her being as in the forest-lands she knew a breathless moment
+in the arms of Mark King.
+
+Well, here were considerations to linger over on an idle day. Now,
+without seeking for hidden springs, there were on the surface certain
+plain facts. No matter what she had felt toward Gratton before, she
+detested him now; no matter what he might have appeared in San
+Francisco, here in his unaccustomed garb he looked to her puny, shallow,
+and contemptible. He was, as she had told him, a beast. He had betrayed
+her confidence; he had taken advantage of her headlong youth; he had
+displayed to her view the vileness within him. He loved her, did he? So
+much the better. It lay within her power, then, to repay him, if only in
+part, for what he had made her suffer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I repeat, Miss Gloria," Gratton was saying, a stubborn look in his
+eyes, "that you promised to marry me. You have had a hard day, I
+realize; there has been much to unnerve you. I erred in haste, perhaps;
+I should have waited until you had a night's rest. But you know why I
+did not wait. It was for your sake."
+
+Gloria heard him through with a hard little smile.
+
+"Nothing is further from my intention, Mr. Gratton," she told him icily,
+"than to marry you. Now or ever. Please let us consider the matter
+closed once and for all."
+
+His fingers worked nervously at his sides. Gloria chose the moment to
+lift her eyes again fleetingly to King's. She wanted Gratton to see, she
+wanted to hurt him all that she could. She looked back to see him wince.
+Nor did his quick contraction of the brows result from her glance alone;
+he had seen the look lying unhidden in King's eyes. Mark King had
+to-night, for the first time, swept barriers aside and looked straight
+into his own heart and known that all of the love that was in him to
+give had been given to Gloria Gaynor; he had come from Jim's cabin to
+look on her for the last time; he was giving her up. And then, when he
+had turned away rather than hear her murmur "Yes," she had cried out
+ringingly: "No!" The sod had not fallen upon a beloved face; death had
+not entered the door; life was not extinguished--where there was life
+invariably there was hope--he had given Gloria up, yes; but she had come
+back from beyond the frontier, she had come calling to him. He was
+certain of nothing just now beyond the tremendous, all-excluding fact
+that, wise or fool, he loved her. He wanted her with a want that is
+greater than hunger or thirst, or love of man for man or of man for life
+itself. Much of this lay shining in his eyes for Gratton to read--or for
+Gloria.
+
+"I am no boy to be thrown aside like an old glove," cried Gratton,
+beside himself, shaken with jealous fury. "You have promised; you have
+loved me; in your heart you love me now. Shall I stand back for a girl's
+nervous whim? I tell you, you shall marry me."
+
+Gloria's laughter, cool and insolent, maddened him. He clenched his
+hands and was swept away by his passion to gusty vehemence:
+
+"Think before you laugh! What if, instead of doing the gentlemanly
+thing, I refused to marry you? Alone with me all this time; all last
+night; a clerk to swear I bought clothing for you; a register to show
+where we engaged a room as man and wife; the San Francisco papers
+already bandying your name about, already nosing after scandal. You've
+_got_ to marry me; there is nothing else for you to do!"
+
+Gloria flushed hotly. But only in anger this time. King mystified,
+looking from one to the other, turned at last to Gloria and muttered:
+
+"For God's sake let me throw him out of the door!"
+
+"I think it might be best first," she answered quietly, "if Mr. Gratton
+remained long enough to understand that this is the last time I shall
+ever speak to him or listen to a word from him. He has tried to get me
+into a nasty situation; he will do all that he can to promote scandal.
+But I want him to know that he will, in the end of it all, have my
+father to reckon with--and my friends." Again she looked swiftly at King
+and again Gratton writhed at the look. "Papa will not be here to-night;
+he is hurt and in Coloma, and I'll give you his message soon. But----"
+
+"You saw your father! In Coloma!" It was a gasp of astonishment from
+Gratton. "You said nothing. You brought a message to King here?"
+
+"And you escorted me and never guessed!" Gloria taunted him. "Really it
+seems too bad, after all of your week-end trips to Coloma, after all of
+your conferences with the estimable Mr. Swen Brodie!"
+
+His prominent eyes bulged, written large with consternation. For a
+moment he stood the picture of uncertainty, plucking at his lip.
+
+"Gloria," he said shortly, "despite all you have said I shall see you
+again. To-morrow, when we have both rested, I'll come to you. Now, if
+you will pardon me, I'll have a word with King. Strictly business, you
+may be sure, King," he concluded sarcastically.
+
+"There's to be no business between you and me," King told him promptly.
+
+"But there is. If you've got two grains of common sense. Look you, Loony
+Honeycutt is dead at last. His secret is no longer his secret. Swen
+Brodie knows something--a whole lot----"
+
+"It strikes me," frowned King, "that you know more of this than I gave
+you credit for. Where do you come in?"
+
+"I know--nearly all that it is necessary to know!" His eyes flashed
+triumphantly. "Think I'm the man to let the crowd of you lift a fortune
+right under my nose? Here is my proposition, and you'll thank your stars
+that I make it: We are not friends, you and I, but that is no reason
+that we cannot be business associates until this trick is turned. You
+and I enter into a pact right now, purely business, you understand." He
+was speaking more and more rapidly in the grip of a new emotion.
+"Whatever we find we divide, fifty-fifty;----"
+
+King's sudden laughter, no pleasant sound in Gratton's ears, checked the
+rush of words. To accept Gratton as a partner--on a fifty-fifty split of
+the spoils! Was the man crazy?
+
+"I have been working with Brodie," shouted Gratton. "If I go on with him
+now, with him and the men with him, six or eight of them taking what he
+gives them either in money or in curses and orders--if, I say, I chip
+in with him against you, what will the inevitable end be, I ask you?
+Look at the odds----"
+
+"The inevitable end," said King sternly, "will be that they'll pick your
+bones and kick you out."
+
+"I demand to know what word Gaynor sent----"
+
+"Will you have him go, Mark?" said Gloria. "He--sickens me."
+
+King, unleashed by her words, took a quick step forward.
+
+"Gratton," he said, "you'd better go."
+
+Gratton, rising to fresh fury, shouted at him:
+
+"And leave you and her here? Alone? All night----"
+
+King bore down upon him and struck him across the mouth, hurling him
+back so that Gratton tripped and fell. Gloria rose and stood watching,
+terrified and yet fascinated. She saw Gratton crawl to his feet; his
+hand went out to the table to draw himself up; it found one of the heavy
+bronze book-ends; the fingers gripped it so that the tendons stood out
+like cords. She could see the faces of both men, Gratton's twitching and
+vindictive, King's immobile, looking at once calm and terribly stern. If
+there were two Glorias within her, one of them fled now; the other
+watched with quick bright eyes and gloried in the man who had come at
+her hour of direst need; one vanished, afraid, the other felt a little
+thrill go singing through her blood. And though that bronze block, were
+it hurled at King's head, might have been the death of him, she was not
+once in doubt as to the end of this conflict. There before her eyes a
+man contended with a manikin.
+
+"Drop that, Gratton! Do you hear me? Drop it, I say!"
+
+He even drew closer while he spoke. In his voice was assurance that he
+would be obeyed; in his look was the promise of death or near-death, to
+be meted out swiftly and relentlessly for disobedience. Gratton, like a
+man in a daze, hesitated. King's hand shot out swiftly, gripping his
+wrist. There was a sudden jerk and the bit of bronze crashed to the
+floor.
+
+"You'll go now!"
+
+"Yes, I'll go. But----"
+
+"On your way, then!"
+
+"But----"
+
+"Shut up!" A tremor not to be repressed shook King's voice. "And go
+before I----Just go!"
+
+Gratton caught up his hat, stood for a moment plucking at his lip and
+staring at Gloria, and then turned and went out. Strangely, only now
+that he had gone, did Gloria shiver and look after him fearfully. The
+man here had seemed so futile and yet she had seen that last look, so
+filled with malevolence that in his wake the room seemed steeped in
+menace. King must have had somewhat the same sort of an impression; he
+went to the door and called out loudly:
+
+"Jim! Oh, Jim."
+
+Jim's voice answered from the cabin:
+
+"Comin', Mark."
+
+"Gratton's outside. I've told him to clear out. Give him about two
+minutes, and if he's still here throw a gun on him and run him off the
+place."
+
+"Oh, I'm going fast enough." From somewhere off in the dark it was
+Gratton's voice calling back hatefully. "And don't you forget it, Mark
+King, I am going where an offer like mine to you will be accepted. We'll
+be there before you yet, a dozen men that won't lay down before you! And
+you can tell that girl in there, with my compliments, she'll be on her
+knees to me before she's a day older." He lifted his voice so that
+Gloria, shivering in the silent house, must hear every word. "You can
+tell her, too, that if I didn't telephone to her mother from Oakland, I
+did call up two of the San Francisco newspaper offices! Tell her to
+watch for the papers. And when they get wind of the nice little
+situation to-night, Gloria here all night----"
+
+King had held the door open only to see if Gratton was going to his
+horse. Now, however, he slammed it suddenly and went back to Gloria.
+After all, Jim could be depended on to see to Gratton and to do his job
+thoroughly and with joy in the doing. There was still the message to be
+had from Ben Gaynor, who, it seemed, lay hurt somewhere in Coloma.
+
+But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Gloria, and for the moment
+all thoughts of Gaynor or a message fled from his mind. Again she was as
+pale as death; she caught at the back of the chair which had served her
+thus before; she lifted to King eyes sick with terror.
+
+"I haven't got the straight of things very well," King said to her,
+speaking very gently. For in his heart he was thinking: "Poor little
+kid! She's only a kid of a girl and she's pretty near the
+breaking-point, from the look of things, and small wonder." But aloud he
+continued: "Only one thing seems clear. You are tired half to death and
+worried the other half. I wouldn't let myself think of that snake
+Gratton or his poison drippings. Things will work out all right." He
+managed a smile of a sort, the first smile to-night, and added: "They
+always do, you know."
+
+"Do they?" she asked listlessly. And she, too, forced a smile, so wan
+and bleak that it came close to putting a dash of tears into King's
+eyes.
+
+"For one thing," he said brusquely, "I'll bet you haven't had a bite to
+eat since you got here; have you?" She shook her head; she hadn't
+thought of such a thing as eating. When had she eaten last? Not since
+she and Gratton, motoring up from San Francisco, had stopped at the
+wayside lunch-counter? Perhaps that was why this giddy faintness
+troubled her, why the blood drummed in her ears.
+
+"You'll sit right down," commanded King. "Or lie down is better. In two
+shakes I'll have something ready for you."
+
+"You are so good to me." That came straight from Gloria's heart; her
+eyes shone with a gratitude which struck him as far beyond proportion to
+the small deed of the moment. "I'll go upstairs a moment; papa's
+message----"
+
+"It can wait ten minutes."
+
+"Let me get it now. I--I will lie down in my room until you call me, if
+you want me to."
+
+"That's good." He watched her go slowly upstairs and then hastened to
+the kitchen. He got a wood fire going in the range, scouted for coffee,
+found a glass jar of bacon, a tin of milk, all kinds of canned goods.
+And meantime, though occupied with much speculation concerning all that
+had happened to-night and must have happened before and might happen in
+the future, he never for an instant entirely forgot Gloria and how
+pitifully borne down she looked. Gratton had tricked her some way, had
+coerced her, had come close to breaking her utterly. And yet her
+indomitable spirit had in the end triumphed over Gratton's scheming;
+King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless "No!
+No and no and no!"
+
+"Just a little kid of a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity
+of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother,
+spoiled to the _n_th degree, given no opportunity to develop her own
+character, to grow up to life's responsibilities. Her mother had not
+even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of them, making Gloria
+ashamed. Grandparents of whom any one might be justly proud; folk of
+integrity, of stamina, of fearless hardihood, men and women of that
+glorious type that builds empires. And Gloria, King sensed, was like
+them. Deep within her, under the layers of artificiality which her
+mother had striven so indefatigably and lovingly to lay on, she was like
+them. He remembered his two days with her alone in the mountains and
+sought to forget the fragment of one evening in the city. "Here she was
+her real self; there she had been what her mother had made her over."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gloria, with lagging steps, had gone to her room. Now she lay on her
+bed, her hands pressed tight upon her closed eyes, her will set against
+heeding the throbbing in her temples as she strove to think clearly.
+Gratton's words rang in her ears. They plunged her into panic. For
+scores of "friends" and hundreds of acquaintances she would furnish a
+topic of talk. Girls who were jealous of her would get into a warm
+flurry of excitement; Gloria could picture a dozen of them sitting at
+their telephones, calling up this, that, and the other Mabel and
+Ernestine, saying: "Oh, did you hear about Gloria Gaynor? Isn't it
+_terrible_! What _could_ she have been thinking of? I knew she was----"
+and so forth and so on, "ringing interminable changes." Youth, though
+declared by the thoughtless to be a period of heedlessness, takes to
+heart far more seriously than does Age all happenings which touch its
+own interests. Pure tragedy is Youth's own realm. It feels acutely, its
+imaginings are fearful, it magnifies and distorts beyond all reason. Had
+Gloria been above thirty instead of under twenty this moment would have
+been far, far less deeply immersed in the gloom of despair. She suffered
+dry-eyed.
+
+But Youth, condition of wedded extremes, while it holds tragedy to its
+bleeding heart, cannot entirely fail in time to listen to the voice of
+hope. Gloria clung passionately to the one straw offered her: Mark King
+had come; he had saved her, if only for the moment. If there were
+further salvation, it lay in Mark King. And so she came presently to a
+thought that made her sit bolt upright, that set her heart racing, that
+brought a new look into her eyes. Just now it had seemed so clear that
+only one thing could save her from clacking diatribes, from torture
+under the tongues of Ernestines and Mabels and daily newspapers--
+marriage with Gratton. But Gratton was gone and Mark King was here! If
+she married King! The "judge" was still here. King was her father's
+friend; between men like them there was nothing which would be denied
+when friendship asked. What if she went to King, saying to him
+straightforwardly: "Thus and such is my predicament. For my sake--for
+the sake of papa's daughter and hence for papa's sake no less--will you
+go through the form of marrying me? I shall be no burden; it will make
+no difference in your life. For to-morrow I will go back to San
+Francisco and you need never see me again. You can let me have a
+divorce; you will have lost nothing; I shall have been saved everything.
+Will you many me, Mark King?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Gloria!" King was calling. "Will you come down now? Everything's
+ready."
+
+"Coming," answered Gloria. "Right away."
+
+She glanced in her glass as she went out; the colour which had played
+hide-and-seek all day was again tinting her cheeks a delicate rose. What
+were fatigue and hunger when hope attended them?
+
+But it happened that Gloria's impulse, which was at least honest and
+frank, was for a little held in abeyance, and thus it came about that
+she lost the opportunity to appear before Mark King at a critical moment
+as being straight-dealing, direct, and outspoken. She thanked him with
+her eyes for the lunch he had set forth for her; she gave him a quick
+little smile as he waited on her. He poured the coffee, gave her milk
+and sugar, brought the hot things from the stove. And all of the time
+there was in his eyes a look which he had no suspicion was there, the
+look of a man's adoration.
+
+"He will do whatever I ask him to do," something sang within her.
+
+"Won't you sit down with me, Mark?" she smiled at him.
+
+And there, while one Gloria had determined to indulge in plain talk, the
+other Gloria came forward obliquely, demanding the place which had
+always been hers when it was a case of man and girl together. The smile
+was the smile of a coquette; it intoxicated; it made a man's heart beat
+hard; it brought him in close to her and thrust the world back. She
+could not have helped the smile or its message.
+
+"I have eaten," he said a trifle harshly, she thought.
+
+"You are so good to me." She stirred her coffee and he saw only the
+lashes and their black shadows on her cheeks. Then she said brightly:
+"This is our third little picnic together, isn't it?"
+
+"Then you haven't forgotten? The others?" The words said themselves for
+him. The human comedy had begun, or the comedy begun long ago was
+resumed smoothly in its third act, King unconsciously answering to his
+cue. After that it was neither Gloria nor himself who played the part of
+stage-director; that time-honoured responsibility was back in the hands
+of the oldest of all stage-managers. The wind that drives autumn leaves
+scurrying, the sun that awakens spring buds were no more resistless or
+inevitable forces than the one now voicing its dictates.
+
+"It would be--unmaidenly to ask him to marry you," whispered that other
+self within her. Oh, if she could only guess which was the _real self_,
+which the pretender! "And there is no need. Look at his eyes!"
+
+King saw lying on the table the package done up in an old cloth which
+she had brought. Further, he knew that he had seen it before and where
+he had seen it. He knew that at last he had old Loony Honeycutt's secret
+where he could put out his hand to it, with none to gainsay him. He knew
+that with it was a message from his old friend Ben; that Ben, himself,
+lay at this moment in Coloma hurt. And yet his eyes clung to the eyes of
+Gloria and all of these things were swept aside in his mind. He saw that
+when her eyes came to a meeting with his the flush in her cheeks grew
+hotter. He tried to remember how he had come away from her in San
+Francisco; how he had given her up for all time. But that memory
+blurred; in its place he stood with her on a boulder in a creek, holding
+her in his arms; he stood with her on a mountain top, with the world
+lost below them. He sought to get a grip on himself; here and now was no
+time to talk to her of love. She was alone; it was his one job right now
+to take Ben's place, to protect her and efface his own madness. But was
+he mad? And was now no time, after all? She was alone, yes; but if some
+day she would marry him, was not now the time? What would he not give
+for the right to stop the nasty mouth of Gratton once and for all.
+
+Fragmentary thoughts, by no means logically aligned. They came and went
+with other thoughts between, pro and con. But thoughts do not always
+sway destiny. In the crisis often enough there is no time for so slow a
+process as thinking; instinct leaps. Instinct compels. All of the
+thought in the world will not draw a steel needle to a bit of wood; all
+of the thought in the world will not hold back the same needle from a
+magnet. There are urges which must be obeyed, the urge of spinning
+worlds to circling suns, the urge of man to maid.
+
+"Gloria!" he said huskily. "Gloria!"
+
+"Yes, Mark?" she said quietly, trying to speak very calmly and as though
+she did not know, oh, so well, all that tumult that lay behind his
+calling her name. But despite her determination she was agitated; the
+moment had come; there was no stopping it. And did she want it? What did
+she want? What, exactly, did she feel?
+
+She knew what was in his heart! His soul exulted as the certainty rushed
+upon him. She knew what he was going to say; words were needless between
+them. And the colour merely deepened in her cheeks while she hid her
+eyes from him.
+
+He came to her swiftly. She rose as swiftly to her feet. He saw that a
+tremor shook her. He saw that she did not draw back from him; her eyes
+at last lifted to meet his own. They baffled him; he could not read
+their meaning. But they shone on him softly; they were the eyes of her
+whom he loved. Like magnet and steel they were swept together. He had
+her in his arms; he felt against his breast the wild flutter of her
+heart, against his face the soft brushing of her hair. He felt her body
+tense but unresisting in his arms; suddenly she relaxed, her head was
+against his breast. Gloria in his arms--Gloria's sweet face hidden from
+him against his rough shirt----
+
+"Gloria!" he cried again. "Gloria!"
+
+"The--the bacon!" gasped Gloria. "It's burning----"
+
+She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with
+the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from
+across the table. Then she fled to the stove and retrieved the burning
+bacon as though here were the one matter of transcendent importance.
+King began to laugh, his laughter as joyous as a boy's.
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+"That's five times you've said 'Gloria,'" she informed him hurriedly.
+"And----Please, Mark," as he moved toward her. "And you haven't read
+papa's letter yet. And--and I'm dying to know what is in that funny
+package. Aren't you?"
+
+"If I'm dying at all," he told her gravely, though he found a smile to
+answer her own--and two very serious smiles they were--"it is of quite
+another complaint. And this time----"
+
+"But _please_, Mark! I am here all alone--with you--and----"
+
+"I know. I haven't forgotten. But, Gloria----"
+
+They both started to a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch.
+Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought
+condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had
+escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the
+puckered and perplexed face of the "judge"; they were just in time to
+see a big hand grasp him by the shoulder and yank him out of sight. They
+heard Summerling expostulate; they heard Jim Spalding's far from gentle
+voice cursing him.
+
+King understood, at least in part, what must lie under Gloria's look of
+distress. Surely circumstance had placed her in an equivocal position
+to-night. Summerling was the type to blab; he was in no charitable frame
+of mind; he had found her alone here with men, had come to marry her to
+one man, and now had seen her in the arms of another. There was but one
+answer, even to Mark King.
+
+"Some time you are going to marry me, Gloria," he said gravely. "Why not
+now?"
+
+"It sounds like--like an advertisement, Mark," she laughed somewhat
+wildly.
+
+"Poor little kid," he muttered, seeing how she trembled. "But, Gloria,
+why not? Some time you are going to give yourself to me, aren't you,
+dear? While this man is still here, won't you let him marry us? It will
+give me the right to shut that fool Gratton's mouth for him and----Oh,
+Gloria, my dear, my dear----"
+
+She stood staring at him with wide eyes. He pleaded with her.
+
+"Will you, Gloria?"
+
+And then from lips which did not smile he heard the very faint but no
+longer evasive "Yes."
+
+"Now, Gloria?"
+
+"Yes, Mark. If you are sure that you want me." She spoke humbly; at the
+instant she was humble. "But," she added hastily, "still you haven't
+read poor papa's letter. He was very anxious. Let me go a minute, Mark.
+I am going upstairs. I--I want to phone to mamma first. And while I am
+gone you can read papa's letter, and--and----" Her face was hot with
+blushes.
+
+"And arrange with the judge," he said, his own voice uncertain. "Yes,
+Gloria."
+
+She ran by him then. He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door
+closing after her. Then like a man who treads on air he went to the
+window and threw it up and called:
+
+"Jim! Tell the judge not to go. I have business with him. I want him and
+you here in ten minutes."
+
+And then when Jim's voice had answered him he thought to take up the
+parcel on the table--largely because Gloria had asked him! A hurried
+letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt's. Something here for
+which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only
+because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to
+bend them to a letter--this was in the beginning an effort. But Ben's
+words caught him when he had read the first line. He had opened the
+packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a
+Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone;
+Gaynor's letter was slipped into it:
+
+    "DEAR MARK:
+
+    "Honeycutt's dead. I've got his secret. But Brodie came
+    near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got
+    there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the
+    "parson's" and then Gus Ingle's. As I was going out of
+    the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me.
+    In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not
+    see; it was just that near! They came close to killing
+    me; when I came to I found they'd been through my
+    pockets. I don't know how much Brodie knows. I do know
+    he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook. I think you
+    can beat them to it, hands down. And, for God's sake,
+    Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don't let the
+    grass grow! I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy;
+    laid up this way I don't see a chance unless you find
+    what we've been after so long _and find it quick_. Will
+    you start without any delay? As soon as you get this
+    phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma. Leave word for me. And
+    let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you!
+    Then I won't go crazy here with worry. And watch out for
+    Gratton as well as Brodie.
+
+    "BEN."
+
+A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old
+excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove
+and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in
+a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace
+left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful
+labourings, was the "secret" at last--Gus Ingle's message come to him
+across the dead years:
+
+    "Good god I never see such gold nor no man neither and
+    when he come in to camp you could reed in his look he
+    had found it because no man could have looked at that
+    Mother load and not look like Jimmy. And big Brodie
+    grabbed him by the throat and shook him and nearly
+    killed him until Jimmy told. And I guess there was
+    enough there for everybody in all the world. We went
+    down the gorge to the narrow place over on the big
+    seedar that had broke off and that was how we come to
+    the First Caive, and then we come to Caive number thre
+    and two. And good god have mercy on my soul when Ime
+    dead but I got the thought right then if it was only all
+    mine--we worked all seven until we dropped that day and
+    night and early in the morning and the storm was coming
+    but we stayed. And for two weeks maybe thre we lost
+    track of time until this grate big pile of gold was dug
+    that I am setting right on top of right now how can a
+    man eat gold when he is dying of hunger and burn it when
+    he is freezing. And it was big Brodie killed pore Manny
+    I seen him and the next day or maybe it was two days
+    Dago was gone and never come back was it Manny's goast
+    got him and drug him down the cliffs screaming horrible
+    and in the gorge--anyway that was Two. and I am all that
+    is left and I am going--I tride to get out and the Big
+    storm drov me back and all I can see is Jimmy Kelp and
+    the parson if I had not of killed them they would killed
+    me sure and big Brodie's gone he is crazy and cant never
+    make it back across the mountains in this storm, and
+    Baldy Winch he took a big nugget and went off, and he
+    stoled what handful of grub there was. And now I can
+    look down in the gorge and see the water all white and
+    snow and ice sickles and I am afraide to get lost in the
+    caives and if I write all this in the bible that was
+    preacher Elsons and tie it up safe in oilcloath and
+    canvas and make a bote out of a chunk of wood and throw
+    it in the river maybe it will get to one of the camps
+    down there and a good man will find it and Ile give him
+    half. You come up the old trail past where the thre
+    Eytalians had their camp last year and over the big
+    mountain strate ahead and about another seven miles
+    strate on and then there is the pass with the big black
+    rocks on one side and streaks of white granite on the
+    other and down into the gorge and strate up four or five
+    miles where the old seedar broke off and fell acrost. My
+    god here goes.
+
+    "GUS INGLE."
+
+To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark
+King, Gus Ingle's message would have brought only stupefaction. But to
+King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the "secret" lay bare. Old names
+held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as
+Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River
+then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.
+
+"What is more," he thought triumphantly, "I know where two caves are in
+there. But where the devil is 'Caive thre'?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were
+steps on the porch. Jim and the "judge" were coming----
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XV_
+
+
+"It strikes me," said Summerling sarcastically, "that there's mighty
+funny goings-on here to-night. I show up to marry one man to a girl and
+nex' thing I know I peek in a winder and see----"
+
+"Never mind that," cut in King hastily. "You are going to marry her
+after all. Only to another man."
+
+"Meanin' you, Mark?" demanded Jim. On his honest old face was a look of
+utter bewilderment; for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he or
+every one else had gone crazy.
+
+King flushed under the look, but nodded and managed a calm "Yes, Jim."
+
+Summerling cleared his throat and thereafter scratched his head.
+
+"It's irregular. I told Gratton that. But he said there was--was
+extenuatin' circumstances and all that. Hadn't been time for a licence.
+It's irregular; don't know as I mightn't get in trouble for it----"
+
+"The marriage would be binding, wouldn't it?" demanded King.
+
+"Sure it would; once I said 'man and wife' nary man could set _that_
+aside. But, if any one wanted to get _me_ in bad, seeing there's no
+licence--well, it would make trouble with my bondsmen and they'd make
+trouble with me."
+
+King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the
+living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should
+hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had
+undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then,
+"either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself
+will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"
+
+"Gratton promised me a hundred dollars," muttered the "judge." "And he
+cleared out without taking the trouble to pay me."
+
+King's face cleared. His cheque for a hundred dollars decided the
+"judge."
+
+"That's a might of money to pay the old duffer for one night's work,
+Mark," muttered Jim. "Strikes me that way, anyhow."
+
+A might of money! King laughed.
+
+"Now if you folks are ready," said Summerling, grown impatient the
+moment the cheque was in his pocket, "I've got a long ride ahead of me."
+
+This time Gloria did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase
+to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a
+thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking--she, too,
+remembered--how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him;
+she put out her two hands to him as she had done that other time. And
+right there they were married--on Gus Ingle's old Bible.
+
+"It's done!" whispered Mark, bending over her. "You are mine now; mine
+for all time, Gloria. And, girl of mine," he added reverently, "may God
+deal with me as I deal with you."
+
+"It's done!" In an awed little voice came Gloria's response, like an
+echo. Mark King had seen her across the quicksands.
+
+Jim and the "judge" had gone. They two were alone in the still house.
+Gloria was nervous; King could see that and thought that he understood.
+So he went for wood, made a cheery blaze in the fireplace, and drew two
+chairs up to it.
+
+"Tell me about papa's letter," said Gloria hastily Had there not been
+that obvious topic she would have caught at another, any other. "He
+didn't tell me how badly he was hurt or what had happened."
+
+King put out his hand for hers, and while Gloria looked into the fire
+and he looked into her face, he told her. At the end he brought out Gus
+Ingle's Bible and read to her what was written in it. All the time that
+his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But
+by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of
+her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay
+this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of treachery
+and lonely death.
+
+"And you know where it is?"
+
+"I can go to it as straight as a string. Two days to get to it and to
+stake a claim; two days to come out with a couple of horses loaded to
+the guards. And that itself means a fortune, if it's clean, raw gold, as
+would seem to be the case. We need not fear the poorhouse, you and I,
+Mrs. King!"
+
+"But Brodie? And Mr. Gratton?"
+
+"They don't know where it is! They can't know, since we've got the
+Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they
+would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before
+dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if
+they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have
+lost the game!"
+
+"You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"
+
+"He wanted me to telephone as soon as I got this." He rose, lingering
+over her. "We mustn't forget him, even for our own happiness." He
+brushed her hair with his lips; he hastened the few steps to the
+telephone in Ben's study.
+
+"I--I am going upstairs, Mark," called Gloria after him.
+
+"All right, Queen of the World," he answered her. "I'm just to phone in
+a message for him. It won't take me five minutes to get it done; just to
+say: 'Tell Ben that I start at dawn and that he's got my word for it
+that nothing's going to stop me! And--that I've just married Gloria!'"
+
+But he was at the telephone longer than he thought to be. The operator
+buzzed into his ear as he took down the receiver; San Francisco was
+trying to get a message through. For Gloria Gaynor. Would he take the
+message? Then an operator in San Francisco, droning the words: "For Miss
+Gloria Gaynor. Your father is hurt in Coloma. Just sent me word. Says
+not dangerously, but I must go to him immediately. Meet me there.
+Mamma."
+
+"Got it," said King, and San Francisco rang off. Thereafter he got his
+own message through; he wondered how Mrs. Gaynor would take the news of
+her new son-in-law. Ben would be glad; he was sure of Ben.
+
+Gloria was still upstairs. King sat in front of the fire, staring into
+the flames, listening to the wind in the chimney, waiting for Gloria.
+When time passed and she did not come, he went softly upstairs and to
+her door. It was closed and he knocked lightly, then dropped his hand to
+the knob, awaiting her voice.
+
+His knuckles had hardly brushed the door, this door which he approached
+in reverence; Gloria had not even heard him. He called softly, his voice
+little above a whisper:
+
+"Gloria!"  He heard her move; for a moment she did not answer. He could
+not know how she stood, scarcely breathing, her hands at her breast; nor
+how, now that the great step was taken, she was again half-frightened,
+half-regretful, altogether bewildered and uncertain. Of herself, of him,
+of everything----
+
+"Is it you, Mark?"
+
+"Yes. May I come in, Gloria?"
+
+"Please, Mark. It's all so new, so strange ... I intended to come right
+back downstairs, but I'm so tired, Mark. And I want to be alone a
+little; to think. I haven't had time to think of anything! You don't
+mind, do you, Mark?"
+
+He answered promptly and heartily, refusing to allow himself to harbour
+a shadow of disappointment.
+
+"No. No, of course not. You will go right to bed? I know you must be
+half-dead for sleep."
+
+"Yes." There was a note of eagerness in the voice coming to him from
+beyond the shut door.
+
+"There was a message from your mother; she has gone to your father and
+wanted you to meet her there. But we will talk of that later."
+
+"Yes.... Good-night, Mark."
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss me good-night?" he asked, hesitating a little
+between the words. His new privilege, a lover's, a husband's, was not an
+hour old; he felt strangely shy as he spoke softly to her.
+
+"Please, Mark! I am terribly tired out, and--and I'm afraid I've mislaid
+the key, and----"
+
+That hurt him; his eyes darkened with the quick pain that came to him
+from her words. He had hoped that Gloria had known him better than that.
+
+"You need never lock your door against me, my dear," he told her gently.
+"I don't want you to be afraid of me. Why, God bless you, I wouldn't
+touch the hem of your dress if you didn't want me to."
+
+"Yes," said Gloria. "I know. You are so good, Mark. But now----"
+
+"I am going," he returned tenderly, "to sit by the fire and think. Just
+to soak myself in the realization," he added with a happy laugh, "that
+you are mine."
+
+"Before you go in the morning you will come to my door?"
+
+"If you want me to...."
+
+"Of course, Mark."
+
+"Then--good-night, dear."
+
+"Good-night, Mark."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVI_
+
+
+King was astir long before dawn. He got the fire going in the kitchen
+and started breakfast, seeking to be very silent and succeeding in
+making the usual clatter of a male among pots and pans. Whilst water
+heated and bacon sizzled, he rummaged through the store-room at the rear
+of the house, gathering what he meant to put into his pack for the four
+or five days' trip. As he returned from the last journey to the
+store-room, his arms full of camp accessories, including canvas and camp
+blankets, he confronted Gloria, fully dressed. He dropped his arm-load
+and filled his eyes with her. Any shadow left overnight in his heart was
+sent scurrying before his new joyousness. Gloria had come down to him
+while he deemed her fast asleep!
+
+"Gloria!" he cried.
+
+A more radiantly lovely Gloria he had never looked upon. She had slept
+and rested; she had bathed and groomed and set herself in order. She was
+dressed after a fashion to bewilder a mere man in the only utterly
+ravishing outing costume Mark King had ever seen. He felt insanely
+inclined to pick up her little boots, one after the other, and go down
+on his knees and kiss them; her hat was a flopsy turban, from under the
+brim of which the most adorable of golden-brown curls half escaped to
+throw kiss-shadows on her rosy cheeks. And Gloria's eyes!
+
+This time there was no door between them, nor even the memory of a
+door. He gathered her up into his arms so that her boot-heels swung
+clear of the floor.
+
+"Do you know ... do you guess ... have you the faintest suspicion how I
+love you?"
+
+"The--the coffee!" gasped Gloria. "It's boiling over!"
+
+He laughed joyously at that, and finally, when he had set her down,
+Gloria, bright and flushed, laughed too.
+
+"Burning bacon last night, boiling coffee this morning!" he chuckled.
+And then, there in the kitchen, they sat down to breakfast. "It's sweet
+of you," he told her softly, "to get up and come down and see me off."
+
+"Oh," said Gloria, "I am going with you."
+
+Not once had King dared think of a thing like that. He had thought that
+at best he would be with her again in four or five days. But that she
+should go with him into the mountains on this quest of his? He sat and
+pondered and stared at her.
+
+"Don't you want me?" asked Gloria. "Aren't you glad, Mark?"
+
+She was serenely prepared for objections, should they be forthcoming.
+For it was not on any spur of the moment, but after long deliberation,
+that she had decided that she would go with him. She wanted no scandal
+in the papers; she meant that there should be none. If it were rumoured
+that she had gone out of town with Gratton; if Gratton wanted to be ugly
+and feed rumour; then on top of that if she appeared within reach of a
+reporter without a husband, there would be talk. If it were answered
+that she was married to Mark King, there would be the question: "And
+where, my dear, is this Mark King?" Those girl friends in San Francisco
+who had met him at her birthday-party would be fairly squirming with
+excited curiosity to know _everything_. Among themselves they would make
+insinuations about the Bear Tamer or the Animal Trainer, as Gloria knew
+that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find
+it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next
+without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they
+would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork
+of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation.... From
+upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the
+"judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake
+outright, not to allow the scotched reptile to writhe free. She was
+married; she was going with her husband into the wilderness on the most
+romantic of all honeymoons. The papers were free to make much of that.
+
+"Of course I want you," said King slowly. "Glad? Glad that you want to
+come with me? Can't you see that I am the gladdest man on earth?
+But----"
+
+"I have already written a message I wanted to send to a girl friend in
+San Francisco...." It was to Miss Mildred Carter, who was engaged to be
+married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_.... "I was going to have it
+phoned in to her. It tells her I'm--married. To you, Mark. And that
+we're off on the most wonderful trip together into the heart of the wild
+country."
+
+"God bless you," he said heartily. But Gloria, glancing at him swiftly,
+saw that his eyes were clouded with perplexity.
+
+"Of course," she said, "if you don't want a girl along----"
+
+"Gloria!"
+
+"Well, then? It's settled? I'm to go?"
+
+"Only I'm afraid it isn't the sort of a trip for a girl. It's hard
+going, and--Oh, it's a cursed shame I can't put it off."
+
+"You said last night that you weren't afraid of anything Brodie and his
+men could do? That they didn't even know where to go? That they'd never
+know where to find you?"
+
+"Yes. And I meant it. But----"
+
+He wanted her with him; she wanted to come. Further, it pained him to
+think that those first glorious days should be spent with the mountains
+between them. He was tempted, sorely tempted. Gloria knew; she smiled
+at him across the table; she tempted him further. ...Was there really
+any danger, would there be danger to her? If he thought so, that there
+was the faintest likelihood of harm to her, he would say no, no matter
+what the yearning in his heart. But if they made a quick dash in and
+out; two days each way, not over one day at Gus Ingle's caves? If they
+went on horseback nearly all the way, and travelled light? He carried a
+rifle nowadays, and he rather believed he might carry it ten years
+without ever firing a shot at any man of their hulking crowd. They could
+go in one way, come out another. They had at least a full day's head
+start of any possible followers. No, in his heart he did not believe
+that there would be any danger to Gloria. Further, the thought struck
+him that she would not be altogether safe here; there was venom in
+Gratton, God only knew how virulent. And there was sinister significance
+in the fact that Gratton was hand in glove now with Swen Brodie. Then,
+too, Gratton knew from Gloria's own lips that she had brought the
+message from her father in Coloma; hence Gratton might suspect, and
+Brodie after him, that Gloria was in possession of old Loony Honeycutt's
+secret. Instead of seeming hazardous to take Gloria with him, it began
+to appear that his new responsibility of guarding her from all harm had
+begun already, and that he could best protect her from any possible evil
+by having her always with him. He could not allow her to go to her
+parents in Coloma; he thought of that, but that was Brodie's hangout,
+and Ben was in no condition to send for her. Nor was it advisable for
+her to go alone to San Francisco; her mother was not there, and Gratton
+might be looked on to follow her....So with himself communed Mark King,
+never a man overly given to caution, but seeking now to measure chances,
+to set them in the scales over against the desire of his heart. A
+fanciful thought insisted on being heard: had Gus Ingle's treasure
+hidden itself all these years, awaiting the time when he and Gloria
+together came to it? Their wedding gift! How much more precious then
+than mere gold!
+
+"We'd travel light," he said thoughtfully, and Gloria knew that she had
+won. "We'd go in quick, out quick. It's getting late in the year," he
+added with a smile, "and we'd have to hurry, Brodie or no Brodie. I've
+no notion for a prolonged honeymoon snow-bound in those mountains."
+
+Her eyes danced.
+
+"Wouldn't that be fun!"
+
+His smile quickened. Her childish ignorance of what such an adventure
+would mean was in keeping with her vast inexperience with matters of the
+outdoors; she had merely begun, in his company, to glimpse the true
+meanings of the solitudes. She would learn further--with him. And a warm
+glow of pleasure came with the thought that Gloria wanted to go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The pearl-grey dawn was flowering into a still pink morning when they
+locked the door behind them and stepped out into the crisp, sweet
+freshness of the autumn air. He had made two small packs, provisions
+rolled into the bedding and the whole wrapped in pieces of canvas; he
+estimated they would be gone five days, and then, making due allowance
+for any reasonable delay, provisioned for ten. When he saw that Gloria
+had noted how for the first time on a woodland jaunt with her he carried
+a very businesslike-looking rifle, he explained laughingly that if they
+developed abnormal appetites there were both deer and bear to be had.
+She was much interested in everything, and looked out to the mountains
+eagerly when King had swung her up to her saddle on Blackie, the tall,
+sober-faced horse, where she sat with a roll of blankets at her back and
+with the horn before her decorated with a miscellany of camp
+equipment--a frying-pan, a short-handled axe in its sheath, an overcoat
+done into a compact bundle. Here was another moment when thoughts were
+too slow processes to emphasize themselves; she was swayed by emotions
+provoked by the moment. Where were the trunks and suitcases and
+hat-boxes to accompany the young bride? In their stead, a coat tied into
+a tight bundle and a frying-pan before her. King looked at her and
+marvelled; her cheeks were roses, her eyes were Gloria's own, wonderful
+and big and deep beyond fathoming. From his own saddle on the buckskin
+he nodded his approval of her.
+
+"You are not afraid that I can't take care of you, are you, Gloria?" he
+asked.
+
+And Gloria laughed gaily, answering:
+
+"My dear Mr. Man, I am not the least little bit afraid of anything in
+all the world this morning!"
+
+So with the glorious day brightening all about them they turned away
+from the log house and into the trail which straightway King dubbed
+"Adventure Trail." And as they went he sang out joyously:
+
+ "The Lord knows what we'll find, dear heart, and the deuce knows what
+      we'll do.
+  But we're back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
+  And Life runs large on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVII_
+
+
+The magnificent wilderness into which rode Mark and Gloria King seemed
+to prostrate its august self to do them honour upon this their wedding
+morning. Succeeding the paler tints of the earlier hour came the rare
+blue day. Last night's clouds had vanished; the air was clear and crisp,
+with still a hint of frost. On all hands had October in passing splashed
+the world with colour. Along the creek the aspens danced and played and
+shivered in bright golden raiment; through the bushes there was a
+glimpse of vivid scarlet where the leaves of a dwarf maple were as
+bright as snow-plants. A little grove of gracefully slender poplars
+trembled in yellow against the azure above. The clear, thin sunlight
+pricked out colours until it made the woods a riot of them, greens dark
+and light, the grey of sage, the white of a granite seam, the black of a
+lava rock, and in the creek spray a brilliant vari-coloured rainbow
+sheen. They two, riding side by side, while the broad trail permitted,
+passed over the ridge and out of sight of the house. Immediately the
+solitudes shut down about them with titanic walls. They rode down into a
+long, shadowy hollow, out through a tiny verdant meadow fringed with the
+rusty brown of sunflower leaves, and on up to the crest of the second
+ridge. Already they were alone in the world, a man and his mate, with
+only infinity and its concrete symbols embracing them, ancient and
+ageless trees, limitless sky, mile after mile of ridge and precipice and
+barren peak. And upon them and about them and within them the utter
+serene hush of the Sierra.
+
+With every swinging step of the horses taking them on, a new gladness
+blossomed in King's heart. For they were pushing ever further into the
+portion of the world which he knew best, loved best. The present left
+him nothing to wish for; he had Gloria, and Gloria had elected to come
+with him. Until high noon they would wind along, for the most part
+climbing pretty steadily with the old trail--Indian trail, miners'
+trail, trail which even to-day seems to lead from the first generation
+of the twentieth century straight back into the heart of 1850 and
+beyond. Here men did not penetrate save at long intervals; here was true
+solitude. And soon, when they should leave this trail to travel as
+straight a line as the broken country would allow toward Gus Ingle's
+caves, they would enter a region given over entirely to the wild's own
+bright-eyed, shy inhabitants.
+
+There were red spots in Gloria's cheeks when they started. King sought
+to guess at what might be the emotions of a young girl going on with
+Gloria's present emotional adventure--vain task of a mere man seeking to
+fathom those troubled feminine depths!--marking that she was a little
+nervous and distrait.
+
+"I know the place Gus Ingle tried to describe," he said, "as well as I
+know my old hat. Or at least I'd have said so until he mentioned the
+third cave. I've been there dozens of times, too, but I've got to see
+more than two caves there yet."
+
+Together they had read the crabbed lines in the Bible; they had been
+silent thereafter as to each came imagined pictures like ghosts from the
+past; ghosts of greed and envy and despair. Now Gloria mused aloud:
+
+"I wonder--do you suppose we'll find it as he says?"
+
+"At least we'll see about it. And whether there be heaps and piles of
+red, red gold, as the tale telleth, be sure our trip is going to be
+worth the two days' ride. I'll show you such chasms and gorges and crags
+as you've never turned those two lovely eyes of yours upon, Mrs. Gloria
+King." (He couldn't abstain absolutely from all love-making.) "And a
+little grove of sequoias which belongs to me. Or, at least, I believe I
+am the only man who knows where they are. Friends of mine, those big
+fellows are, five old noble-souled monarchs."
+
+She looked interested and treated him to a fleeting smile, but asked
+curiously:
+
+"How can a man speak of a tree that way? As though it were alive--" She
+broke off, laughing, and amended: "But they _are_ alive, aren't they? I
+mean--human."
+
+"Why, you poor little city-bred angel," he cried heartily. "You will
+answer your own question inside of two days. No doubt I'm going to grow
+jealous of old Vulcan and Thor and Majesty. Sure, I've named them," he
+chuckled. "And you'll come with me into their dim cathedral to-morrow at
+dusk and listen with me to their old sermon. A man ought to go to church
+to them at least once a year, to keep his soul cleaned out and growing
+properly."
+
+Gloria appeared thoughtful; that she was interested just now less in
+that of which he spoke than in the man himself he did not suspect. She
+was noting how he spoke of trees as friends; how he was different from
+other men whom she knew in that he stood so much closer to the ancient
+mother, the wilderness now embracing them. Instinctively she knew that
+it behoved her to penetrate as deeply as she might into the inner nature
+of this man who, hardly more than a pleasant, attractive stranger
+yesterday, was to-day her husband.
+
+"What is the oldest thing in the world?" he asked her abruptly.
+
+She wrinkled her brows prettily at him.
+
+"Church to-morrow evening and school now?" she countered lightly.
+
+"Answer," insisted King. "Just at a rough guess what would you say was
+the oldest thing in the world?"
+
+Gloria cudgelled her brains. Finally, since he seemed quite serious, and
+she knew that wisdom lay in pleasing the male of the species in small
+and unimportant matters, she sought to reply.
+
+"The Sphinx or the Pyramids, I'd guess," she offered.
+
+"Naturally," he returned. "And what will you say when I introduce you to
+the Pharaoh who was a big, husky giant before Thebes was thought of?"
+
+Again she looked to see a twinkle of jest in his eyes.
+
+"Pharaoh?" she said. "Just a tree? Over two or three thousand years
+old!"
+
+"By at least another thousand," he rejoined triumphantly. "And as
+staunch an old gentleman as you'll find."
+
+Even Gloria, a poor little city-bred angel, must muse upon the
+statement. Having caught her interest he told her picturesquely of his
+old friends; how they had dwelt on serenely while peoples were born and
+empires rose and fell; while Rome smote Greece and both went down in the
+dust; while Columbus pushed his three boats across the seas; while the
+world itself passed from one phase to another; how they were all but
+co-eternal with eternity.
+
+"When you think how these old fellows were a thousand years old when the
+Christ was a little boy," he ended simply, "you will begin to realize
+the sort of things they have a way of saying to you while you lie still
+and look up and up, and still up among their branches that seem at
+night to brush against the stars."
+
+She let her fancies drift in the leash of his. But again they left the
+picturesque ancient trees and returned to him. A little smile touched
+her lips and was gone before he was sure of it; she was thinking that a
+man like King kept always in his heart something of the simplicity of a
+little child; she wondered if she herself, though so much younger in
+actual years, were not worlds more sophisticated. For his part King
+noted that she displayed to-day none of that chattering, singing gaiety
+of their former rides together; he remembered, sympathetically, that she
+had had very little sleep last night, and that she had endured a
+wearisome twenty-four hours before, and that the long, nervous strain
+under which she had struggled must certainly have told upon her, both
+physically and mentally. So, believing that she would be grateful for
+silence, he grew silent with her.
+
+Further and ever further into the heart of the solitudes they rode
+through the quiet hours of the forenoon, with Gloria ever more
+abstracted and Mark King holding apart from her, doing her reverence,
+drinking always deep of that soft, sweet beauty which was hers. They
+forsook the creeks where the yellow-leaved aspens fluttered their myriad
+little gleaming banners; they made slow, zigzag work of climbing a
+flinty-sided mountain; they looked back upon green meadow and gay poplar
+grove far below; they galloped their horses across a wide table-land
+over which shrilled the wind, already sharpened by the season for the
+work it had to do before many weeks passed. Though there were some few
+level spaces, though now and then as King sought for her the easier way
+they rode down short slopes, with every mile put behind them they had
+climbed perceptibly. Already Gloria had the sensation of being by the
+world forgotten--though for her the world could not be forgot. A ridge
+from which they looked out across the peaks and valleys seemed to her
+like an island, lost, remote, eternally set apart from other people
+whom she knew, from all her life as she had lived it. She went on and on
+and felt like one in a dream, journeying into a fierce, rugged land over
+which lay a spell of enchantment, a spell that had been cast over it
+before King's all but immortal trees had burst from the seeds, so that
+now, while the outside world pulsed and beat with life, and swung back
+and forth with its pendulous progress, here all was unchanged,
+changeless.
+
+King led her, well before midday, to the spot in which from the first he
+had planned that they would noon. A forest pool ringed with boulders,
+which were green with moss under the splashing of the water from above,
+where the swaying pines mirrored themselves and shivered in the little
+breeze which ruffled the clear, cold water. Here was a tiny upland
+meadow and much rich grass; here a sheltered spot where Gloria might sit
+in the sun and be protected from the colder air.
+
+He was quick to help her to dismount and noted that she came down
+stiffly; the eyes which she turned to him were heavy with fatigue; some
+of the rose flush had faded from her cheeks.
+
+"Maybe I shouldn't have let you come after all, dear," he said
+contritely. "These are harder trails than we've ridden before, and we've
+had to keep at it steadier."
+
+There was an effort in her smile answering him.
+
+"The last two days _have_ been hard to get through with," she said as
+she yielded to his insistence and sat down on the sun-warmed
+pine-needles. "I am sorry I am so--so----"
+
+He did not allow her to run down the elusive word.
+
+"Nonsense," he told her heartily. "You've got a right to be tired. But
+when you've had some hot lunch and a cup of hot coffee you'll be tip-top
+again. You'll see."
+
+King unsaddled and tethered the horses where they could browse and rest
+and roll; built his little fire and went about lunch-getting with a joy
+he had never known in the old accustomed routine before. Now and then he
+glanced toward Gloria; he could not help that. But he saw that she was
+lying back, her eyes closed, and while his heart went out to her he did
+not force his sympathy on her. She was tired and, what was more, she had
+every right and reason to be tired. He hoped that she might get three
+winks of sleep. When he came near her for the coffee-pot he tiptoed. She
+seemed to be asleep.
+
+But Gloria was not asleep. Never had her mind raced so. It was done and
+she was Mark King's wife! Higher and higher loomed that fact above all
+other considerations. But there were other considerations; her father
+hurt, she did not know how badly; her mother mystified, by now perhaps
+informed of Gloria's marriage; Gratton with the poison extracted from
+his fangs had the fangs still; gold ahead somewhere, in caves where men
+long ago had laboured and fought and snarled at one another like
+starving wolves and died; Brodie somewhere, Brodie with the horrible
+face. She shivered and stirred restlessly, and King, who saw everything,
+thought that she had dreamed a bad dream. But lunch was ready; he came
+to her with plate and cup. And again Gloria did her best to smile
+gratefully.
+
+"You are so good to me, Mark," she said. Her eyes were thoughtful; would
+he always be good to her? Even when--but she was too weary to think. It
+seemed to her that only now was she beginning to feel the effects of all
+she had been through.
+
+"I want to learn how to be good to you, wife of mine," he said very
+gently. "That is all on earth I ask. Just to make you happy."
+
+"You love me so much, Mark?" she asked, as one who wondered at what she
+had read in his low voice and glimpsed in his eyes.
+
+"Gloria," he told her gently, "I don't understand this thing they call
+love yet; it is too new, too wonderful. But I do know that in all the
+world there is nothing else that matters."
+
+"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold?" she said rather more lightly than
+she had spoken.
+
+"Not even Gus Ingle's red, red gold."
+
+She looked at him long and curiously.
+
+"You would do anything you could to make me happy? Anything, Mark?"
+
+"I pray with all my heart and soul that I always may!"
+
+Gloria seemed to rest through the noon hour and to brighten. When she
+saw him the second time look at the sun she got up from the ground and
+said:
+
+"Time to go on? I'm ready. And after that banquet I feel all _me_
+again!"
+
+He laughed and went off after the horses, singing at the top of his
+voice. She stood very still, looking off after him, her brows puckering
+into a shadowy frown. Oh, if she could only read herself as he allowed
+her to read him; if she could only be as sure of Gloria as she was of
+Mark; if she could only look deep into her heart as she looked into his.
+But she could not! His heart was like the clear pool just yonder across
+which the sunshine lay and far down in which she could see the stones
+and pebbles as through so much clear glass; hers was like the rushing
+stream above, eddying and swirling and hiding itself under its own light
+spray. All day long she had tried to see what lay under the surface.
+_Did she love Mark King_? She had thrilled to him as she had thrilled to
+no other man; but that had been in the springtime. Twice then she had
+been sure that she loved him. But that was so long ago. And now that she
+had allowed him to carry her out of the quicksands? What now? She was so
+borne down by all that she had lived through; he was so much a part of
+the mountainous solitudes towering about them. And was she one to love
+the wilderness--for long? Or did it not begin to bear down upon her
+uncertain spirit? Did it not menace and frighten and, in the end, would
+it not repel? Oh, if she had only let him go on alone this morning; if
+she had remained where she could rest and think and thus come to see
+clearly, even into her own troubled heart!
+
+Their first hour after lunch led them through a region which, given
+over to silence itself, denied them any considerable opportunity for
+conversation. King rode ahead, turning off to the left from their
+resting-place by the pool, and riding through a sea of grey brush,
+following a narrow trail made by deer. Then the mountain-side reared its
+barrier and made all forward and upward progress slow and toilsome.
+Three times they dismounted and King led the horses; here Gloria clung
+to the steep mountain-side, looking fearfully down into the monster
+gorge carved at its base, dwelling with fascinated fancies on the
+thought of slipping, losing handhold and foothold and plunging down
+among the jagged boulders strewing the lower levels. There was really no
+great danger, she told herself over and over; King's cheery calls
+reassured her; no danger so long as they went forward on foot. But now
+and then when a horse's foot slipped and a wild cascade of loose soil
+and rocks went hurtling downward, she grew rigid with apprehension.
+
+But there was only an hour of this. Thereafter they rode down a long
+slope and into a long, narrow, twisting ravine, rocky cliffs on one hand
+and a noisy stream on the other, a fair trail underfoot. Nearly always
+now King rode ahead, finding the way for her; and Gloria, her spirits
+drooping again with the advancing afternoon, vaguely oppressed by the
+solemn stillness about her, was glad that she too could be silent. When
+he did call to her she needed only nod or smile; he turned to point out
+some rare view that appealed to him, a vista worth her seeing, a cascade
+or a fall of cliff, or a ferny nook, or perhaps a late ceanothus-
+blossom. He pointed out a scampering Douglas squirrel and had her
+hearken to a quail.
+
+"We're already in the finest timber belt in the world," he told her,
+full of enthusiastic loyalty to his beloved mountains.
+
+Thus, he leading the way, she following with head down and shoulders
+drooping, they came about four o'clock to a small meadow, cliff-ringed,
+studded with big yellow pines and here and there graced with an incense
+cedar. Stopping in the open, sitting sideways in the saddle, he waited
+for her.
+
+"And what do you think of this, Miss Gloria?" he called gaily as her
+horse thrust his black nose through the alders down by the creek.
+
+Gloria drew rein and looked at him with large eyes across the twenty
+paces separating them.
+
+"I can't go any further," she said bleakly. "I'm tired out!"
+
+He was quick to see a gathering of tears, and swung down from his horse
+and went to her with long strides, his own eyes filled with concern.
+
+"Poor little kidlet," he said humbly. "I've let you do yourself up...."
+
+And it was his duty, his privilege, and no one's else in the world, to
+shelter her, to stand between her and all hardship. He put out his arms
+to take her into them quite as he could have picked up a little maid of
+six, something stirring in the depths of him which in man is twin to the
+maternal instinct in woman. But Gloria said hurriedly: "Please, Mark, I
+am so tired ..." and drew back, and he let his hands fall to his side.
+For a second time her act hurt him; her gesture was akin to locking a
+door last night. But in a moment, his pity and loyalty and staunch faith
+in her crowding the small ache out of his heart, he was unrolling a
+pack, making a temporary couch for her and commanding her lovingly just
+to lie down and look up at the tree-tops above her, and rest while he
+staked out the horses. Sensing that perhaps the very bigness and
+majestic silence of these uplands might rest heavy upon her spirit and
+perhaps depress if not actually awake in her an emotion akin to fear, he
+strove to cheer her by his own blithe acceptance of the fortune of the
+hour. He told her heartily that she had earned a rest if any one ever
+had; that it was well, after all, to get an early start at pitching
+camp; that he was going to make his lady-love as cosy here in his big
+outdoor home as was ever princess in castle walls. Gloria shivered and
+threw herself face down on the blankets. Gloria did not know what
+possessed her; she fought for repression, hiding her face from him. Out
+of a hideously stern world a black spirit had leaped upon her; it
+clutched at her throat, it dragged at her heart. When King called a
+cheery word from beyond the thicket where he had gone with the horses,
+she could have screamed. She was so nervous that now and again a fierce
+tremor shook her from head to foot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King was counting it fortunate that they were granted so likely a camp
+site for the night. He looked up at the tall black cliffs shutting in
+the little meadow; they would hold back the night winds from Gloria. He
+chose the spot, well back from the creek, where she would sleep. High
+overhead, like brooding giants, stood the upright pines. Where a little
+clump of mere youngsters, lusty fellows not a score of years old, had
+the air of pressing close together as though thus with their combined
+strength they sought to match the strength of their aloof parents, a
+compact grove to make a further shelter against the mountain air, Gloria
+would sleep. He stretched a strip of canvas from tree to tree, making a
+five-foot wall of it. Close by he started his fire, knowing from
+experience oft repeated how a cheery blaze in the forest may dispel
+shadows within even as it makes the sombrest of shadows dance gaily
+under the trees; to one side he laid many resinous faggots, planning on
+their crackling light later on when the dark came. He ringed his fire
+with rocks, lugging them as heavy as he could carry up from the creek
+side, making the rudest of fireplaces. But it had the merit that it
+threw the heat back toward his extended canvas, and there between it
+would be snug and warm. All about him, as he laboured, was the singing
+of water and, high in air, the singing of pine tops. They made merry
+music and King, gone down to the stream to fill his coffee-pot, sang
+with it from a full, brimming heart. Gloria was tired, but she was
+resting now. And in a little while, when dark came, he and she would sit
+by his fire and look into it and talk in hushed voices, hand locked in
+hand; they would watch for the first of the big blazing stars to come
+out--he and Gloria, alone in the wilderness.
+
+He saw a trout swinging lazily in a quiet pool. Trout for Gloria! He
+glanced toward where she lay; he was glad that she was not looking. It
+would be a surprise for her. He hurried to his kit in his pack, got out
+hook and line, baited with a tiny bit of red flannel, and went back to
+the creek. For he knew that it was not likely that the trout here could
+have had any remembered encounters with man; they were plentiful and
+might, like many other sorts of beings, be lured to their undoing by
+curiosity and greed. He cut a willow pole, stood back and cast out his
+gay bit of bait, letting it drift with the riffles. There came a quick
+tug, another, sharp and vigorous, and he swung his prize out of the
+water, breaking the surface into scattering jewels, flashing in the
+sunlight as it struck against the grass along the creek's edge.
+
+Dusk gathered while he worked over his fire. The aroma of boiling coffee
+rose, crept through the air, blended with the aromas of the woods. He
+had made toast, holding the bread to the coals upon a sharpened stick.
+There were strips of crisp bacon garnishing a trout browned to the last
+painstaking turn. There were fried potatoes, cut by King's pocket-knife
+into thin strips and turned into gold by the alchemy of cooking. He set
+out his dishes upon a flat-topped rock, replenished his fire, threw on
+some fresh-cut green cedar boughs for their delightful fragrance, and
+went to call Gloria.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gloria, too tired bodily and mentally to wage a winning battle against
+those black vapours which flock so frequently about luckless youth, had
+suffered and yielded and gone down in misery. She had been crying, just
+why she knew not; crying because she could not help it. Hers was a state
+of overwrought nerves which forbade clear thinking, which distorted and
+warped and magnified. The babble of the water which had been music to
+King was to her a chorus of jeering voices; the wind in the pines an
+eerie moaning as of lost spirits wailing; the trees themselves, merging
+with the dusk, were brooding, shadowy giant things which she suddenly
+both feared and hated; the cliffs rising against the sky loomed so near
+and so gigantically tall that she felt as though they were pressing in
+upon her to suffocate her, to crush her, to annihilate her. The world
+was turning black with the night; the night rushed, treading out the
+last gleam of sunlight; even the one star which she had glimpsed through
+her tears impressed her only with its remoteness. She was frightened;
+not because of any physical violence, for Mark King stood between her
+and that. But of vague horrors. She thought of San Francisco; of her own
+bright room there; of the lights in the streets, of pedestrians and
+motors and street-cars filling that other steel-canoned wilderness with
+familiar noises. And somehow, San Francisco seemed further away,
+immeasurably further away, than that one remote star blazing through the
+vastness of space.
+
+"A cup of coffee and a bit of supper," King said gently. "You'll feel a
+lot better."
+
+She rose wearily and followed him. Without a word she dropped down
+beside his banquet, putting out a listless hand to her tin cup. The
+firelight upon her face showed him her thoughtful eyes; but they were
+turned not toward him but toward the bed of coals. He had anticipated
+her lively surprise at the trout; she pushed the brown morsel aside,
+saying absently:
+
+"I am not hungry. It was good of you to go to all of this trouble. I am
+afraid I am not much of a camper." She forced the shadow of a smile with
+the admission.
+
+"Tuckered out," he thought as he looked into her face across which light
+and shadow flickered as flame and smoke in the camp-fire came and went
+fitfully, twisted by the evening breeze. "Clean tuckered out."
+
+Gloria, feeling his gaze so steady upon her, turned her eyes toward his,
+eyes heavy and sober with her drooping spirit. As the flames frolicked
+about the pitch-pine he had tossed to the coals, he saw the traces of
+tears. He said nothing, supposing that he understood; he but strove the
+harder to be good to her, to share with her some of that rare joy
+filling his own heart. He sought with unobtrusive tenderness to
+anticipate her slightest want; he jumped to his feet and brought her a
+cup of water; he shoved aside a burning branch which rolled impudently
+too near the divine foot; he removed the offending fish from under her
+nostrils hastily and half apologetically; he piled the fire high when he
+saw her shiver. And finally when she pushed her cup away and let her two
+hands drop into her lap he gathered the dishes and carried them away to
+the nearest pool to wash them, leaving Gloria silent and thoughtful,
+brooding over his fire.
+
+When he came back to her in the hush of the first hour of night, he
+thought that he understood her need for silence, and spoke only
+infrequently and briefly, and very, very softly, calling her attention
+now to the last lingering light upon the piney ridge behind them or to
+the liquid music of the creek, which, with the coming of night, seemed
+to grow clearer and finer and sweeter, or finally to the big star
+burning gloriously in the perfect deep-blue sky.
+
+"And now," he said, taking up his short-handled axe, "I am going to make
+for my lady-love the finest couch for tranquil, restful sleep that
+mortal ever had."
+
+As he strode away toward a grove of firs he was lost to her eyes before
+he had gone a hundred paces. The night came so swiftly it seemed to her
+feverish fancies that in the dark the big tree trunks were huddling
+closer together. In a moment she heard the sound of his axe, striking
+softly through green juicy branches. He worked swiftly, grudging every
+minute away from her. And then, with his arms full of the fragrant,
+balsamy boughs, he stopped and let them slip down to the ground and
+himself sat down upon a log and filled his pipe with slow fingers. He'd
+force himself to smoke one pipe before he went back to her, thinking
+that she would be grateful for a few moments alone.
+
+Almost with the first puff of smoke there came to him Gloria's piercing
+scream. His heart stopping, he jumped up and ran through the trees to
+her, shouting: "Gloria I Gloria! I'm coming. What is it?"
+
+Gloria was cowering against the nearest tree, her face showing
+frightened in the firelight, her eyes wide with nervous horror.
+
+"There is something there ... in the bushes!" she cried excitedly. "I
+heard it moving...."
+
+He looked where she pointed. Down by the creek, just waddling back into
+the alders, was a fat old porcupine, dimly seen in the fringe of the
+camp-fire. But King did not laugh. His first impulse upon him,
+strengthened by Gloria's helplessness, he took her into his arms,
+holding her close to him.
+
+"Why did you leave me?" asked Gloria petulantly. "So long."
+
+He had been away from her fifteen minutes while he cut an armful of
+fir-boughs, and thereafter filled and lighted his pipe--and to Gloria
+the time had seemed long! Little enough of love's confession, surely,
+but a golden crumb to a man's starving love. He drew her closer; their
+faces, ruddy with fire-glow, each tense with its own emotion, were close
+together.
+
+"Oh!" cried Gloria. She wrenched away from him violently. "You--you hurt
+me. Let me go!" She buried her face in her hands; he saw her shoulders
+lift and droop; he heard her sob: "Oh, I was a fool----"
+
+His arms had dropped to his sides and he stood for a moment speechless,
+staring at her as across a chasm shadow-filled.
+
+"Gloria," he said, bewildered.
+
+But now her hands, too, were at her sides, clenched and nervous; her
+white face was lifted and she broke out passionately into hot words; he
+saw her breast heaving and sensed that she was stirred to depths never
+until now plumbed. What he could not glimpse were the vague,
+unreasonable reasons, the distorted horrors grinning at her among the
+spaces of black gloom into which her spirit had sunk; had he been a
+fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and
+nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an
+understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy,
+and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition
+which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that
+had gone before.
+
+"I was half-mad last night," she panted. "There was no way to turn. That
+beast of a man drove me to desperation. Then you came, and--and----Oh,
+I wish that I were dead!"
+
+Incredulous, amazed, near stupefied, he stood rooted to the ground.
+
+"I don't understand," he said dully after a long silence broken only by
+a tumble and frolic of the water and Gloria's quick, hard breathing. He
+strove to be very gentle with her. "Just what is it? Can you tell me,
+dear?"
+
+"Don't call me dear ... like that," she cried sharply. "Just as though I
+were your ... _property_." He saw the roundness of her eyes. She
+shuddered. "You knew that I was driven to it, to save my name, to stop
+hideous gossip...."
+
+In her disordered mind she had been flung, as upon shoals, to many bleak
+points of view; she had blamed fate for her undoing, she had blamed
+Gratton, she had laid the responsibility upon her mother for having
+allowed her to drift; but always she had looked upon herself as the
+victim. Now, in her agitation, which had risen close to hysteria, it was
+suddenly Mark King whom she blamed for everything; he, in the guise of
+fate, had betrayed her!
+
+"You saw that I was half dead with terror; that I hardly knew what I was
+doing; that all I could think of was escape from the horrible trap that
+had been set for me; you----"
+
+"So that was it?" But still his tone was utterly devoid of any emotion
+save that of incredulity. "You mean you didn't love me, Gloria?"
+
+"When did you ever ask me if I loved you?"
+
+"But you ... you married me.... Great God!" He ran his hand across his
+brow as though to brush away an obsession. "Not loving me, you married
+me just to save yourself from possible scandal?"
+
+"What girl wouldn't?" she cried wildly. "Driven as I was?"
+
+He tried to think with all of that calm deliberation which this moment
+so plainly required. In mind he went back stage by stage through all of
+last night's events. And so he came in retrospect in due time to the
+moment when he had come to the porch and had looked in through the
+window to take his last farewell of her; when he had seen her standing
+at Gratton's side. She had drooped so like a figure of despondency; she
+had lifted her head slowly at the "judge's" question. And then there had
+occurred that sudden change in her bearing and in her voice alike, when
+abruptly she had cried out: "No. No and no and no!"
+
+"Tell me," said King heavily, "when you refused to marry Gratton last
+night--did you know that I was outside?"
+
+"Yes," she answered. She wondered why he asked. "There was a mirror; I
+saw your reflection in it."
+
+"If I had not come--would you have gone on with the thing?" He
+hesitated, then said harshly: "Would you have married him?"
+
+"I don't know. Oh," she exclaimed, twisting at her hands, "how can I
+tell what I would have done? driven one way, torn another----"
+
+"You might have married him? You but chose me as the lesser of two
+evils? Was that it?"
+
+"I tell you I don't know! I only know that I was hideously compromised;
+I would never have dared show my face again in San Francisco--anywhere--it
+would have killed me----"
+
+And even yet there was in King's face only a queer tortured incredulity.
+For a long time neither moved nor spoke. His eyes were on her, hers
+intently on him. When he answered it was in a voice from which all of
+to-day's joyousness had fled.
+
+"I'm going to make your bed, Gloria," he said evenly. "Near the fire,
+which I'll keep going. I'll make mine on the outside, so you need not
+be afraid of any prowling animal. Then in the morning we will talk."
+
+She watched him go back for his scattered fir-boughs. And even Gloria
+noted how heavy was his walk. But she could not guess how when he was
+alone with his trees, and the darkness dropped curtainwise between him
+and her he went down on both knees and buried his face in one of those
+same fallen sprays from the fir.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XVIII_
+
+
+Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon
+the slow procession of the stars. Just so had he lain many a night in
+the forest-land--but life then and now were as two distinct existences
+which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds,
+remote one from the other. Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the
+physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the
+darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and
+sparkle. Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long
+years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion.
+Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the
+message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to
+him across the limitless vastitude of the universe. Countless times that
+voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of
+the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him
+with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human
+strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a "small" act; he
+marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and
+eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two
+feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them. He
+had known that firefly cluster of lights above to be the majestic
+processional of worlds. He saw himself as small; the universe as big.
+And the knowledge did not crush; it elevated. Throughout the whole of
+creation ran the fine chain of divine ordinance, of a law that flowered
+in beauty. There was God's work above him, about him, within him. And
+God stood back of it all, vouching for it, making it good. The spinning
+of worlds, the pulses of tides, the course of the blood in his
+veins--these were kindred phenomena; the law of God bound about with its
+fine chain of divine will and love the greater and the lesser bodies
+moving through the universe. Upon such a comprehension, brotherhood of
+man and tree and sun and flower, had been raised Mark King's haphazard
+edifice of a theory of life. The stars reminded him that through the
+eons all had been right with the world of worlds; they sang of hope and
+happiness and beauty. They showed a man the way to rich, full
+contentment. They lighted the path to generous dealings with other men.
+They threw their searchlight upon the day a man had just done with and
+set him thinking; they led his thoughts ahead to the day soon to dawn,
+making him wish to make a better job of things.
+
+But to-night between him and his beloved stars stretched a region of
+shadows through which the eyes of his soul did not look. Something
+within him had been stricken; sorely wounded; beaten to its knees;
+chilled with death. He sought to think quite calmly, and for a long time
+clear consecutive thought was beyond his reach. A moment had come when
+he could only _feel_. He was swept this way and that. He had given to
+Gloria his love without stint, without reservation, without limit. The
+love which no other woman had ever awakened had poured itself out before
+Gloria like a flood of clear swift water breaking free. He loved after
+the only fashion possible to him, with his whole heart and soul, with
+his whole being. He adored. He made of his beloved a princess, a
+goddess. He saw her upon a plane where no woman ever lived, in an
+atmosphere too rare for flesh-and-blood humanity. A man does not love
+through human reason; rather through a reason, hidden even to him,
+deeper than humanity. Then Gloria had put her hand into his; Gloria had
+married him; Gloria had elected to come with him. After that he had seen
+nothing in its true light; Gloria had remade the world into paradise
+ineffable.
+
+He had been on the heights, lifted among the stars. And without warning,
+without mercy, the world had crashed about him. From the zenith to the
+nadir. Small wonder that thoughts did not come logically! He floundered,
+lost, crushed, bewildered.
+
+Just yonder, on the bed of fir-boughs he had made for her, lay Gloria.
+He did not look that way. The wind was rising; he heard it go rushing
+through the tree-tops; it struck with sudden, relentless impact; it set
+the shivering needles to shrill whistling; it made the staunch old
+trunks shudder. He heard the canvas flap-flapping by Gloria's bed; above
+him tossing boughs scraped and creaked.
+
+One thing only seemed clear to him: the time had come when a man must
+seek to hold himself in check, when he must not leap, when he must
+strive with all the stubborn will in him to reserve judgment. His own
+life's crisis had come to him, revealing itself with the blinding
+swiftness of a flash of lightning. A step forward or back now would be
+one step toward which his entire destiny, from the hour of birth until
+now, had led him; there would be no retracing it; it would be final; and
+everything--everything--was at stake. He must think; he must try to
+understand all that Gloria had experienced; to see what impulses had
+moved her; to make allowances for her; to come to read aright what lay
+in her heart. He must see clearly into two human hearts! Task for the
+gods! As though the wilderness about him were a colossal malevolent
+entity endowed with the power to look into human breasts, it jeered at
+him with its voice of the wind.
+
+He had but half a mind to give to physical senses. Though the wind
+howled all night long, he scarce was conscious of it; though the cold
+increased, he did not know that he was cold before he had grown numb.
+He had given to Gloria all of their bedding, save alone the one blanket
+he had wrapped about him; he had kept on all his clothing, buttoned up
+his coat, and forgotten that he was not warmly covered. Now he got up
+and walked up and down; he made the fire blaze up; he sat huddled over
+it until it burned down to a bed of glowing red coals.
+
+Once or twice he heard Gloria stir restlessly upon her fir-bough bed.
+But he did not speak. There was nothing to be said between them now;
+they would wait until she had rested, until morning. Then there would be
+no more delay. They would understand each other then as few men and
+women had understood; there would be plain words and but few of them. He
+grew impatient for morning and sat looking forward to its coming with a
+face set and hard, growing as stern as death.
+
+Gloria, exhausted, had gone to sleep, snuggled warmly into her blankets.
+It was the wind that awoke her; she started wide awake, her heart in her
+throat, startled by the flapping of the canvas at her head. She lay
+still and looked up; the pines were black and swayed dismally; the wind
+among them made shuddersome music; the cold began to drive through her
+blankets, through her clothing. Her body was stiff and sore; the
+branches of fir under her hurt her through the canvas and one blanket
+which covered them. She turned, twisting into a position of less
+discomfort. The creek babbled and splashed; its voice merged with the
+wilds into a bleak, cheerless duet.
+
+She lifted her head a little; the fire was dying out and King had gone!
+The darkness bore down upon her; she heard everywhere vague sounds,
+noises as of stealthy feet. She knew a moment of blind terror; she tried
+to cry out but only a little choking gasp resulted. She saw something
+moving, a vague, formless, dreadful something, and lay back, chilled
+with fright. It was King; he was bringing fresh fuel. She sank back and
+again looked up at the pines swaying against the field of stars. She
+began to shiver; a nervous chill. She felt the slow tears form and spill
+over and trickle down her cheeks. She gathered her nether lip between
+her teeth and lay very still, shaken now and then by a noiseless sob.
+
+She existed through a period of suppressed excitement. If King found
+cool logic eluding him, Gloria's mind was an orgy of nervous imaginings.
+She was back with her mother, weeping, sobbing out upon a comforting
+breast all of her hideous adventures; she was reading the tall headlines
+in the newspapers; she was commenting on them with simulated flippancy
+to Georgia and Ernestine; she was meeting Mr. Gratton for the first time
+again, treating him to such haughty disdain as put hot blood into his
+white face; she was standing erect in the morning, confronting Mark King
+fearlessly, demanding her rights, commanding that he take her home. And,
+piteously lonely and frightened, she was longing to have him come to her
+now, to put his arms about her, to hold her tight, to set his fearless
+body between hers and the vague and terrible menaces of the night and
+the jeering night voices. She heard a twig snap; her heart beat wildly;
+she wondered what she would do when he came--and she saw that he sat
+motionless by the fire.
+
+The night wore on. She dozed now and then, fitfully, awakened always
+rudely by unaccustomed noises or by the cold or the discomfort of her
+bed. She put her hand to her cheek, wondering if she were going to be
+feverish; her face was cold. She saw that King had lighted his pipe. She
+wanted to scream at him. How she hated him for that. That he could smoke
+while she lay here in such wretchedness made her briefly hot with anger.
+He was a man, and sweepingly she told herself that she loathed all
+mankind. She accused him of heartlessness, of lack of understanding, of
+brutal lack of sympathy. He and he alone was responsible for
+everything--that vague, terrible _everything_. He sat there as still as
+a rooted tree; he bulked big through the gloom like a rugged boulder; he
+was a part of this wild land, as indifferent, as cold, as merciless.
+The thought now that he might come to her made her quake with fear; she
+was afraid of him.
+
+If she could only sleep! No sleep to-night, little the night before,
+less the night before that. No wonder her brain swirled. If all this had
+happened at any other time--She was a bundle of nerves--nerves that
+vibrated at the slightest suggestion. She was going to be ill. Perhaps
+the end of it would be that she would die. All of the misshapen,
+monstrous fancies which are bred of a sleepless and nervous night made
+for her a period of such stress that as the hours wore on they blanched
+her cheeks and put dark shadows under her eyes and taunted her with
+longings for a rest which they denied her.
+
+Thus, in the stern grips of their destinies, Mark King and Gloria lived
+through the night, two uncertain spirits awaiting the light of day. And
+thus their brains, those finite organs upon which mankind entrusts the
+ordering of great events, prepared themselves for the moment when they
+must grapple with and decide a matter of supreme moment. And all night
+the wind, like a hateful voice, jeered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At four o'clock that chill, wind-blown morning King began the day. He
+saw that Gloria was awake and sitting up, looking straight ahead of her.
+He gave no sign of having noted her, but busied himself in a swift,
+silent sort of way with fire-building and breakfast preparation. Gloria,
+in turn, saw him; she experienced aloof wonder at the look on his face.
+He was haggard; his mouth was set and hard.
+
+She had thought to be thankful when daylight came. Now she got up and
+went to the fire, rubbing her cold hands together, looking at an
+awakened world with dull, lack-lustre eyes. It was not yet full day;
+what light filtered down here into this sheltered spot was cheerless; as
+it drew forest details out of the thinning shadows it seemed to be
+painting them in cold grey monotones upon a cold grey world.
+
+He and she, when he came back with an arm-load of wood, looked straight
+into each other's eyes, long and soberly, searchingly and hopelessly.
+After that they did not again look into each other's faces; no
+good-morning had passed between them since both sensed that any time for
+empty civilities had gone. There could be no conventional pretence at
+harmony even in small things; they must be in each other's arms or
+worlds apart.
+
+Out of a night's grappling with chimeras, King had come to one and only
+one determination: he would go slowly, he would hold an iron check upon
+himself, he would throttle down a temper which more than once in his
+life, at moments of tempest, had blazed out uncontrollably. He would
+smother within himself that passion which in forthright men is so prone
+to burst into violence. Were Gloria to show herself to be this or that,
+were she to say this word or another, he would speak with her coolly, he
+would listen to her calmly, and in the end, since judge he must, he
+would judge with his heart ordered to beat steadily and not with a wild
+rush of blood. He had set a guard in his own breast as he might have set
+a guard over a camp of treacherous enemies.
+
+Yet, from the outset, nothing was more unlikely than that these two
+should advance by smooth paths to a clear and utter understanding. His
+one glimpse of her face dethroned his cold logic and moved him very
+deeply; she was so white, so pitifully sad-looking. She, too, had
+suffered; God knew that she had battled through hours of anguish. He
+wanted her in his arms; he wanted to batter at the world with his fists
+to save her from its flings of grief and pain. He bit savagely at his
+lip and turned away. And she, seeing his haggard eyes, his drawn face,
+knew that she had been unjust last night when she had hated him for
+seeming a soulless man, who could smoke his pipe in all serenity and
+feel nothing of the unhappiness of the night. He did not look like the
+Mark King of yesterday; the glad gleam of joy had died in his eyes; the
+quick resiliency had gone out of his step. He, too, had lived through
+slow hours of torture. He did love her--she could never doubt that----
+
+Had he suddenly caught her to him then, had he crushed her close in his
+arms, had he cried out in headlong passion that she _must_ love him,
+that he would make her love him, that she was his, that he would not
+give her up--would she have wrenched away from him, hot with anger--or
+would she have crept close and known at last whether or not she loved
+him? But here was something else she could not know; he turned and went
+off for his wood; she crouched shivering by the fire.
+
+They breakfasted in silence, the fire between them. Neither did much
+more than drink the strong coffee. Gloria sat tossing bits of bread into
+the fire. It was on his lips to tell her not to do that; waste in the
+wilderness is a crime. But he held his words back. He went methodically
+about camp work; cleaned the plates and cups and pans; remade the two
+packs. All this time she did not stir. At last he came back to her and
+stood by the dying fire, ominously silent. She grew nervously restive,
+wishing that he would say something.
+
+"There's a day's work to be done," he said at last. His voice, meant to
+be impersonal, was only stern. "That means an early start. And--"
+
+"Is it very much further to the caves?" she asked.
+
+He had paused; she had to say something.
+
+"It will take a long day getting there. You see, we didn't come very far
+yesterday."
+
+This, she supposed, was a fling at her, and she stiffened under it. But
+when she spoke it was to ignore the innuendo, intended or not. For,
+wherever they might be led, she hoped it would not be into sordid
+quarrelling.
+
+"It begins to be rather obvious that I should not have come. Doesn't
+it?" she asked.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Now, if I turn back----"
+
+"To the house?"
+
+"And then to mamma and papa, in Coloma. And then to San Francisco."
+
+"And I?"
+
+"If you would go with me as far as the house----"
+
+She saw how his body straightened, how his broad shoulders squared.
+There was something eloquent in the gesture; Mark King, with no
+toleration of a clutter of side issues, came straight to the main
+barrier, which must be swept aside for good and all, or which must be
+skirted and so passed and relegated to the limbo of dead hopes.
+
+"Do you love me, Gloria?" he demanded. "As lovers love? As I have loved
+you? As a wife should love her husband?"
+
+"Didn't I explain all of that last night?" she said petulantly. "Must we
+go over it all again? If I have ... have pained you, I am sorry. I can't
+say any more than that, can I? I thought I made you see how I was
+placed, how there was but the one thing for me to do...."
+
+"Marry Gratton or me? And you chose me?"
+
+She hesitated. She knew that he was angry, though he gave so little
+outward sign. Nor did she fail to recognize that he had grounds for
+anger. But none the less she resented his insistent questionings. She
+stood looking blankly at him. If she had only obeyed her straightforward
+impulse at the house to go to him and explain her predicament!
+
+"I intended," she began in a low, strange voice, "to go to you, to tell
+you----"
+
+"Answer me," he said sternly. "Yes or no. Did you marry me without love
+and just to save yourself from possible gossip of being alone all night
+with a man? Is that why you married me? Yes or no?"
+
+To Gloria, as to King, the issue was clear and not to be clouded; to her
+credit be it said that she wasted no time in fruitless evasion. This
+matter would demand settlement, as well now as later. There was wisdom
+in ending all unpleasantness once and for ever.
+
+"Yes," she answered defiantly.
+
+Then suddenly it was given her to see a Mark King she had never dreamed
+of, a Mark King of blazing wrath thrusting aside the man whom she knew
+and who had held himself in check and throttled down his emotion until
+she spoke that quiet "Yes." The word was like a spark to a train of
+gunpowder. His determination to beat down his temper, no matter what
+came, was gone; his memory of her ordeals was wiped out; from his whole
+tense being there flashed out upon her a hot, heady anger, like stabbing
+lightning from an ominous cloud. His few words seared and scorched a
+place in her memory to endure always.
+
+He clenched his hands and raised them; for an instant she thought he was
+going to strike her down.
+
+"You are utterly contemptible!" he shouted at her. "And I am done with
+you!"
+
+He turned and left her. Gloria stared after him in amazement. She saw
+how he walked swiftly, his big boots crunching through the gravel down
+by the creek bed, splashing through the water, carrying him up the
+timbered slope toward the horses. She could not know that he was almost
+running because he was telling himself in his fierce white passion that
+unless he left her thus he would lose the last power of restraint, and
+set his hands to her pink-and-white throat and choke her. Until the last
+second he had sought not to condemn too soon. Now, after his fashion, he
+condemned sweepingly. For the moment he held that she was less to him
+than the grime upon his boots.
+
+When he came to the horses he was white with anger; he lifted his hand
+and looked at his fingers queerly; they were trembling. He cursed
+himself for a fool, shut the hand into a hard fist as steady as rock,
+and for an instant glared at it blackly. Then he opened the fingers
+slowly; a hard smile made his mouth ugly and left it cruel; the fingers
+had hearkened to a superb will, and gave no greater hint of trembling
+than did the nigged hole of the giant cedar under which he stood.
+
+He coiled his horse's tie-rope and led him back to camp. As he drew
+near, Gloria promptly turned her back and studied her nails; she had had
+encounters with men before now and had not yet gauged the profundity of
+this man's emotion. She counted fully on bringing him to a full and
+contrite sense of his crime before she condescended so much as to look
+at him. But when she flashed him a quick, furtive glance she saw that he
+had his back upon her, and that he gave neither hint of softening nor
+yet of knowledge of her presence. He bridled the buckskin, saddled, tied
+his rope at the saddle-horn, and began making his pack. She watched,
+uneasy and concerned but not yet fully understanding. But when she noted
+how he took from their breakfast-table one cup, one plate, one knife and
+fork, only; how he did not appear interested in the marmalade-jar which
+she knew had been brought for her; how he left half of the coffee and
+bacon and sugar; a strange alarm came over her. She glanced wildly
+around. The forest glowered darkly; the silence was overpowering; the
+loneliness bewildering. He was going to leave her--she had not the
+faintest idea in the world where the trail lay.
+
+King went swiftly about his preparations. He did not even see her; he
+studiously kept his eyes aloof. Within his soul he swore that he would
+never look at her again....He took up his rifle.
+
+Gloria stirred uneasily. She did not like to yield to him even to the
+extent of saying a stiff word. But she felt that the man was not playing
+a part, and that in another moment she would be alone.
+
+"You are not going to leave me here alone, are you?" she demanded
+coldly.
+
+"I am going on," was his curt rejoinder.
+
+"And I?" she persisted.
+
+"What you please."
+
+He went on with his preparations. Terror sprang up into the girl's
+heart.
+
+"I would never find my way out," she cried, jumping to her feet and
+coming toward him. "I am not used to the mountains ...I don't know which
+way ...I would die...."
+
+"To be rid of you the easiest way," he returned bluntly, "I would turn
+back with you until we got within striking distance of the open. But
+you have made me waste time as it is, and I promised Ben that I'd be in
+Gus Ingle's caves with no time lost. So I am going on."
+
+"But," and all of her surging terror trembled in her rushing words, "I
+would die, I tell you...."
+
+"And I tell you," he snapped back at her, "that I don't care a damn if
+you do. Must I tell you twice that I am through with you?"
+
+He set his foot to the stirrup. Gloria, pride lost in panic, ran to him
+and grasped his arm, crying to him:
+
+"You mustn't leave me this way! It's brutal ... it's murder."
+
+"I gave my promise to Ben," he said. "You are not worth breaking a
+promise."
+
+"If you won't take me back, then let me go with you."
+
+"Worthless and selfish and cowardly! Useless and vain and brainless!
+Good God! am I, a man full grown, to loiter on the trail with the like
+of you? Let go!" He shook her hand off roughly and swung up into the
+saddle, sending his horse with a boot-heel in the flank down to the
+ford. But Gloria screamed after him, and ran after him, down to the
+creek and through it, calling out:
+
+"Mark! Mark! For God's sake don't leave me. I am afraid; I will die of
+fear. Take me with you...."
+
+He did not look back at her, but he did pause. After all, she was the
+daughter of his old friend.
+
+"The woods are free and open," he said slowly. "To even such as you. For
+the third time and for the last I tell you this: I am done with you. But
+if you like you may follow behind me. I will wait for you ten minutes.
+Not here, but on the ridge up there. And if you have not come, I will go
+on at the end of that time. That is my solemn word, Gloria Gaynor."
+
+He rode from her, straight and massive in the saddle, up the slope among
+the big-boled trees, and in a trice out of sight. She stood like one in
+a sudden trance. Then, with an inarticulate moan, she ran into the grove
+and grasped Blackie's rope, and dragged at him trying to make him run
+with her to her saddle and few belongings. The saddle nearly
+overmastered her; it was heavy, and she knew as little of it as did any
+city girl. But her need was sore and her young body not without supple
+strength. In half of the allotted time Gloria came riding up the ridge.
+Now King glanced toward her briefly. But less at her than at her pack.
+
+"You had better go back for the rest of the grub," he said to her. "And
+for your blanket-roll. That would be my advice to the devil himself....
+You can do it in the five minutes left to you."
+
+Gloria flung up her head, opened her lips for a stinging reply, and then
+held for a moment in silence and hesitation.
+
+"You hideous brute!" she flung at him. But none the less she hastened
+back for her outfit. Five minutes later they rode on into the
+ever-deepening wilderness, she just keeping his form in sight, he never
+turning nor speaking.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XIX_
+
+
+For his brutal treatment of her Gloria fully meant that in the ripeness
+of time he should pay to the uttermost. After that first panic she felt
+toward King only such anger as she had never experienced before, never
+having cause for it. Perhaps the emotion was the beginning of a new
+soul-life for her; certainly here was a moment of reversion to a
+condition of unplumbed progenital influences; the scorching anger
+arising from such a primitive situation was in itself primal. Hence the
+emotion no less that the experience itself was novel; clean, searing
+anger.
+
+Following this emotion which rode her and sapped her nervous strength
+came a period of faintness and nausea. She closed her eyes and dropped
+her head and clung to the horn of her saddle with hands which went cold
+and shook. In this mood she called out once to King. But he was far
+ahead and did not turn. She did not know whether he had heard her.
+Gradually the weakness passed; they topped the ridge and the sun wanned
+her. Coolly and collectedly she turned her thoughts upon the
+insufferable insult and came back through a sort of circle to her first
+intention. Now the decision was cold and stubborn: he would pay and in
+full.
+
+King led the way unfalteringly. Time and again she saw no hint of a
+trail underfoot or ahead; they broke through brush or made a difficult
+way through a thicket of alders or willows and invariably came again
+upon a trail. It was evident that the man thought only of his journey's
+end and was hastening; hence he took all the short cuts which he knew.
+In one of these pathless places, where the scrub-trees and tangle of
+brush were above her head, where it seemed that she must smother, she
+lost all sight of him. Her horse came to a dead halt. She listened and
+could not hear the hoofs of his horse. Again panic mastered her, and she
+cried out wildly. But just ahead was a mad mountain stream filling the
+gorge with its thunder. She knew that King could not hear her; she felt
+the desperate certainty that he would not heed could he hear. Then she
+struck her horse frantically with her bare hands, and pounded him with
+her heels, longing for the sight of King as one athirst in the bad lands
+longs for water. The horse snorted, and whirling and plunging went
+ripping through the bushes which whipped at her and tore the skin of
+hands and face. But in three minutes he brought her into the open and
+into full sight of King, riding up a gentle slope through big red-boled
+cedars. When her fear died, as it did swiftly after the way of fear, it
+left not the old, hot anger, but a new elemental emotion--cold hatred.
+
+Thus upon their second morning the honeymoon entered upon its second
+phase. Every moment brought some new discomfort to her; the saddle hurt
+her: her clothes were torn, her tender skin bruised and scratched;
+pains came stabbingly with early fatigue As for King, he had come
+abruptly to look down upon her as utterly despicable; being a man of
+high honour he convicted her out of hand as one without honour;
+despising her, he despised himself for having linked his life in ever so
+little with hers. But yesterday he had knelt to her humbly in his
+innermost heart of hearts; now he sought to shut his mind against her
+quite as definitely as he turned his back on her.
+
+What sombre, misshapen edifice they should build upon these
+corner-stones of hate and contempt was a matter into which no conjecture
+could enter even slightly had their compelling environment been
+different. In the city they would have turned their backs and walked
+away from each other. But two storm-driven men upon a raft don't
+separate until land is sighted. Gloria, at least, was in her present
+plight comparable to a shipwrecked sailor of little skill and less
+resource. Hence, what was to be, remained to be seen.
+
+At ten o'clock the air was sun-warmed and sweet. Half an hour later the
+genial day was made over by the high wind trailing vapours into a chill
+bleak sky. They had climbed to fresh altitudes; the timber through which
+they progressed indicated that a height of at least seven thousand feet
+above sea-level had been passed. They passed through groves of the
+thin-barked tamaracks, came at the base of a rugged slope to scattering
+mountain pines, which reared into lusty perfection on bleak, wind-swept
+levels, where many of their companion growths were beginning to run out
+in dwarfed, twisted misery, and came to a rocky pass through the
+mountains where on all sides the red cedar, the juniper of the Sierra,
+throve hardily among bare boulders, crowning the lofty crests like a
+sparse, stiff, hirsute display upon the gigantic body of the world. The
+dwarf pine lingered here, straggling along the slopes, beaten down by
+many a winter of wind and heavy snow. But by noon they had made a slow,
+tedious way down a rocky ridge and were once more in the heart of the
+upper forest belt. In an upland meadow, through whose narrow boundaries
+a thin, cold stream trickled, they nooned. Long had Gloria hungered for
+the moment when she would see King swing down from the saddle; during
+the last half-hour she had begun to fear that his brutality knew no
+bounds and that he would spare neither the horses nor her but crowd on
+until nightfall. When he did dismount by the creek she drew rein fifty
+feet from him.
+
+King slipped Buck's bridle, dropped the tie-rope, and let the animal
+forage along the fringes of the brook. To Gloria, in a voice which
+struck her as being as chill as the grey, overcast sky, he said:
+
+"Better let your horse eat. We've got to go pretty steady to get
+anywhere to-day."
+
+Gloria got down stiffly from her saddle. In all the days of her life she
+had never been so unutterably weary. Further, she was faint from hunger
+and her throat pained her; she went to the creek and threw herself down
+and put her face into the cool water, from which she rose with a long
+sigh. She had seen how King did with his tie-rope; she did similarly,
+but was too tired to trouble with removing the bit from her horse's
+mouth. Still Blackie accepted his handicapped opportunity and joined
+Buck in tearing and ripping at the lush grass. It was more inviting than
+the manzanita-bushes and occasional sunflower-leaves at which he had
+snatched during the day.
+
+King made coffee and fried bacon; the horses had earned an hour of rest
+and fodder, and a man has the right to bacon and coffee even though hard
+miles lie before him. While he pottered with his fire he looked more
+than once at the sky in the south-west. With all of his heart he wished
+that he had turned back with Gloria this morning. By now he could have
+set her feet in a trail which even a fool could travel back to the log
+house, and he could be again hastening upon his errand. Gloria lay
+inert; she chewed slowly at a bit broken from a slab of hard chocolate
+and kept her eyes closed. Her face was very white; two big tears of
+distress slipped out from the shut lids. But King did not come close
+enough to see them.
+
+When his coffee was ready he called to her, saying indifferently:
+"Better have a cup. It helps." But Gloria did not reply. King seemed not
+to notice whether she ate or not. But, when he had drunk his own coffee
+and she still lay quiet on the grass, he sweetened a cup for her, put
+some milk in it, and set it at her elbow. "Better drink it," he said
+coldly. And Gloria gathered her strength and sat up and drank.
+Thereafter she ate some bread and potted ham. Fragments of bread, the
+crust, and half of the ham she threw away. King opened his mouth to
+protest; then shrugged and remained silent. His back to a tree, he sat
+and smoked until the hour had passed.
+
+Precisely at one o'clock they were on their way. Gloria caught her own
+horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and
+to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was
+all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities
+began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that
+she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie
+here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as
+one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of
+death seemed less terrible than that of utter desertion. The mountains
+were so big they stifled her. With every tortuous step forward this
+formidable land all about her had grown more severe, more lonely, more
+to her like the kingdom of desolation than she had ever dreamed existed.
+There were slope fields strewn with black lava rock where never a
+solitary blade of grass upthrust a thin spear; there were broken
+expanses across which the eye might travel wearily for what appeared
+endless miles. One could call out here with never a faint hope of being
+heard; one left alone here could die miserably, taunted only by the
+echoes of her own choking voice. This devil's land took on a vindictive
+personality; it was a hideous colossus, stooping over her, inspired with
+but one cruel desire, to crush her soft white body, to stamp out her
+life, to annihilate her and gloat over her shrieking despair. She felt
+like some hapless little princess in a fairy-tale who had wandered into
+a monstrous land of black sorcery.
+
+By four o'clock, when it seemed to Gloria that she had reached and was
+passing the limits of her endurance, came two momentous occurrences.
+King, riding ahead as usual, was not quite so far in advance, and did
+not have his back turned square upon her. For the first time he had
+briefly mistaken the trail; they were on the steep flank of the
+mountain; he turned and rode back in her general direction but some
+hundred yards lower on the slope.
+
+"The trail's down here," he announced shortly. He did not lift his eyes
+to her face, did not note the droop of the weary body. His look was all
+for her horse, and a new and unreasonable spurt of anger was in his
+heart Through her unbounded ignorance she had needlessly fatigued her
+mount, having no knowledge of the ways one employs to save his horse.
+
+Gloria understood dully that she was too far up and must ride down to
+his level. She was beyond complaining or asking questions; with a sudden
+jerk upon the reins she brought Blackie about. King cursed under his
+breath.
+
+"That's too steep!" he called to her. "Want to kill your horse?"
+
+Blackie tried to swerve and sidle down. Gloria lifted her whip and
+struck him. Blackie snorted and obeyed her command. Some loose dirt gave
+way underfoot, the tired beast stumbled, a dead limb caught at his legs,
+tripping him, and Blackie lurched downward and fell. Through the grace
+of fortune Gloria rolled clear and unhurt. Blackie got up, tottering,
+with one quivering fore-leg lifted. King's face went black with rage.
+
+But this time it was wordless rage. He dismounted and made his way up to
+the lamed horse; Gloria, from where she lay, thought at first that of
+course he was coming to her. But he kept his back to her as he lifted
+the horse's fore-leg and felt tenderly at the wrenched muscle. Gloria,
+without stirring, and without experiencing any poignant emotion, watched
+him listlessly, then shut her eyes. Her most clear sensation was one of
+relief; they would no doubt make camp here.
+
+A cold drop of rain splashed on her cheek. She opened her eyes. King was
+removing Blackie's saddle. Gloria closed her eyes again and sighed. A
+sort of dreary thankfulness blossomed feebly in her heart that the
+torturous day was over. King would make some sort of a shelter; she
+would drink a cup of coffee and crawl into her blankets and go to
+sleep....
+
+"Come on," called a voice as though from some great distance. "We've got
+to hurry as fast as God will let us."
+
+Blackie was standing where King had led him, his saddle and bridle swung
+up into a tree, his foot still lifted, his nostrils close to the long
+grass but untempted. Gloria's canvas-rolled pack and the rifle were
+across King's back. As she sat up and stared at him she read his
+intentions. He was going on on foot, expecting her to take his horse.
+
+"I can't," she said miserably.
+
+He looked up into the sky and not at her.
+
+"You can do what you please," he retorted curtly. "I am going on."
+
+She rose and went stumbling down the slope. She swayed as she tried to
+mount, but he did not offer his hand. When she was in the saddle he
+strode on ahead. Blackie looked after them wistfully.
+
+"The leg's not broken," King told her gruffly. "Just a bad sprain. Not
+your fault it isn't worse, though. He'll take care of himself; God knows
+he's got as good a chance as we have."
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.
+
+He merely swung up his arm toward the sky by way of answer and went on.
+The second big rain-drop hit Gloria's cheek. It was chill; its dullness
+seemed to drive straight to her heart.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XX_
+
+
+The storm caught them as it has caught so many a wayfarer before and
+since. The wintry season was not due for a full four weeks, but the
+winter had thrust sign and season aside and made his regal entry after
+his own ancient fashion. There came a crash of reverberating thunder, a
+scurry in the thickening mass of black clouds, a drenching downpour of
+rain. For twenty minutes they crouched in what scant shelter was
+afforded them by a squat, wide-limbed cedar. Then the wind went ripping
+off through the tree-tops, exacting its toll of flying twigs and leaving
+in its wake a brief, hushed calm. Through the still air fell scattering
+flakes of snow, big and unbroken and feathery. King's eyes were filled
+with concern; his face was ominous like the face of the world about him.
+
+Again Gloria's tired body was assured of rest; again King said
+expressionlessly: "Come on." This time he helped her into the saddle,
+being in haste and of no mind to wait for trifles. He hurried on ahead;
+she followed on Buck listlessly, clinging to the saddle, her eyes often
+shut.
+
+For an hour it snowed. Though there was no sun it was not dark save in
+the deeper canons. Nor was it as cold as Gloria had thought it must
+be--or else she was too tired to feel the pinch of the sharp air. But
+presently the flakes grew fewer and then ceased utterly. Those that lay
+on the ground or clung to branches melted swiftly; and with their
+departure the last light of the day was gone. Now King led the horse and
+Gloria rode through a gathering darkness. She wanted to ask why they did
+not stop; why they did not turn back, but lacked the spirit. Now and
+then she half dozed.
+
+At last it was pitch dark and the rain was beginning again. King had
+stopped and was helping her down. She was numb now in body; her brain
+was numb. The rain hardened into a rattle of hail. Thereafter the air
+softened and filled with swirling snow. Gloria could not see if they
+were in an open valley or shut in by canon walls or upon the slope of a
+mountain. Nor did she greatly care. She waited until King prepared some
+kind of a shelter, and then went wordlessly to it; she felt fir-boughs
+under her aching body and was, in pure animal fashion, conscious of
+blanket and canvas over her and of a grateful warmth. Through a tangle
+of bushes she saw the flicker of a small fire; she smelled coffee; she
+drank half of the hot cup which he brought to her. Then she let go her
+grip upon a wretched world and passed like a child into a heavy sleep.
+
+By his fire of little cheer Mark King sat, with his canvas drawn over
+his slumping shoulders, his head down, his heart as black as the night,
+his soul possessed by ravaging blue demons. At the end of a fool's day
+came a fool's night. He should have paid heed to the first threat of a
+thin film across the sky; he should have turned back with Gloria the
+first thing this morning; he should have done anything in the world save
+exactly what he had done. He should not have married her; he should not
+have brought her with him; it was even sheer idiocy to come after this
+blind fashion into the mountains in the late fall. Though the season was
+early the hour was ominous. The storm might pass before dawn. There
+remained the equal likelihood that it would not. Were he alone, or had
+he a man, or, yes, by heaven! a real woman with him, things would not be
+so bad. The wind jeered at him through the trees; the storm drenched his
+fire; he cursed back at both.
+
+"One thing," he thought when his pipe brought him a solitary instant of
+peace, "I won't be worried with Gratton and Brodie and his
+double-dealing crowd. If they ever started they would have sense enough
+to turn back long ago."
+
+After the cold, wet night came a sodden morning. King stood up and
+looked about him curiously; his first thought was to make sure that they
+had really camped upon the edge of that particular upland valley which
+he had striven for. And a glint of satisfaction came into his eyes; it
+is something to have followed such a trail aright upon such a night.
+Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which
+many miles further on flowed into the American. Rising abrupt beyond it
+were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the
+mountain tributaries of the American. The rocks, like the river, were
+black, and looked far colder than the white world which extended in all
+directions.
+
+If, in truth, there existed heaps of raw red gold somewhere in a cave in
+these mountains, and there had been any exactness in the description in
+Gus Ingle's Bible, then the spot was not more than three or four miles
+away. That was one consideration. It was still snowing. Here was a
+second consideration. King turned moody eyes to Gloria's canvas-and-fir
+shelter in the lee of a little bit of cliff. There lay the third. He
+prepared breakfast without delay but without enthusiasm. He felt a tired
+man with shackled limbs dragging a dead weight.
+
+When he went to wake Gloria he first stood over her, looking queerly
+down upon her sleep. She showed less trace of the hard day and wild
+night than he had expected to see; his preparations for her comfort,
+instinctive and thorough, had been made with the cunning skill of a man
+familiar with situations like the present. She had rested; she lay
+curled up, snug and warm, under the covers, upon which a thin layer of
+fluffy snow had gathered. Her face was against a curved arm, and the
+sweetness of it in its tranquil repose was a bitter sweet to him. Her
+lashes against her cheek stirred and flew apart under his steady gaze.
+He looked into Gloria's eyes, sweet and soft, heavy with sleep.
+
+"Time to be up," he said. He turned on his heel and went back in haste
+to his fire.
+
+Gloria, awake, was ravenously hungry. She came sooner than he had
+expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order.
+Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him. She shrugged
+her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands to the small,
+wind-blown blaze.
+
+"Are we going back?" she asked colourlessly.
+
+"No," he returned as indifferently. "It's about four miles to the caves.
+We'll be there in a couple of hours. Then we'll see what we see."
+
+Gloria sent a long, searching, and awe-struck look across the broken
+country. Yonder, then, she realized dismally, lay their destination;
+bleak, black, rocky heights, at so great an altitude and in a region so
+barren that but few wind-broken trees grew, and the brutal face of the
+world was unmasked. She saw bare peaks, steep slopes, a tremendous gorge
+like an ugly gash; on the far side of the gorge sheer cliffs. Toward
+them King looked. Was it there that Gus Ingle's caves awaited them? Was
+that journey's end? She shivered and drew closer to the fire, closer to
+her companion, shrinking from the menace of the mountains.
+
+"Is it going to keep on snowing?" she asked.
+
+This time he shrugged. That was his only answer. She stared at him, a
+slow flush came into her cheeks, her eyes hardened.
+
+"Oh, very well," she said coldly.
+
+That was the whole of their conversation save for one curt remark and an
+impudent laugh in answer at the end of the scanty meal. Gloria tossed a
+piece of bacon into the fire. King looked at her sternly and said:
+
+"Young lady, we may be up against the real thing right now. Nobody but a
+fool will do a trick like that."
+
+The laugh was Gloria's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once on their way they climbed almost steadily. The air grew rarer and
+colder. The snowflakes became smaller, at last a fine sifting like sand
+particles that cut at hands and face viciously. No longer were there
+groves to shelter them; on all sides bare, hostile rocks, and only
+occasionally a sparse growth of sprawling, earth-hugging dwarf pine and
+cedar, over which King strode as over so much low, tangled brush. Then
+came a long ridge, a spine from which the world dropped almost sheer on
+both sides, with the wind raging so that it seemed Buck must be blown
+off his feet, or the girl torn from the saddle and borne far out like a
+thistledown. With frightened eyes, which she strove vainly to keep
+closed, she saw long, broken slopes; occasionally when the air cleared,
+a frothing torrent; and once, at the end of a couple of hours, far down
+in a distant level land, a growth of giant timber. She thought that King
+was making his way down there. But his purpose soon became plain even to
+her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the
+ravine which lower down cut like a knife across the timbered tract,
+headed for what he took to be Gus Ingle's cave. A mile away she saw it;
+a great, ragged, black hole in a high mass of rock, close to the crest
+of the next ridge.
+
+She was wrapped warmly and yet here the icy breath of the wind pierced
+the fabric of her wrappings and hurt her to the bone. She watched King
+wonderingly as he hastened on; did the man have no sense of bodily
+discomfort? Certainly he gave no sign. He was like an animal; she found
+room for a flash of scorn in the thought. For so she was pleased to
+consider him lower in the scale than herself.
+
+At another time she might have seen the world about her clothed in
+grandeur; now its sublimity was lost I upon her. It was a ravening
+beast, an ugly thing, big and brutal, and ... like King. Oh, how she
+hated it and him!
+
+When at last he waited for her and told her to get down she had the
+suspicion that he had gone mad. Certainly here was no spot to tarry; it
+was on her lips to demur. But she looked at his face and slipped stiffly
+from the saddle. They were high up on the ridge; Gloria, on foot beside
+him, clutched at the wind-twisted branch of one of the sprawling cliff
+growths, in sudden panic that she was being swept from her feet. Just
+below them was the deepening cleft in the mountain-side which, further
+down, widened and descended into the steep-walled gorge. Through it
+shot a mad, frothy stream. A hundred yards further on, high up in the
+cliffs, was the yawning hole in the rocks. King, holding Buck's bridle,
+looked about him and at the sky. Gloria read in his manner a hint of
+uncertainty. Hoping to influence his decision, she said quickly:
+
+"Hadn't we better turn back now?"
+
+He looked at her steadily before answering.
+
+"In what," he replied in that impersonal way which maddened her, "have
+you so altered as to be worth a man's broken promise?" And then she knew
+that no thought of going back had had any part in his brief indecision.
+He was going forward, would go forward in anything he undertook; that
+was a part of his make-up. He was merely seeking the best place to
+unpack and a convenient spot to tether Buck. They were going to make
+camp either right here or nearer the cave, perhaps in it. She looked at
+the uninviting hole and shivered. She would know his decision when King
+saw fit to enlighten her.
+
+Now he merely dumped at her feet the roll from the horse's back, setting
+his rifle down against it. Then he led Buck away, zigzagging tediously,
+at last passing from sight beyond an out jutting monster crag. Gloria
+crouched, seeking to shield herself from the whiplashes of the wind. She
+listened to it as it shrieked about the slabs and boulders of granite;
+the sound was indescribably eerie, filled with unrest, eloquent of the
+brutal contempt of the eternal for the feeble and transient. The
+universe grew utterly lonely; the wind was a whining thing cutting
+through the silence. And King was so long in coming back....
+
+The terrifying thought electrified her: "What if he had deserted her?
+What if he had no intention of coming back?" She should have known
+better; perhaps, deep down within her, she did know better. But the
+suspicion brought its wild flutter; she sprang up and grew rigid in
+tense fright; she felt a strange, glad rush of joy as she saw his hat
+bobbing up and toward her along the mountain flank. When he rejoined
+her she was staring off at nothingness, her back to him.
+
+He lashed the two canvas rolls together, swung them up to his shoulders,
+took frying-pan, coffee-pot, and rifle in his free hand, and nodded
+toward the small pack of provisions which had been left over from lunch.
+"Better bring those," he advised briefly. "There's no telling what may
+be in the cards." He went on along the knife-edge of the ridge, down
+into a little depression, up beyond. She hesitated, saw that he had not
+looked, bit her lip angrily, and snatched up the parcel. Then she
+followed him, stooping against the wind.
+
+When she came up with him he had thrown down his pack at the very edge
+of the gorge. She came to his side, leaned forward, and looked down. Far
+below plunged the wildest torrent she had ever seen; it hurled itself in
+mad haste between boulders; it shot down over dizzy falls; it made for
+itself a white mantle of frothing waters; it looked as black as ebony in
+sections of smoother channel and as cold as death; it spun in
+whirlpools, it filled the air with its din. And King meant to go down to
+it; to cross it; to climb the dizzy cliff upon the further side! She
+knew from his look, without asking. For just across the chasm from them
+in the highest of the cliffs was the yawning black-mouthed place of
+horrors. If one slipped on those bare rocks, clambering down or climbing
+on the further side! She sat down suddenly; now when her lip was caught
+between her teeth it was to fight back the tears. The world was so cold
+and stern and brutal; this man was so much like the environment; she was
+so woefully, desperately heart-sick. On this lofty crest of a
+devil-tossed land she felt the insignificance of a fly clinging to the
+brow of an abyss.
+
+King went about his task methodically. Gloria watched him rather than
+look across the rocky gorges. Slowly and with difficulty he made his way
+down the steep wall of rocks, dragging and pulling the roll of bedding
+and provisions after him. It required perhaps twenty minutes for him to
+get to the bottom. She wondered where he would attempt a crossing; the
+water looked so black in the pools, so violent over the rapids. He went
+up-stream; there lay an old cedar log so that it spanned the current,
+its sturdy old trunk ten feet above the water. For a moment King
+disappeared under an out-thrust ledge; then she saw him again, the pack
+on his shoulders. He had climbed up to the top of the log; he was
+crossing. Where he went now she must follow!
+
+Fascinated, she watched him. Once she thought he was going to fall. But
+unerringly he trod the rude bridge underfoot, gained the other side
+without mishap, tossed down his bundle, and lowered himself from the log
+after it. Gloria marvelled at him; she could see his face and it was
+impassive. Could he not hear the hostile voices of the raging waters?
+Could he not feel the ominous threat of the bleak day and the monster
+cliffs? Was he a man without imagination as he seemed to be without
+fear?
+
+On he went, down-stream again, clinging to the steep pitch of the gorge,
+until he was almost under the mouth of the cavern. He put back his head
+and looked up; it was a hundred feet above him and the cliffs, from
+where Gloria sat numb with cold and dread, looked unsurmountable. Yet he
+was going up them!
+
+"And where he goes you will follow." It was as though the wild waters
+below were chanting it into her ears and thereafter filling the gorge
+with the mockery of derisive laughter.
+
+Slowly, tediously, but with never a sign of hesitation, King made his
+way up the cliff. He had been here before; he knew and remembered every
+foothold and handhold. Nor was the task the impossible one it looked
+from a distance. There were cracks and crevices; there were seams of a
+harder material which, better withstanding the attacks of time, were
+thrust out beyond the general level; on them a man might stand. There
+were spots of softer material, scooped out into pockets by wind and
+water; there were flinty splinters; there were places where the wall,
+looking from across the canon to be sheer and perpendicular, sloped more
+gently, and a man might crawl up them.
+
+King had drawn up after him, stage after stage, the roll of bedding,
+using Blackie's tie-rope to haul it up and to moor it briefly. Gloria
+saw it swing at times like a huge, misshapen pendulum; watched it crawl
+up after him. She saw the wind snatch at it and set it scraping back and
+forth when he let it dangle at rope's end; she saw King's coat flap in
+the wind. Once she cried out aloud, thinking a second time that King was
+falling. If he fell from that height--if he were killed--what then would
+be the fate of Gloria Gaynor!
+
+But at length he came safely to the cave's mouth. He stood upright and
+looked about him. Then he drew up to his feet the dangling roll; with it
+in his arms he was gone into that yawning hole. She waited breathlessly
+for his return. She saw him come again into the light; he had the rope
+in his hand, was coiling it. He began to come down. He was returning for
+her.
+
+She did not stir while he made the slow descent, nor while he recrossed
+on the log and climbed the steep bank to her.
+
+"I am going to spend the day up there," he told her in his studied aloof
+manner. "I'll know soon enough now what truth there is in the story of
+Gus Ingle's gold. There's room in the cave to sleep, and there's shelter
+of a sort. To-morrow morning, if I find nothing, I'll start back with
+you. If you care to come up now I'll help you."
+
+"What else is there to do?" cried Gloria, with the first flash of
+passion. "What else do you leave me?"
+
+He slipped a loop of the rope about her waist, taking slow pains not to
+touch her with his hands, and turned downward again. She followed,
+filled with sudden fear when they had climbed down ten feet, obeying him
+hastily when he commanded her to stand still or to move on, feeling her
+fear grow mightily as they progressed. The wind, strengthening abruptly,
+tore at her in angry gusts. She was panting and shaking visibly when
+finally she reached the log spanning the stream. He was up before her,
+offering her his hand. How she hated to touch it! How she feared to
+follow him! But her hand went into his, her steps followed his, and
+without hesitation; for there was nothing left now to choice. She looked
+down and saw the water raging below; it was like a monster leaping at
+her, snatching at her. She wanted to look away and could not. Like one
+moving through the fearsome steps of a nightmare she went on, clinging
+to King's hand, his hand tight upon hers, cold hands which met because
+they must. At last the torrent was behind her; she came down into King's
+arms from the log; she was faint and would have sat down. But he urged
+her on.
+
+It was another nightmare climbing up the cliffs to the cave. He went
+ahead; he stopped and braced himself; he tautened the rope about her
+waist and said: "Come on. Slow and careful does it." She clutched with
+her cold, sore fingers at the rocks, felt the rope tighten, and went up
+and up. The wind, as though in a fury at losing its quarry, shrieked in
+her ears, and in mighty gusts strove to drag her hands from the rocks
+and to set her swinging as it had swung the roll of bedding. She climbed
+on. King ordered and she obeyed; she waited for him to go up, further
+ahead; for him to call to her and draw in on the rope. Stage by stage,
+weary stages fraught with terror, she toiled up and up and up. And so at
+last, when it seemed to her that no strength remained in her, she came
+to King's side at the gloomy entrance of Gus Ingle's cave. The formless
+black void before her which under other circumstances would have
+repelled, now invited. It offered shelter and rest and protection. She
+crept by King with never a backward glance, and threw herself face down
+on the uneven floor.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXI_
+
+
+A long time King stood at the mouth of the cave, looking forth upon the
+newly whitened world. The look of the thickening sky, the wintry sting
+of the rushing air, the businesslike way in which the snow swirled and
+fell created a condition upon which he had not counted and for which he
+had no relish. This was more like a mid-winter blizzard than any storm
+had any business being so early in the season. For many hours already
+the snow had been falling, piling up in the mountain passes; if it kept
+on at this rate through another day and night--well, he and Gloria had
+best be getting out without any loitering.
+
+He looked at his watch; not yet eleven o'clock. Need for haste; the day
+would be short. Before darkness shut down he had half a dozen hours,
+hours for methodical search. Here was one of Gus Ingle's caves; another,
+he knew, was directly below and at the base of the cliffs; the third
+should be near. It was the third that he was chiefly interested in. He
+recalled the words in the old Bible: "We come to the First Caive and
+then we come to Caive number three and two!" There lay significance in
+the order of Ingle's numerals; first, three, and two. Two of the caves
+were for any one to see; before now King had been in both of them. Hence
+it must be that Gus Ingle's treasure lay in the third. That one King
+must locate. And without too much delay. He looked down at Gloria. She
+lay motionless just as she had thrown herself down.
+
+Taking his rope with him King made what haste he could going down the
+cliffs. The sides of the ravine were littered with dead wood, drift and
+limbs that had broken off the few battered trees above. He gathered as
+heavy a load of dry branches as he could handle, bound them about with
+his rope, and, fighting his way all the way up, clambered again to the
+upper cave. Gloria had not stirred. He moved about her, went a dozen
+paces deeper into the great cavern, and threw down his wood. Breaking
+branches into short lengths he quickly got a fire going. The flames
+spurted up eagerly, bright and cheery, and threw dancing light among the
+wavering shadows. He brought the bedding-roll closer and opened it into
+a rough-and-ready bed. Then he called to Gloria.
+
+"You'd better lie here by the fire," he told her. "You're apt to catch
+cold there."
+
+She was sitting up, watching him. Now she rose listlessly and came
+forward, dropping down into a sitting position upon the blankets, her
+chilled hands out toward the blaze.
+
+"I don't like the look of this storm," he told her. "It is up to us to
+hurry. I am going to look around now. I think you had better rest all
+you can so as to be ready to make a start back as soon as I find out
+whether we are on a wild-goose chase or not."
+
+"You mean--we may start back to-day?"
+
+"I don't know what I am going to find, of course; whether I am going to
+find anything. But if we can get only a couple of hours on our way
+to-day, it's just that much gained."
+
+"You are going to leave me here?"
+
+"I won't be far." With that he set fire to a dry pine faggot, the best
+torch available, and left her, going deeper into the cave. She watched
+him, marvelling at the size of the cavern. He went on a score of paces;
+he seemed to be ascending a steepening slant floor and then to have gone
+over a sort of ridge and to be descending again. But still going further
+from her. Presently she knew that the tunnel had turned sharply to the
+right; she could hear the thud of his boots and for a little while could
+see the flare of his torch against a wall of rock; he himself had passed
+out of her sight.
+
+But she knew that he had not gone a great deal further. For he was not
+so far away that she could not hear him; he was going back and forth; at
+irregular intervals she saw a dim, ghostly light playing upon the dark
+cavern walls. And, despite the weary ache of a hardship-tortured body,
+she began to be interested in his search. If there were, in truth, such
+gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of--gold
+for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony
+Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his
+following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening
+wolves on the trail--gold in quantity to make even toughened old
+gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it--why, then, that gold was
+half Mark King's and half Ben Gaynor's! And it might be that now, at
+this very instant, Mark King was finding it; was standing over it,
+staring down at it by the ghostly flare of a smoking torch. She sat,
+tense and still, listening, trying to probe with tired but suddenly
+bright eyes through the dark.
+
+She started, realizing that no longer could she hear King searching back
+and forth. It was very silent about her, only the crackle of the flames
+making a sound to be heard against the rush of air outside. It seemed to
+her that King had been gone a long time. She rose to her feet, tempted
+to follow him. She was curious to know what he was doing; why he was so
+silent; where he had gone. But in the end pride restrained her and she
+sat down again to wait in an attitude of indifference.
+
+But the minutes dragged on and never a sound came back from the far,
+dark depths of the cavern; fifteen minutes, half an hour. She grew
+restless and walked up and down; she went to the mouth of the cave and
+stood looking out into the swirling snow-storm; she returned to the
+fire, throwing on more wood. She felt sure that an hour had passed--two
+hours--she began to grow alarmed. Always that dread thought was ready to
+spring out upon her: "If something had happened to him!" She went a
+little way in the direction he had taken; stood peering into the dark,
+listening breathless and rigid. Never a sound. She went back to the
+front of the cave, looking down, staring out into the grey sky, across
+the ridge....
+
+Gloria, trembling with a new excitement, was down on her knees before
+the pack when King returned. She sprang up to face him. And each, with
+the other's emotions and experiences of the past two or three hours
+unknown to him, marvelled at what was to be read in the other's face.
+Gloria was excited; King's excitement was no less. Where she had at
+least the clue to his altered expression, he had none to hers.
+
+"It's here!" he burst out. "And I've found it. Tons and tons of it, such
+knobs and nuggets of pure gold as never man laid eyes on! We have here
+the Magic Lamp to rub: a castle in Spain and an ocean-going yacht and
+the newest thing in motor-cars and a trip around the world and a
+presentation to royalty--a fragment of heaven and a very large slice of
+hell. Ambition fulfilled and love consumed and hate born. We have old
+Ben made whole and full of power again. And here we have all that is
+left of Gus Ingle and his friends--except for a pile of bones back
+yonder!"
+
+She saw that in each hand he carried what looked like a big rough stone;
+she saw from the way he carried them that they were heavy. The fires
+leaped higher, brighter in her eyes. Now she saw the way to make Mark
+King pay for all of his brutality to her; to pay to the uttermost!
+
+"I have nothing to say to you," she said as stiffly as she knew the way.
+"I care to hear nothing you have to say. I have tolerated all that I
+mean to tolerate from you."
+
+Her bearing, no less than her words, astonished him. For the first time
+he saw what it was that she held in her hands. She had been gathering up
+her own little personal effects; a tiny parcel of silken things, comb
+and brush, trifling feminine odds and ends. He stared at her
+wonderingly.
+
+"I don't understand----"
+
+Gloria treated him to cool laughter.
+
+"You will in a minute. I am going."
+
+"Going? You? In God's name, _where_?"
+
+Deep silence answered him. He frowned at her in puzzled fashion a
+moment; then, suspecting the truth, since his racing mind could hit on
+no other possible explanation of her manner, he dropped to the fireside
+the things in his hands and went swiftly to the cave's mouth. He looked
+out into the storm, his eyes questing in all directions. Nothing. Only
+the thickening storm, the ridges dim beyond the swirl of snow----
+
+Then he saw. For a long time he stood, studying it, seeking to make
+sure. What he saw was beaten down by the falling snow, dissipated by the
+wind, gone entirely over and again only to rise like a shapeless ghost
+of disaster. It was a column of smoke. Some one had encamped no great
+distance away; on the same stream, hidden only by the windings of the
+gorge. Some one? Why, then, Gratton and Brodie and their crowd, after
+all! He glowered angrily toward the faint smudge of smoke. Then he swung
+about and came back to Gloria's side.
+
+"You saw that smoke?" he demanded. "You plan on going to them?"
+
+"Yes," cried Gloria. She sprang up and confronted him angrily. "Yes to
+both questions."
+
+"You know who they are, then?"
+
+"No; but that doesn't matter."
+
+"Which means as plain as print," he said thoughtfully, "that you would
+go to any man to be rid of me." He laughed unpleasantly and Gloria's
+anger flared the higher.
+
+"Do you know," he said presently, "that they are probably Gratton and
+Swen Brodie and their outfit?"
+
+"What of it?" asked Gloria, erect and defiant.
+
+"You know that Gratton has set out to ruin your father? That he's a
+double-dealing scoundrel? That Brodie is worse? That neither is hardly
+the sort for a girl to trust herself to in a place like this?"
+
+"I am not given much choice," Gloria informed him with high insolence.
+
+"That's a fact," he conceded with a grunt.
+
+He'd give a thousand dollars right now to be well rid of her; yes, and
+have Gratton and Brodie and the rest of them come on looking for any
+sort of a row that suited their ilk. He told himself that with savage
+emphasis, but he asked: could he let her go?
+
+"Before I go," said Gloria when she thought that he had nothing further
+to add, "I want to say just one thing: father has always considered you
+his best friend. I shall lose no time in telling him what you really
+are."
+
+Gloria's remark, coming just when it did in King's perplexity, settled
+his decision firmly on him. The girl was a vicious little fool; so he
+was determined to think of her unequivocally. But she was, after all,
+Ben Gaynor's daughter and, furthermore, the apple of Ben's eye. She was
+in King's keeping; he had been eminently to blame for bringing her here,
+his was the responsibility. Gratton's eye was the sort that soils a
+woman.
+
+"You are _not_ going," he said suddenly, turning upon her. "I won't
+allow you to put yourself in Gratton's or Brodie's dirty hands."
+
+A quick light was in her eyes, a quick spurt of satisfaction in her
+heart. In King's decision she read the assurance that he was still madly
+in love with her, that now his jealousy stirred him. She lifted her chin
+and with her little bundle under her arm came forward, walking
+confidently.
+
+"Stand aside, please," she commanded. "I am going, I tell you."
+
+Again sensing the familiarity of the battlefield she felt an almost
+serene confidence, believing herself easily mistress of the situation.
+So much must have been plain to King from that "Stand aside, please,"
+which Miss Gloria Gaynor of last week might have addressed to a porter,
+were it not that just now King's thought was not bended to trifles. When
+she came to his side and he did not stir, she sought to brush by him.
+There was no hesitation in the way in which he put out his hand and held
+her back.
+
+"There can be only one captain to an expedition in adventure," he told
+her seriously. "I have been elected to the job. You'll pardon me if I
+put matters into one-syllable words? Until we are well out of this, if
+we are ever out at all, you will have to do what I tell you. You are not
+going to desert ship."
+
+She stared at him speechlessly. Then:
+
+"By what right do _you_ issue orders to _me_?" she cried.
+
+"Let us say," he returned in the coin of her own harshness, "by the old
+right of a husband. If that isn't sufficient you can add to it: by the
+time-honoured right of the lord and master! For that is just precisely
+what I intend being until I can turn you over to your dawdling set in
+the city again. Wait a minute," he added sternly, as he saw her lips
+opening to a rush of words. "I would be glad to have you go were
+conditions less exacting. Now I have thought matters over and it appears
+essential that certain of our marriage vows be remembered. You don't
+have to love or honour, but by thunder you are going to obey! Reversion
+to an ancient order of things, eh? Well, the world was better then,
+largely in that women were worth a man's while. Further, for my part, I
+fully intend to keep my obligation of protecting you against your own
+foolishness, the storm, Gratton, Brodie, and the devil himself. And,
+finally, I mean to keep my promise to your father. He sent me to get Gus
+Ingle's gold; it's here. So is Gratton with his cut-throat crowd. I will
+in all probability have my hands full. But, once and for all, you stick
+with me. Where," he concluded with the last jeer, "the wife's place
+should be!"
+
+Gloria tried to stare him down, to wither him with the fire of her
+scorn, to brave by him. But the man, all emotion having receded from his
+eyes, was once more like so much rock, but rock endowed with dormant
+power of aggression. She felt as though she had to do with a great
+poised boulder which offered no menace so long as she let it alone, but
+which needed but an unwary step of hers to destroy its equilibrium and
+thus bring it crashing down upon her, crushing her. She began by
+wondering if she had mistaken his look just now when she had leaped to
+the triumphant decision that he loved her; she ended by feeling hopeless
+and tired and uncertain of all things. To keep him from noting how she
+was trembling she went hastily back to the roll of bedding and dropped
+down to it. On the instant it became clear to her that physically King
+was the master. To her, before whom difficulties had heretofore
+invariably melted, it seemed equally clear that there must be a way out
+of an unbearable situation. So now, for the first time, she began a
+certain logical line of thought, seeking to shape her own plans.
+
+"Please listen to me seriously," King said quietly to her. "I won't talk
+long to you. Your father is on the edge of bankruptcy. He is temporarily
+out of the running--at the hands of the very men you want to go to. He
+counts on me for what is in Gus Ingle's caves. I have found at least a
+part of it and I honestly believe that it is in your hands and mine to
+pull Ben through and leave him a rich man on top of it. Gratton and
+Brodie are down there; they'll clean us out if they can. The stake is
+big enough for them to stop at nothing short of murder, and I am not
+oversure they'd stop there. Gus Ingle's crowd didn't, and I don't know
+that men have changed much in half a hundred years."
+
+"I am listening," said Gloria coolly when he paused.
+
+"Here's the point: this is treasure-trove; we got here first. It is up
+to us to hold it. Can I count on you? You don't happen to have any love
+for me; well, you shouldn't have any for Gratton or Brodie, either. And
+you know that you can trust yourself to me. Can I count on you sticking
+on the job, your father's and your own job as much as mine, until we
+make a go of it?"
+
+Gloria's logical thinking had barely begun, and as yet had not had time
+to progress. Her spite was lively and bitter. In her distorted vision,
+blurred by passionate anger, she cried out quickly:
+
+"So, now that the odds are against you, you come cringing to me, do
+you?" Again she was misled into fancying that she held a whip-hand over
+him. "Answering your question, I would trust Mr. Gratton any day rather
+than you. He, at least, is not quite the brute and bully that you are."
+
+King was hardly disappointed.
+
+"At least you have given a straight answer," he muttered. "That is
+something."
+
+Now he shaped his plans swiftly and carefully, knowing where she stood.
+It was characteristic of him that, once having seen clearly his own
+responsibility toward a foolish girl, he did not seek to simplify his
+own difficulty by ridding himself of her. Henceforth he would merely
+consider her his chief handicap, with him but against him. He consoled
+himself with the whimsical thought that there was never a proper
+treasure-hunt that did not carry traitorous mutineers on the questing
+ship.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXII_
+
+
+And so, after all, he and Gloria were not alone in the mountains; that
+other crowd was still to be reckoned with. King stood at the cave's
+mouth, frowning into the ever-thickening smother of the storm. Their
+smoke was gone again, beaten down, hidden behind the snow-curtain. But
+they were there, at no very great distance. Thus, then, they knew
+something. Just what? Here was the matter of his perplexity; did they
+know all that he did? Or had they merely such a hint as would lead them
+as close as this? Or had they followed his trail?
+
+He grew impatient with seeking to speculate. It struck him clearly and
+forcefully that he had but one thing to do: to trust that they did not
+have such full information as had fallen into his hands and to see to it
+that he gave them no help. Though they should come close, very close,
+still that which he had found might remain hidden from them. There lay
+his work; to do all that he could to hide Gus Ingle's gold. First he
+would bring with him more than the two nuggets; all that he felt he
+could manage to carry with the rest of his necessary load. Enough to
+help Ben Gaynor over a crisis; enough raw gold to slam down before some
+San Francisco capitalist, together with a tale which would make any man
+eager to stake the owner to what loan he asked. With that he'd seek to
+get back to the open. He would get provisions, snow-shoes, a dog-team,
+if necessary, a couple of trusted men to come with him; he would be back
+here within the week. But first, before he went, he would strive to make
+as sure as a man could that Brodie's crowd did not find the golden
+hoard.
+
+He went a second time far back into the darkness of the further cave,
+carrying a smoking torch as before, vanishing from Gloria's eyes. She
+was alone; nothing stood between her and the cave's mouth; she was free
+to go! He must have thought of that. He was giving her her chance. She
+had but to snatch up the few things she meant to take with her, to go
+out, to find her way down the cliffs----She shuddered. She was afraid!
+Did he know that, too? Had he thought of that? She moved back and forth
+restlessly; at one instant she was sure that she would go, only to be
+certain of nothing before another second passed. How soon would he
+return? Would he hurry after her, would he bring her back forcibly?...
+She went where she could look out; the column of smoke had disappeared;
+the wind tore at her in mighty gusts. She hesitated and time passed.
+
+How long he was gone she did not know. She only knew that she had done
+nothing when at length he returned. There was a look of grim
+satisfaction on his face; whatever he had gone to do he had done in a
+manner to please him. She noted that his coat was off; that in it, as in
+a bag, he carried something heavy.
+
+"This goes with us wherever we go," he announced triumphantly. "It's a
+big breathing spell for Ben Gaynor." He dumped it out; there were other
+lumps like the two he had brought back the first time. She wondered
+dully if that grimy stuff were gold! She watched him while he emptied a
+provision-bag and thereafter dropped into it the stuff he had brought in
+his coat. On top of it went the articles of food.
+
+"If you can whip up enough endurance for the work ahead of us," he
+announced impersonally, "we stand a good chance of getting out of this.
+Otherwise, we stand a whole lot better show of being caught here and
+freezing and starving to death."
+
+Gloria shook visibly. Nervousness and fear and the cold were combined
+and merciless. Her look sped from King's face to what she could see of
+the snow-storm.
+
+"But we'll wait," she asked in utter, weary meekness, "until this
+horrible storm is over?"
+
+"One never knows about a storm like this," he told her. "It may blow
+itself out soon and it may keep on for a long time. Now, it's beginning
+to pile up in the drifts, to hide the trails, to make going harder every
+minute. As it is we'll have our work cut out for us; if this keeps up
+all afternoon and all night ..." He shrugged.
+
+"You mean that then we couldn't get out at all?" she asked sharply.
+
+He looked down on her thoughtfully. "I don't know," he replied slowly,
+"whether you could make it then or not. I am more or less used to this
+sort of thing and you are not. I figure that we ought to take no more
+long shots than we have to. If we start right now and have any luck we
+can make several miles before night and camp in some of the thick
+timber. We'd be as well off there as we are here and just that much
+nearer the outside. If the weather allowed us to travel at all we could
+be back at your father's place in four or five days at the longest.
+And," he added significantly, "we have food to last us just about that
+long."
+
+Gloria sprang up hastily. "Quick," she cried. "Let's hurry."
+
+King nodded and began his preparations. Into the squares of canvas he
+rolled everything they were to take with them, and he took no single
+article which he judged was not absolutely necessary. One small
+frying-pan and one light aluminium pot, with single knife, fork, and
+spoon, constituted all in the way of cooking utensils. With jealous eye
+he judged the weight, bulk, and worth of every other article, whether it
+be a tin of fruit or a slab of bacon. Those delicacies, which his love
+for Gloria had prompted him to bring with them, he now placed at one
+side, to be left behind. Bacon, to the last small scrap and fat-lined
+rind, coffee, to the once-boiled dregs in the coffee-pot, he packed
+carefully. Then, his roll made and drawn tight, he took up the discarded
+articles and hid them under some loose dirt in a remote, black corner of
+the cave. Ten minutes later he had gotten first his pack, then Gloria,
+safely down the cliffs, and they started. Head down, silent, like two
+grotesque automatons, they trudged on. They crossed on the fallen cedar,
+they climbed out of the gorge on the far side, they fought their way on.
+
+Several times King turned. But she soon saw it was not to look at her;
+his glance passed down the long canon toward the spot where they had
+seen the smudge of smoke. She had come near forgetting that other men
+were near; she had no interest in them now. King had brought her here;
+King must take her safely back to the world which she had forsaken so
+stupidly. The obligation was plainly his; the power seemed his no less.
+
+As Gloria fought her way along she was upborne at every step by the
+expectation of coming presently to their horse, of being placed in the
+saddle, and of having nothing to do from then on but hold to the pommel
+and have King lead her on to an ultimate safety. The progress would be
+long and the way little less than an adventure in hell to her; but at
+least hers would have become a slightly more passive part and she would
+be moving on toward the luxury of four walls and a maid and warm
+comforts. So when they came to the spot where King had tethered his
+horse, and there was no horse there, Gloria looked her blank, stupefied
+bewilderment, and then simply collapsed. She dropped down in the snow,
+her face in her hands, too weary and heartbroken to sob aloud. King
+stared about him with an almost equal consternation.
+
+Leaving Gloria where she lay inert in the snow, King put down rifle and
+pack and hurried down into the hollow where he had tethered his horse.
+Five minutes of reading the signs in the snow told him the story. He had
+been right; his venture from the beginning had been loaded to the guards
+with bad luck. There was the end of the broken tie-rope; there the
+tracks showing the way Buck had gone, in full, headlong flight. The rope
+was stout and would have broken only were the animal terrified. If
+frightened, then there had been something to cause fright. Again, since
+the horse fled straight down the slope, that something startling it
+would have been at some point directly above. King turned and mounted to
+the ridge top again. Here were other tracks, all but obliterated by the
+snow which had fallen since they were made. A bear had come up over the
+ridge; had frightened the horse into breaking its tether and running.
+And the equally startled bear had turned tail and raced off the other
+way. Both animals were probably a dozen miles off by now; the bear,
+perhaps, twice that distance.
+
+King came back slowly and sat down on his pack. From Gloria's dejected
+figure he looked to his watch, from his watch again to the four points
+of the compass. His lips tightened. The afternoon was passing and the
+dark would come early.
+
+"Are you up to crowding ahead on foot?" he called to Gloria. "If you
+have the nerve we can really make better time that way, anyhow, from now
+on. Can you do it?"
+
+At first she did not try to answer. But when he shouted to her again,
+his voice hard with anger, she moaned miserably:
+
+"I am sick; I am dying, I think. I can't go on."
+
+King grunted disgustedly.
+
+He let Gloria lie where she was until she had rested. Then he went to
+her and put his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. She was
+limp and pale, her eyes shut, her lashes looking unusually black against
+the pallor of her pinched cheeks.
+
+"We'll go back to the cave for the night, after all," he told her
+quietly. "It's the inevitable, and that's one thing there's no sense
+bucking against. Stand up!"
+
+But the slight figure in its boyish garb drooped against him; Gloria's
+head moved the slightest bit in sidewise negation; her pale lips stirred
+soundlessly.
+
+"What?" asked King.
+
+"I can't," came her whisper.
+
+He judged that here was no time for foolishness, but rather the time for
+each one to do his part if the two of them lived to make all of this an
+unpleasant memory.
+
+"You've got to," he informed her crisply. "I can't carry you and the
+pack and rifle and everything, can I? I am going back; the rest is up to
+you. Do you want to lie here and die to-night?"
+
+"I don't care," said Gloria listlessly.
+
+He looked at her curiously. As he drew his hands away she slipped down
+and lay as she had lain before. He turned away, took up his pack and
+gun, set his back square upon her, and trudged off toward the only
+shelter that was theirs. Along the ridge, buffeted by the wind, half
+blind with the flurries of stinging hail with which that wind lashed him
+as with countless bits of broken glass, he did not turn to look behind
+him; not until he had gone fully half of the way to the cave. Then he
+did turn. He could not see her following as he had pictured her. He
+dropped his burden and went back to her. She lay as he had left her, her
+face whiter than he had ever seen it, her eyes shut, certain small blue
+veins making a delicate tracery across the lids.
+
+He had meant to storm at her, to stir her into activity by the lashings
+of his rage. But instead he stooped and gathered her up into his arms
+and carried her through the storm, shielding her body all that he could.
+And as he stooped and as he moved off he was growling deep down in his
+throat like a disgruntled old bear. When it came to clambering down and
+then up the cliffs Gloria obeyed his commands listlessly and as in a
+dream, lending the certain small aid that was necessary. Even so, the
+climb was hard and slow, and more than ever before filled with danger.
+But in the end it was done; again they were in Gus Ingle's cave. King
+built a fire, left Gloria lying by it, and went back for his pack. When
+he returned she had not moved. He made a bed for her, placed her on it
+so that her feet were toward the fire, and covered her with his own
+blanket. Then he boiled some coffee and made her drink it. She obeyed
+again, neither thanked him nor upbraided him, and drooped back upon her
+hard bed and shut her eyes. Here was a new Gloria, a Gloria who did not
+care whether she lived or died. With a quickening alarm in his eyes he
+stood by the smoky fire, staring at her. Uninured to hardship, her
+delicate body was already beaten; with still further hardship to come
+might she not--die? And what would Mark King say to Ben Gaynor, even if
+he brought back much raw red gold, if it had cost the life of Ben
+Gaynor's daughter?
+
+She did not stir when he came to her and knelt and put his hand against
+her cheek. He was shocked to learn how cold she was. Lightly he set his
+fingers against her softly pulsing throat; it was cold, like ice.
+Plainly she was chilled through. As he began unlacing her boots a
+curiously bitter thought came to him. She was his; the marriage service
+had given her to him with her own willingness; his wife. And now he was
+doing for her the first intimate little thing. He drew off her boots and
+stockings and found that her feet were terribly cold. He wrapped them in
+a hot blanket and hastened to set a pot of water on the coals. While the
+water warmed he knelt and chafed her feet between his palms, afraid for
+a moment that they were frozen. Finally, while he bathed them in
+steaming water, the dead white began to give place to a faint pinkness,
+like a blush, and again he put the blanket about them.
+
+She had not moved. When a second time he laid his hand against her
+throat the cold of it alarmed him. He hesitated a moment; then, the
+urgent need being more than evident, he began swiftly to undo her outer
+garments. The boyish shirt he unbuttoned and managed to remove; it was
+wet through, and stiff with frost. He noted her under-garments, silken
+and foolish little things, with amazement; she had known no better than
+to wear such nonsensical affairs on a trip like this! Good God, what
+_did_ she know? But he did not pause in his labours until he had slipped
+off the wet clothing. Then he wrapped her in another warm blanket and
+placed her on her bed, her feet still to the blaze. All of the time she
+had seemed, and probably was, hardly conscious. Now only she opened her
+eyes.
+
+"I can't have you playing the fool and getting pneumonia," he growled at
+her. "We've got our hands full as it is. Don't you know enough to ..."
+
+But she was not listening. She stirred slightly, eased herself into a
+new position, cuddled her face against a bare arm, sighed, and went to
+sleep.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIII_
+
+
+All night King kept his fire blazing. With several long sticks and a
+piece of the canvas, drawing deeply upon his ingenuity and almost to the
+dregs of his patience, he contrived a rude barrier to the cold across
+the mouth of the cave. Countless times he rolled out of his own bunk,
+heavy-eyed and stiff, to readjust the screen when it had blown down, to
+put more wood on his fire, to make sure that Gloria was covered and
+warm, sleeping heavily, and not dead. His nerves were frayed. In the
+long night his fears grew, misshapen and grotesque. Within his soul he
+prayed mutely that when morning came Gloria would be alive. When with
+the first sickly streaks of dawn he went to put fresh fuel upon the
+dying embers he found that there was but a handful of wood left. He came
+to stoop over the girl and listen to her breathing. Then he descended
+the cliffs for more wood.
+
+During the night winter had set the white seal of his sovereignty upon
+the world. The snarling wind had died in its own fierceness, giving over
+to a still, calm air, through which steadily the big flakes fell. Now
+they clung to bush and tree everywhere; the limbs had grown thick and
+heavy, drooping like countless plumes. Fat mats of snow lay on the level
+spaces, upon flat rocks, curling over and down at the edges. Where he
+stood King sank ankle-deep in the fluffy stuff. As he moved along the
+cliffs and down the slope toward a dead tree he stepped now and then
+into drifts where the snow was gathering swiftly. As he looked up,
+seeking to penetrate the skies above him and judge their import, he saw
+only myriads of grey particles high up, swirling but slightly in some
+softly stirring air-current, for the most part dropping, floating,
+falling almost vertically. Nowhere was there a hint or hope of
+cessation. The winter, a full four weeks early, had come.
+
+In the noose of his rope he dragged up the cliff much dead wood, riven
+from a fallen pine. Throughout the noise of his comings and goings the
+girl slept heavily. He got a big fire blazing without waking her and set
+about getting breakfast. While he waited for the coffee to boil he took
+careful stock of provisions. For two people there was enough for some
+twenty meals, food for about a week. Time to conserve the grease from
+the frying-pan; to hoard the smallest bit of bacon rind. He even counted
+his rounds of ammunition; here alone he was affluent. He had in the
+neighbourhood of a hundred cartridges for the rifle. While he was
+setting the gun aside he felt Gloria's eyes upon him.
+
+During the night and now, during this inventory, he had been granted
+both ample time and cause for his decision. He addressed her with prompt
+frankness.
+
+"Inside fifteen minutes we've got to be on our way out. As we go we'll
+look for the horse. But, find it or not, we're going."
+
+She lay looking up at him thoughtfully. She had rested; she resented his
+coolly assumed mastery; she had not forgotten that there were other men
+near by. But she merely said, by way of beginning:
+
+"The storm is over, then?"
+
+"No. But we are not going to wait. We have food for only six or seven
+days, at the most."
+
+She let her eyes droop to the fire so that the lids hid them from him.
+It was not yet full day; it was still snowing. Gratton and the men with
+him would, of course, have ample supplies. She yearned feverishly to be
+rid of King and his intolerable domineering. She estimated swiftly that,
+paradoxically, her only power over him was that of powerlessness; while
+she lay here hers was, in a way, the advantage. On her feet, following
+him, he would be again to her the brute he had been coming in.
+
+"I am tired out," she said faintly, still not looking up. "I am sick. I
+have a pain here." She moved her hand to her side where, in reality, she
+was conscious of a troublesome soreness. "I can't go on."
+
+He stared at her. She was pale. Now that she lifted her eyes for a brief
+reading of his look, he remarked that they appeared unusually large and
+luminous. There was a flush on her cheeks. His old fear surged back on
+him: Gloria was going to die! So he did what Gloria had counted on
+having him do: put milk and sugar in her coffee and brought the cup to
+her; he hastened to serve her a piping-hot breakfast of crisp bacon, hot
+cakes and jam. He urged her to eat, and made his own meal of unsweetened
+black coffee and cakes without jam. Triumphantly and covertly Gloria
+observed all of this. Hers was the victory. Mark King was again waiting
+on her, hand and foot, sacrificing for her.
+
+He allowed himself half a pipe of tobacco--tobacco, like food, was going
+to run out soon--and smoked sombrely. Here already was the thing to be
+dreaded more than aught else: Gloria threatened with illness. As Ben
+Gaynor's daughter, never as his own beloved wife, she had become his
+responsibility. She was a parcel marked "Fragile--Handle with Care,"
+which he had undertaken to deliver safely to a friend.
+
+"I am going to look for the horse," he told her. He got to his feet and
+took up his rifle. "But don't count too much on my success. All the
+chances are that Buck is a long way on the trail back to his stable.
+Blackie has probably limped back home by now. Another thing: if I don't
+get Buck to-day he'll be of no use to us; that is, if the snow keeps on.
+But I'll do what I can."
+
+But, before leaving, he did what he could to make for her comfort during
+his absence. He brought up fir-boughs, making them into a bed for her.
+He readjusted his canvas screen, securing it more carefully, thereby
+making the cave somewhat more snug. And at the last he dropped a little,
+much-worn book at her side; she did not know he had it with him. She did
+not appear to note it until he had gone. Then she took it up curiously.
+A volume of Kipling's poems, compact and companionable, on India paper
+between worn covers. With a little sniff she put the book down; just the
+sort of thing for Mark King to read, she thought with fine scorn, and
+utterly stupid to Gloria. What had she to do with _The Explorer_ and
+_Snarleyow_ and _Boots_ and _The Feet of the Young Men_? Less than
+nothing, in sheer, regrettable fact. She knew he had one other book with
+him, Gus Ingle's Bible! The profaned volume of a murderous, long-dead
+scoundrel. What a library for a dainty lady! Gloria suddenly found that
+she could have screamed.
+
+She scrambled up and went to peer out around the canvas screen. No sound
+out there, for the wind was dead and the snow dropped noiselessly; the
+creek in the gorge, because what little draught there was in the air
+bore down the canon, sent no sound to her ears. The wilderness of crag
+and peak and distant forest was hostile, pitiless. She sought eagerly
+for some sign of Gratton. There was none; no smoke this morning denoted
+his camp, no longed-for figure toiled upward toward her. But he would
+come soon; he must. King had found the gold here; Gratton would know and
+come. She would wait, hoping for Gratton's coming before King's return.
+
+Meanwhile King, making his way down the mountain slope, found that his
+estimate of the storm was cheerlessly correct; the fluffy stuff
+underfoot was in places already knee-deep and mounting steadily higher.
+He shook himself and growled in his throat and ploughed through it
+vigorously.
+
+"A pair of webs would look like wings before long," he muttered. "Well,
+we'll make 'em, since we can't buy 'em."
+
+Making his way back to the point where Buck had broken his tether, King
+overlooked no precaution; since he did not care to have his and Gloria's
+hiding-place known unnecessarily to Gratton and his following, he
+forsook the natural pathway and made slower, hard progress along the
+gorge where others would be less likely to chance upon his tracks and
+where the tracks themselves would soonest fill with drifting snow.
+Passing about many a stunted grove he came at last to the place whence
+Buck had fled. He knew that in the general direction indicated by the
+line of flight, beyond two ridges, was the valley of the giant sequoias.
+There a horse would find water, shelter, and grass. If he failed to find
+the animal there--well, then, Buck was well on the trail or lost to King
+in any one of a hundred places.
+
+And always as he went, panting up and ploughing down, the steep slopes,
+his eyes were keen for meat, be it Douglas squirrel or bear. But the
+woods seemed deserted and empty; only those cheerful, impudent little
+bundles of feathers, the snowbirds, and an occasional, darting
+water-ouzel along the creeks. These he let alone, but with the mental
+reservation that the time might well be at hand when even such as they
+must be called on to keep life in him and Gloria.
+
+He had taken on a man's-sized contract for his morning's work and drove
+his big body at it relentlessly. And he took his own sort of joy from
+it, the joy of a fight against odds, the joy of action in the open. His
+body was wet with sweat, but neither his ardour nor optimism were
+dampened; his foot came perilously near frost-bite after he slipped into
+the hidden water of a small stream, but he considered the accident but a
+part of the day's work. So, prepared by common sense for
+disappointment, he looked hopefully to finding the horse. And as he
+pushed on he pondered other likely spots to seek this afternoon or
+to-morrow if he did not find the animal in the sequoias.
+
+When at last he came to the grove of big trees he was among old friends.
+But he knew almost as soon as he reached them that they had no word for
+him to-day. On his wedding morning he had planned how he would bring
+Gloria here, taking it for granted, in his blind infatuation, that they
+would mean to her what they had meant to him. Now he passed swiftly like
+a noiseless shadow between the gigantic boles; he did not lift his head
+to look at old Vulcan's lightning-blasted crest, two hundred feet in
+air, all but lost up there in the falling snow; he gave no thought to
+the thousands of years which were Majesty's and Thor's. He went with his
+eyes on the ground, seeking tracks of a horse. And as he had more than
+half expected, he found nothing. The magnificent vistas, carpeted in
+snow, gave him no view of anything but snow.
+
+Later he must cudgel his brains and seek elsewhere. Now, with other work
+to be done, he should go back the shortest, quickest way. So he set his
+feet into the trail which they had made, and turned his back upon the
+grove. Where he crossed streams he took stock of pools; there were trout
+there if a man could take them. This was another matter to see about.
+Oh, he would be busy enough. And yet he did not loiter, and stopped only
+briefly and infrequently to rest.
+
+Before returning to Gloria, King meant to look in on Brodie's camp, if
+only from a distance. As matters stood now there was no telling what
+bearing Gratton's and Brodie's actions might have later upon his own
+affairs. It would be well to note if the men were preparing to fight the
+storm out or to pack up and leave rather than take prolonged chances
+with the season. So, a mile below his own camp, he slipped into a grove
+of firs and made his unseen way toward the fringe whence he counted upon
+seeing what they were about. He was still moving on slowly and had had
+no glimpse of the men when he heard them. He stopped abruptly and
+listened.
+
+They were down there, against the canon wall. Words came to him
+indistinctly, muffled by the thick air. The tones of the voices were
+unmistakable. Three voices there were, each with its own peculiarity,
+none of them Gratton's. First a big, booming voice; then a sharp,
+staccato-quick voice; thereafter a high-pitched, querulous utterance,
+nervous and irritable. Disagreement, if not out-and-out quarrel, had
+already come to camp. King moved a few paces nearer, pushed aside a low
+branch from which the snow dropped with little thuds, and saw the men.
+
+There were four of them in an excited group, and slightly drawn apart,
+one hand at his mouth, was Gratton. The four paid no attention to him,
+but formed a group exclusively self-centred. Of these four one now held
+his own counsel, his attitude alert, his hands in his pockets, his head
+turning swiftly, so that his eyes were now on one speaker, now on
+another. Across the brief distance King could see the puffs of smoke
+from the pipe in his teeth. The man wore a red handkerchief knotted
+about his throat; its colour was as bright as fresh-spilled blood. Swen
+Brodie.
+
+Now and then as a voice was lifted King caught a word; repeated several
+times he heard the word "bacon." Here, doubtless, was the matter under
+discussion. One man, he of the thin, querulous voice swung his nervous
+arm widely and fairly shrieked his message; it came in little puffs and
+was lost between. King heard him shout "bacon" and "snow" and "hell."
+The three expressions, so oddly connected and yet disjointed, were
+significant.
+
+Gratton stood apart and gnawed at his hand; though he could not see the
+prominent eyes, King could imagine the look in them. Swen Brodie puffed
+regularly at his pipe and watched and listened intently.
+
+Abruptly the wrangling knot of men resolved itself into two definite
+factions. His fellows had turned upon the shrill-voiced man, plainly in
+some sort of denunciation or accusation. He was the smallest of the
+lot, and drew back hastily, step after step, offering the knife-edge of
+his curses as the others clubbed their fists.
+
+"... a lie!" he shrieked. "Fools...."
+
+Gratton gnawed at his knuckles, Brodie puffed steadily, and the two
+aggressors accepted windy denial as sign of guilt. One of them sprang
+forward and struck; the little man whipped out a revolver and fired. The
+shot sounded dull and muffled; a puff of smoke hung for a moment like
+the smoke from the pipe, appearing methodically between the passive
+onlooker's teeth; the man who had struck stopped dead in his tracks.
+There came a second shot; then in sharp staccato succession four others,
+followed by the ugly little metallic click announcing that the gun had
+emptied itself. Before the last explosion the balancing body sagged
+limply and sprawled in the snow.
+
+King's first natural impulse was to break through the brush and run
+forward. But his caution of the day commanded by circumstance, though
+never a part of the man's headlong nature, remained with him,
+counselling cool thought instead of hot haste. The man down was dead or
+as good as dead; him King could not help. So he held back and watched.
+
+There fell a brief silence while the man who had done the shooting and
+the men about him, no less than the figure lying in the snow, were as
+motionless as so many carven statues. At last Brodie spoke heavily.
+
+"Benny's right. Bates had it coming to him. Times like this stealing a
+side of bacon is worse'n murder. Bates stole it; he was going to try to
+double-cross us and beat it out of here. Now he's dead, and good
+riddance." He spat into the snow when he had done.
+
+Benny, chattering wildly to himself now, began a hasty reloading of his
+revolver. The man whom he had shot, whom Brodie named Bates, lay not
+five steps from Benny's feet, his blood already congealing where it
+flushed the snow. Oddly enough, King knew personally or by repute each
+of the men before him with the single exception of the man who had paid
+in full for his own--or some one else's--crime of stealing food at a
+time when food meant a chance for life. To begin with, there was Swen
+Brodie and there was Gratton. There was Benny, who had done the killing,
+a degenerate, a morphine addict, and a thorough-going scoundrel. Beyond
+him stood the burly ruffian of the big, awkward, bony frame, who had
+brought the "judge" to the log house the other night at Gratton's
+bidding, Steve Jarrold. Through the trees, coming up now, were two more
+of the ill-featured party, a swart, squat Italian, and just at his heels
+a ragged scarecrow of a man named Brail. It was Brail who came close
+enough to stoop over the fallen man.
+
+"Dead, ain't he?" queried Benny, half-coughing over his words.
+
+His fellows had drawn closer so that they stood in a ring about the
+body. One man alone held apart. Gratton's eyes were wild, void of
+purpose; the dead, chalky-white of his face turned a sickly greenish
+tinge. After a little, while no one paid any attention to him, he began
+a slow withdrawal, moving jerkily step by step, his dragging heels
+making long furrows in the snow. Then King, too, began to draw back,
+slipping quietly and swiftly through the screen of tree and bush,
+stepping in the tracks he had made coming hither, praying suddenly for
+further fast-falling snow to hide or obliterate the trail he had made.
+And for the moment he was not thinking of the gold which they, too,
+sought, and which he had meant to snatch away from under their noses. He
+thought only of Gloria. If that crowd, in its present temper, found the
+way to his camp--if, in one way or another, Gloria fell into their
+hands--then could she thank God for a clean bullet and a swift end of
+things.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIV_
+
+
+The mere fact of being absolutely alone from midday to dark would have
+been for Gloria an experience at any time and in any environment. Of
+her friends in the city there were many who had never in a lifetime
+known what it was to spend half a dozen consecutive daytime, waking
+hours in perfect solitude, catching not so much as a fleeting glimpse of
+a servant, a policeman, a nurse, or a street-car conductor in the
+echoing street. Solitude rendered rippleless by an absence of any
+familiar sound; neither the whisk of a maid's broom, the clang of a
+telephone bell, the buzz of motors, or the slamming of doors. At those
+intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might
+quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied
+coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that
+the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness.
+
+She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone. Five
+minutes later she began to stir restlessly; another five minutes and
+already she was listening for his return. Never once during the day was
+there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning
+faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the
+flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude
+door through which she thought to see him returning.
+
+Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet. She
+drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances
+toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire
+between it and herself. When she peered out across the desolate world
+she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch
+miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black
+unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal,
+insensate wilderness. And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she
+saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the
+expressions of his own brutality.
+
+After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something
+to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped
+so readily. She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and
+forced herself to read. Pages eluded her, but here and there single
+lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks
+the garments of one going blindly through it. So she was arrested by the
+line: "_In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth_." And
+this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and
+walked back and forth impatiently. It was almost as though King had left
+the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told
+herself angrily that he was _not_ like that, had never been like that.
+He was a mere brute of a man, not "_such as fought and sailed and ruled
+and loved and made our world_." He was, rather, unthinkably crude and
+boorish and detestable.
+
+But, rebelling at utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to
+the only companion at hand. She read _The Explorer_, fascinated in a
+shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were
+whispering to her from the black corners of the cave: "_There's no sense
+in going further--it's the edge of cultivation._" And later: "_I faced
+the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down._" Others than she
+had gone into the last solitudes. Others who had joyed in it and sung of
+it! It was as though the dead shades of those others squatted at the
+edges of her fire and mocked at her. Then she could fancy that it was
+King himself jeering, and that he cried: "_Then He chose me for His
+Whisper, and I've found it, and it's yours!_"
+
+She snapped the book shut. Later she opened it to the tale of Tomlinson.
+She did not entirely grasp it, but she could not entirely miss what it
+said. She hurried on; she wondered vaguely at the call of the Red Gods;
+here again, seeking distraction, she was whipped back to reality. There
+were the lines, staring at her, as though King had rewritten Kipling:
+
+  "_Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight?
+    Who hath heard the birch log burning?
+    Who is quick to read the noises of the night?_"
+
+And the answer was: "Mark King." Even now it was a torturous twilight
+in the cave, even now she smelled wood-smoke; even now she was like one
+starting at the noises of the night....
+
+"Man-stuff," she thought contemptuously. She had heard such an
+expression used in connection with the verses of this uncouth scribe. It
+did not strike her that man-stuff might well enough be woman-stuff also,
+being one or the other, or both, for the sheer reason that it was human.
+She chose to consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental
+digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his
+emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers,
+unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and
+spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like
+Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like
+the explorer; the impact of a storm's buffeting and the low appreciation
+of a full stomach drew limits marking his possibilities of expansion. He
+was a beast, and she hated the whole sex sweepingly and superbly. In
+great surges of genuine sympathy her heart went out to herself.
+
+But, after all, the moments in which her thoughts were snared away from
+her fears and the oppression of loneliness were few and short. From
+wondering what kept King she passed to bitter anger that he should
+desert her so; she concluded that he was doing it with malicious intent.
+
+Repeatedly she was tempted to go forth and seek Gratton: to hunt up and
+down until at last she came to him. Again and again she went to the
+mouth of the cave and looked forth. But each time she drew back,
+terrified at the thought of making her way unaided down the sheer cliff
+wall. She sought to tell herself that she was not afraid of the snow, of
+being lost, of being unable to find Gratton. But she could not climb
+down the cliff; she knew that she would fall. Dizzy and sick, shivering
+with dread and cold, she turned back always.
+
+She let her fire die down, not noticing it. Then the cold reminded her,
+and she worked long building another. She knew where a block of matches
+was; she had seen King set it carefully away. In her excitement she
+struck dozens of matches, dropping the burnt ends about her.
+
+At last her fire blazed up and she warmed herself. Then she was
+conscious of a strange faintness and realized that she was hungry. She
+went to their food cache and ransacked it hastily. She opened a tin of
+sardines and came back to the fire with it in her hands. She had no
+clear conception of the deed when, half of the fish consumed, the smelly
+stuff revolted her and she hurled the remaining part into the bed of
+coals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King stamped the loose snow from his boots and came in. Gloria stood
+confronting him, tense, rigid, white-faced, her hands stiff at her
+sides. She wanted to cry out, to upbraid him, all of her fear of the day
+turned into molten anger, but at the moment her strength failed
+strangely, her heart seemed to be stopping, she choked up. The surge of
+her relief, like a suddenly released current, impacting with that other
+current of her unleashed anger, made of her consciousness a sort of
+wild, fuming whirlpool. Nothing was clear to her just then save that
+Mark King had come back and that, no doubt, his heart was filled with
+jeers; she could not read the expression of his shadowed face, but
+fancied it one of mockery.
+
+King was tired throughout every muscle of his body. He set down his
+rifle, tossed his hat aside, and slumped down by the fire. Coming in
+from the storm-cleansed open he sniffed at the closeness of the cave. It
+was not alone the smell of smoke; his first thought was that Gloria had
+been cooking something. Then he noted the sardine-can. With a stick he
+raked it out of the coals. And now Gloria could read his expression well
+enough as he jerked his head up.
+
+"In God's name," he demanded, "what do you mean by a thing like that?
+Are you stark, raving mad?"
+
+For a moment she was at a loss to understand what had enraged him. The
+act of tossing the distasteful food into the fire had been purely
+involuntary; her conscious mind had hardly taken cognizance of the fact.
+When it dawned upon her what he meant, her own anger was still greater
+than her sense of her act's folly. But she found no ready answer to his
+accusation. She was not without reason; in their present predicament she
+was a fool to have done a thing like that; she could hardly believe that
+she had done it. And so she stared impudently at him and held her
+silence, and finally, with an elaborate shrug of disdainful shoulders,
+she turned her back on him.
+
+But King flung to his feet and set his hands on her two shoulders and
+swung her about. Her eyes opened widely.
+
+"Listen to me," he said angrily. "I am going to talk plain to you. You
+are a fool, a downright, empty-headed silly fool. What you have
+destroyed in wanton carelessness would have kept the life in a man a
+whole day. Haven't you sense enough to see it's going to be nip and tuck
+if we ever get out of this? You've shown yourself, from start to finish,
+a miserable cheat; there's no trust to be put in either your judgment or
+your intentions. Be still," he commanded, as she sought to wriggle out
+of his grasp, to avoid the direct blaze of his eyes. "I am going to do
+what I can for you; to see you safe through this, if I can. Not because
+you are anything to me, but just because you are Ben Gaynor's, and he is
+my friend. Understand?"
+
+"You are hurting me," she said in defiance. "Take your dirty hands off."
+
+"When I am done," he returned curtly. "I am going to stick to you and
+see you through, I tell you. But I am not going to have you throw all of
+our chances away by dumping grub into the fire. If you do one other
+brainless thing like that, and I catch you at it, I am going to tie you
+up, hand and foot, and keep you out of mischief."
+
+"You wouldn't dare----"
+
+But she knew better; he would dare anything. He _was_ of the type that
+fought and sailed and ruled. Now, when having spoken his mind he turned
+away from her, she stared after him and watched him as he dropped back
+by the fire. Then she went slowly to her bed to hide her trembling, and
+lay down.
+
+Presently she heard him stirring. She did not turn her head to look at
+him. But she knew that he was busied with supper. She smelt coffee,
+heard the clash of tin cup and plate, and realized that he was eating.
+She wondered if he had forgotten her. After a while she moved just a
+trifle and furtively; he had put away his dishes and was filling his
+pipe. And he knew that she was watching him.
+
+"No," he said to her unspoken question. "I am not going to cook for you
+any more. I have had a hard day of it, doing the man's work. Had you
+done the woman's you would have had supper ready for me."
+
+He lighted his pipe with a splinter of burning pine. Then for the first
+time he saw the waste of scattered matches on the floor. From them he
+looked to her in an amazement so sheer that it left him no word of
+expostulation. The suspicion actually came to him that the girl was mad.
+It was scarcely conceivable that a perfectly sane individual could do
+the things which she had done.
+
+She saw him get up and begin gathering up all of the foodstuff. He
+carried it to the back of the cave, where he passed out of her sight in
+the dark. He was gone ten minutes and came back empty-handed. He made
+the second trip, after which there was left on a shelf of rock only half
+a dozen matches and enough food for one scanty meal. This Gloria
+ignored.
+
+"Do you think," she said contemptuously, "that what you have hidden back
+there I couldn't find?"
+
+"You could find it but you won't," he returned with quiet assurance that
+jerked the question from her:
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because," he grunted contemptuously, "you are too much of a coward to
+go back there to look for it."
+
+And in her heart she knew that here was but the mere truth. For, why
+was she not already in Gratton's camp? Her opportunity had come and
+gone--because she had been afraid.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXV_
+
+
+King awoke filled with resolve and definite purpose. It was pitch dark,
+but he sensed the coming of wintry dawn. He drew on his boots and went
+to look out. It was still snowing, heavily, steadily, implacably. He
+kicked the loose fluffy stuff underfoot.
+
+"The biggest storm in twenty years," he told himself. "And if any one of
+us in these mountains come out of them alive he'll have something to
+talk about. It's the real thing."
+
+He went grimly about his fire-making, fixed purpose crystallizing to the
+smallest detail. Again he must seek immediately to locate his horse; one
+could eat horseflesh if driven to it. He must try to get game of some
+sort. And every lost hour meant lessened chances of his killing forest
+meat; deer and bear and the smaller folk, if they had been caught
+napping, would be scurrying out of the mountains long before now; soon
+the solitudes would be utterly barren and empty. He went to Gloria's
+bed.
+
+"You'd better get up," he said briefly. "Time to start the day. While we
+eat I want to talk with you."
+
+She awoke slowly, blinked at him, and only drew her blanket higher about
+her chin.
+
+"I am tired," she answered petulantly. "Don't you realize that a
+girl..."
+
+"I realize," he cut into her sleepy expostulation, "that you are weak
+and frightened and useless. And that those are three of the many things
+you've got to get over the shortest way if you don't want to die here."
+
+"I don't know that I care to live," she began, turning with her old
+instinct toward an attitude which before now had robbed him of his
+harshness. But his plan was set in cold determination, and he cut her
+short again.
+
+"If you don't care, I do. And I am going to pull you through with me, if
+for no other reason simply because I have set out to do it, and am not
+going to lie down on the job. What's more, you've got to do your share.
+I have built the fire; will you get up?"
+
+"No," she flashed out at him, thoroughly awake now. "I won't!"
+
+He stooped, caught the corner of her blankets, and whipped them off.
+Instinctively, she sought to draw the under-bedding over her, forgetting
+that she had not undressed.
+
+"You brute!" she screamed at him.
+
+"Get up," he told her sternly, "or, by heaven, I'll make you!"
+
+She saw his face plainly now as his crackling fire burned higher. It was
+hard, his eyes were ominous. She hesitated and saw in his eyes and in a
+stir of his body that he was going to jerk her to her feet. She flung
+out of bed at that and upon the far side from him.
+
+"Get your boots on," he ordered. "I don't want you catching cold from
+idiotic carelessness, and I won't have you going sick on my hands. For
+the first and last time I'll admit that I don't enjoy driving you like a
+cursed galley-slave. But I'll do it, and do a thorough job of it, if you
+force me to it."
+
+She drew on her boots hastily and came to the fire and laced them. He
+was a new man this morning and relentless. She was afraid of him after a
+new, bewildered fashion.
+
+"I never saw a storm worse than this," he told her. He had cooked the
+breakfast because he was in a hurry, and did not care to trust her
+wasteful fingers with their already precious food. "There must be two or
+three feet on the level places by now; ploughing through snow like that
+is killing work for a man, and you wouldn't last at it ten minutes." He
+had no intention of speaking contemptuously; she knew that his thought
+was not trifling with such matters as her feelings. He was merely
+indulging in plain talk. "We have enough food for a few days. After
+that, if we stuck on here and did not find more somehow, we'd die like
+dogs. Therefore we are going to get ready to beat it out the first
+chance we get."
+
+"But if I wouldn't last ten minutes, as you so elegantly put it?"
+
+"Not as you are; not as the snow is. But I'm hoping that before it's too
+late we'll get clear weather, a sun, a thaw, and freezing nights. Then
+we could tackle it on the crust. And your job now is to get yourself
+ready for that one chance."
+
+Her anger at the indignity already done her whipped out the sarcasm:
+
+"By getting ready, I suppose you mean for me to pack my trunk and order
+the expressman at the door?"
+
+He looked at her with a long, impersonal stare which bewildered her; she
+was at utter loss to read its meaning until he spoke:
+
+"You are to pack what endurance you've got into your muscles. You are to
+make up your mind to call up all of the grit that's in you. You'll need
+both. And you are to quit lying around and getting weaker every day;
+you've got little enough time to harden yourself, so you are going to
+take on the job right now."
+
+She gasped, incredulous. He nodded sternly.
+
+"Gloria," he said tersely, "I am going to do all that I can for both of
+us. You are going to do all that you can. That is final."
+
+She bit her lips and gave him her scornful silence. The blood was red
+and hot in her cheeks.
+
+She ignored him when he called crisply that breakfast was ready. There
+were limits to her obedience, she thought rebelliously. To be told do
+this, do that, to arise when this man's body was rested, to eat when his
+stomach was empty, was intolerable. King looked at her and had the
+understanding to grasp something of her thought. So he explained:
+
+"I want you to come outside with me. You'll find it hard work. It would
+be a first-rate idea if you'd fortify your strength by the little bit
+of nourishment which we can afford to take. No? Well, I'm sorry.--Here."
+He offered her the pieces of a sack he had cut in two for her. "Tie
+those about your feet to keep them from freezing."
+
+"When I want your advice, I'll ask for it," she retorted icily.
+
+"Very well," he answered. "And I can't make you eat if you don't want
+to. After all, perhaps you are not hungry." He set aside her portion.
+"You'll have the appetite for that when we get back."
+
+She had the appetite now. But she would prefer to starve, she honestly
+thought at the moment, than eat when he told her to eat. Now he finished
+in silence. She saw him glance at his watch. Her heart seemed scarcely
+to stir in her breast; then slowly it began to beat, swifter and
+swifter, hammering wildly. He had said that she was going out with him;
+what he promised to do, she realized again, he would do, if it were
+humanly possible. She wanted to run, run anywhere, just to be lost to
+him. And yet she stood stock-still and rigid, while her heart hastened
+and leaped and her mind sought to grasp the thing to do. She must go
+with him, do what he told her like a slave, as he had said, or he would
+make her. Her reason said directly: "You will go without a word." And
+yet, when he arose to his feet and knocked his pipe out and looked at
+her, her reason fled before the flood of the passionate wilfulness of
+the old Gloria, and she cried shrilly:
+
+"I won't! I won't! I am not your slave and I am not going to jump at
+your bidding! You can't make me; you shan't make me. _I won't!_"
+
+He had hoped for better than this. He came closer and looked intently
+into her eyes, seeking to measure what endurance and steadfastness and
+stubbornness were hers. But her eyes showed him only glimpses of a
+storm-tossed soul.
+
+"I will make you," he said harshly. "So help me God, Gloria, I will make
+you. And I am through talking; I am sick of talk. Come with me."
+
+She drew back and back in white-lipped fury.
+
+"You don't _dare_...."
+
+"Listen to me! We are down to bare elementals now; can't you see it? It
+is no question of what we'd like to do or dislike. It is a question of
+life and death. If to let you have your way were anything other than
+suicide, I'd let you have it. If I thought that you would listen to
+reason, I'd stop to reason with you. But as things are, I've got nothing
+left me but tell you what to do; and you've got to do as I say."
+
+"My life is my own, to do with it as I please. I do not please to obey
+your commands."
+
+Her tortured heart surged up in wild triumph as he turned; it sank
+sickly as he came back. He had a piece of rope in his hand, the heavy
+half-inch rope which had served to tie a horse.
+
+"You would tie me!" she gasped. "Me!"
+
+"No," he said tersely. "As though you were any other fractious animal
+refusing discipline when refusal means death, I am going to whip you!"
+
+"God!" screamed Gloria. "Oh, my God!"
+
+For again he but said simply the thing which he meant to do. And she
+knew. Yet the consummation was monstrous, unthinkable. She would not
+believe it; at the last minute his lifted arm would fail him; God
+Himself would wither it; undreamed rescuers would come; the earth would
+open ... _something_ would save her from this humiliation which would
+kill her.
+
+"While I count three," said King. And steadily, though there was a
+pallor on his own face, which should have told her the terrible
+relentlessness of his intention, he counted: "One, two, three."
+
+She put her face into her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one
+under the flashing guillotine. She willed to move, to obey, at this
+tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her
+back. "_I won't!_" she screamed. The blow fell swiftly. The rope cut
+through the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped
+shoulders. The pain was immediate, hot and searing, and Gloria
+shrieked--once only--and grew still. She dropped her hands and looked at
+him, her face as white as a dead girl's, her eyes as unfathomable as a
+maniac's. She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose
+soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who
+had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess--to
+be beaten by a man! To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse's
+tie-rope. She, Gloria Gaynor, to have her bedding ripped off her, to be
+commanded to do a man's bidding--and to be whipped!
+
+She had known fear, blind, paralysing terror. She had suffered indignity
+and experienced an insulted resentment that seared through her like a
+hot iron. She had known pain, merciless bodily pain. Now she was plunged
+into stupor. But that stupor was of only the fraction of a second in
+duration. A flash as of white fire flared through her brain. In a soul
+in torment something had happened. Something had been killed within
+her--or something had been born. A blow at a man's hand had seemed to
+cut through her being; it had separated body and spirit. She was
+conscious of the body as though she stood apart and looked down at it.
+He could beat that; he was stronger. The spirit rose above it--a spirit
+bathed in floods of fire. She was in the sudden fierce grip of such
+anger as kills, of such defiance as suffers death and does not yield.
+
+"I won't go with you," she cried. "You may beat me; you may kill me if
+you like, unthinkable brute that you are. I will not follow you now; I
+will never follow one step ever. I have listened to you; now listen to
+me! I would rather die than be brought to safety by you. If I cannot
+find the way home without your help, I do not want ever to get home. I
+am not afraid of you or your rope. I had rather feel a clean rope across
+my shoulders until they were bloody than your vile hand on mine."
+
+"You will do what I tell you to do," he said thickly. "It is the only
+way. I will make you."
+
+Blazing eyes burning in a death-white face gave him his only answer.
+His own face now was no less white; iron-bodied as he was, he was
+trembling. Yet he lifted the rope. To strike the second blow. Not just
+to frighten her, but to strike. She read his purpose clearly, and she
+could not restrain a shudder of her flesh. But she did not draw back
+from him, and she did not cry out. She meant what she had said, or what
+some re-born Gloria had said for her; he might kill her, but she would
+not follow him.
+
+And then Mark King, as he was about to strike, stayed his hand at the
+last moment and hurled the rope far from him, and whirled about and left
+her.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVI_
+
+
+Someway he came to the base of the cliffs. He was outside; he was in the
+open. And yet he struggled blindly through a pit of gloom. He was
+conscious of but one fact in all the world; about it everything else
+turned and spun as sweep the bodies of the sky about the sun. He had
+lifted his hand against a woman. He, Mark King, had struck a woman. He
+had struck Gloria. His friend's daughter--Ben's daughter. He had struck
+her.... What had come over him? Had he gone mad? Stark, staring, raving
+mad? He knew all along that his nerves were on edge, raw and quivering.
+But no jangling nerves explained a thing like that. He, who had held
+himself a man, had struck a woman--a girl! A little, defenceless girl.
+
+"My God!" he groaned.
+
+He stumbled on. He did not know where he was going or why. He ran his
+hand across his eyes again and again. He didn't know why he did that;
+one couldn't thus wipe out a vision which persisted in his brain. He'd
+see her as she stood there every day and night until he died. In a
+sweeping revulsion of feeling he saw himself all that she had named him,
+a great, hulking brute. All along he had been brutal with her; he
+should have made due allowances; he should have been patient. He had
+plunged her into an existence of which she had no foreknowledge. He had
+looked to her for the sober sanity of maturity when he should have
+remembered how young she was, how little of real life she knew, how she
+had been driven to desperation by circumstances which crushed her; how
+she had gone sleepless, living on her nerves. He had held her weak and
+worthless and without spirit or character. And now he could only see her
+standing up before him, white but valiant, defying him, unafraid,
+welcoming death rather than yield to him. He would have given ten years
+off the span of his life to have the deed of one mad moment wiped clean.
+
+It was a long time before consecutive thought returned to him. And it
+brought him only increased bitterness. Gloria had said that she would
+die here rather than have him lead her to safety. Well, he did not blame
+her for that. Rather, he told himself grimly, he honoured her for it.
+And yet, now more than ever, his and his alone was the responsibility of
+seeing that she went clear of this wretched existence into which he had
+stubbornly led her. He could not take her away against her will; he
+could not pick her up in his arms and carry her over a two or three
+days' journey! Nor could he entrust her to the only other human beings
+who were near enough for her to go to. What could he do? She would
+perish without help; hence he must help her. But how?
+
+There was but one possible answer, and in due course of time he came to
+see it clearly. He must leave her, get back the shortest, quickest way
+to civilization, and send other men, trustworthy men, in for her. It
+could be done even though the storm continued. He could get a dog-team,
+Alaskan huskies, to be had in Truckee; he could load sledges with
+provisions; he could put the right man in charge and then lead the way.
+That would mean several days alone for Gloria; but what else was there?
+
+And even that solution depended upon the consideration which by now was
+the elemental, all-essential thing; first he must find some sort of
+provisions with which to eke out their small supply. There was not
+enough in camp to sustain him while he battled with the storm for a way
+out and to sustain strength in her while she waited. He must first
+replenish the larder; otherwise they died. He must get fish in plenty or
+a bear or a deer. He looked at the grey, ominous sky, at the piling
+snow, and the chill of the wilderness struck to his heart. But at last
+his eyes grew hard again with determination.
+
+In a distressed mental condition in which the only solid ground beneath
+him was his determination to do to the uttermost that lay within him for
+Gloria, he broke into mutterings, voicing aloud fragments of speech,
+forcing himself toward steadiness of forward-driving purpose.
+
+"I've got to leave her.... She won't go with me. That means I've got to
+leave with her every scrap of food we have between us. I can go two days
+without eating.... I can! A man, if he's half a man, can finish his work
+before he buckles under.... Her one danger is Brodie. Otherwise she
+would be safe enough for four or five days. She's got to stick close to
+the cave; she must not dare to set foot outside....
+
+"But that's not enough; they might come to the cave.... The way in is
+not overwide; would they see it from below? They don't know where it is
+or they would have done as I did; they would have come to it for
+shelter.... No, they don't know of it. Can I close up the entrance,
+somehow, so that they won't find it? There are loose rocks in there....
+If they _do_ come this way, up the gorge, it will be hard for them to
+see it from below.... Even if they should find it, I can show her where
+to hide. Way in the back. There's a place there.... I can get out in two
+days; back in two days. Somehow. Allow five days to cover accidents.
+Five days; she can stick it out five days. If I don't take a scrap of
+her food away from her.... Oh, I can make it; it is up to me to make
+it. I'll get a fish sooner or later--or a rabbit.... A man can eat his
+boots."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After a long time he went back to the cave. He knew now just what he
+would do, since it had become clear to him that there was but one thing
+to be done. Gloria faced him as he came in; she marked how he walked,
+like a very tired man. Her head was up, there were spots of colour in
+her cheeks; in her eyes was a new look. She had found herself. Or she
+was finding herself? Her spirit had risen undaunted in a crisis; in a
+clash of wills hers had not gone down before his. Rather it had been
+hers that had triumphed. She might know fear again, but the time was
+past and dead when she would bow meekly before a man's bidding. So she
+told herself, while with head erect she awaited his speech.
+
+He began, saying very simply what he had decided must be said. He did
+not swerve for the useless words "I am sorry." He knew that she did not
+expect them, would not answer them. What he had done was monstrous and
+unpardonable; hence a man would not ask pardon. By his own act they were
+set as far apart as two beings inhabiting two widely separate worlds. It
+remained for him merely to instruct her concerning what she must do;
+then to find the way to bring her back safely to her father. Thereafter?
+There the haze crept in again; he would go away, far from the Sierra,
+far from California, to some corner of the world where no man who had
+ever known Mark King would see him again. At that moment he could have
+died very gladly, just to know that she was once more among her own
+people, and that so far as he was concerned life was a game played out
+and ended.
+
+Now that he spoke again, his voice was no longer harsh and stern, but
+gentle rather. Gentle after a steady and matter-of-fact fashion that was
+infinitely aloof. He could not know how impersonal his utterance sounded
+in her ears, since he did not fully realize how at the moment he held
+himself less an individual addressing another than as the mouthpiece of
+fate.
+
+"The first thing in the morning," he told her, "I am going over the
+ridge and to the headwaters of the other fork. I have been thinking of
+that country a good deal; it's a little far and hard going and I'll burn
+up a lot of fuel making the trip, but I've got a hunch a bear's in
+there. The one that stampeded Buck may have circled around that way. And
+I'm going to play every hunch I get, good and strong. It will probably
+be dark before I get back."
+
+She thought that he had finished. But presently, in the same strangely
+quiet voice, he continued: "I may even be gone all night. If I am it
+will be because I am playing the last card.... You have said that you
+would rather be dead than go with me. I believe you meant that." Again
+he paused. Gloria did not again lift her eyes from the fire; did not
+speak. King sighed and did not know that he had done so. "If I don't get
+back to-morrow night it will be because I am trying to break through to
+civilization. I'll outfit a party and send them in for you. I'll get
+through some way in two days; I'll get help back to you in another two
+or three at latest. You have food here to keep you alive a week, if you
+spin it out."
+
+Long before he had gotten to the end of his slow speech her heart was
+beating wildly. The old fears surged back on her, crushing her. To be
+left here alone four or five days--and nights! It was unendurable! She
+would be dead.
+
+"You have your choice," he went on, his voice grown still more gentle.
+"If you will let me help you--"
+
+But, even while in the silence that followed she heard the rapid beating
+of her own heart, something stronger, more stubborn, than the Gloria of
+another day kept her silent.
+
+And still he had not finished.
+
+"Before I go I am going to do all that I can to wall up the mouth of the
+cave. It will make it warmer in here and--and there will be less danger
+of any one finding the place. You threatened once to go to those other
+men; _no matter what happens, you must not do that_. You don't quite
+understand what some men are. These happen to be the worst of a bad
+crowd that ever got into these mountains. They respect neither God nor
+man--nor woman. They are in an ugly mood; they probably have more
+bootleg whiskey with them than food; I did not tell you, but I looked in
+on their camp and saw one of them, a dope fiend named Benny Rudge, shoot
+one of his own friends dead, suspecting him of having stolen a side of
+bacon. You would be better dead, too, than in their hands. Never forget
+that. They don't know if they'll ever get out of this alive; they are
+desperate devils.
+
+"But with the cave walled up, they won't find you. If the worst should
+happen and they came here, still you could hide. I'll show you the
+place, far back in the cave. You could run there with your blankets and
+food; you could stay there, never moving. No man could find you there.
+They would see where we had been here, but they would have to decide in
+the end that we had gone, both of us.
+
+"I'll bring you plenty of wood; I am going to make a pair of snow-shoes
+of a sort for me; I'll make a pair for you. I hope you won't need them."
+He ran his hand across his brow but continued in a moment, his voice
+unchanged: "I'll go out before daylight in the morning; it will take me
+all that is left of to-day to do what must be done first."
+
+He turned then and went about his work. She went back to the place by
+the fire, terribly moved, agitated to the depths of her soul, torn this
+way and that. But one steady fire burned in her bosom--the newly kindled
+white flame of her resentment. Just yonder, where he had hurled it, a
+grim reminder, lay the rope.
+
+He brought fragments of rock to the cave's mouth, the biggest he could
+find, boulders which he rolled from the further dark, and with which he
+struggled mightily as he piled them one on the other. Higher and higher
+he built his rude wall, placing the smaller stones at the top. And in
+time, after hours of labour, he had hidden the great hole as best he
+could, leaving only at the side a way to pass in and out which could
+hardly be seen from below. Across this he fixed the canvas; were that
+glimpsed, its grimy-white would appear but a lighter-hued streak of
+granite.
+
+"If you will come with me, I will show you your hiding-place."
+
+She lifted her head and looked at him. No word had passed between them
+during the back-breaking hours of his labouring. Again, she thought
+swiftly, he was seeking to command, to dictate. Doubtless, in the end
+she would have arisen and gone with him, since to refuse were madness.
+But he had not waited. He had gone alone into the depths of the cavern;
+she heard his slow, measured steps receding; she heard them again, slow
+and measured, as he came back.
+
+"It's only about thirty paces, straight back," he was saying. "My steps,
+remember, but shortened so that it would be about the same for you. Say
+thirty-five. There I have made a little pile of rocks; you can't miss
+it. That marks the place, just at the side of the rock pile. That's
+where I found the gold. There is a blind cave back there, just under
+this one; there's only a small entrance to it, straight down, a ragged
+hole in the floor, hardly more than big enough for a man to drop down
+through. I had it hidden by dragging a boulder over it. Now I have
+shoved the boulder just far enough to one side to let you go through.
+Also, I have set bits of stone under its outside edge so that it is
+fairly balanced; if you go through, a quick tug at it will topple it
+over to cover the hole again. There's air down there, that comes up from
+below. And it's a better place to be than here--if any one should come."
+
+She shuddered. But he had not seen. There remained much to do and the
+hours fled so swiftly. He set to work making the clumsy snow-shoes. He
+imitated a crude native shoe he had once seen in Alaska; he bent willow
+wands he had brought from along the edge of the stream, whipping them
+about with narrow strips of canvas, binding other wands crosswise,
+making, also of canvas strips, a sort of stirrup for each foot. The last
+of the weak daylight passed and died gloomily and he was still at his
+task, bending now by his fire, working on with infinite care. The
+sticks, brittle with the cold weather, broke under his strong fingers;
+patiently he inserted others or strengthened the cracking pieces with
+string. His face, ruddy in the firelight, was impassive; Gloria, looking
+at him, saw no mere man but a senseless thing of machine levers and
+steel coils; something tireless and hard and as determined as fate
+itself.
+
+They had made their scanty suppers; after it both were hungry. They had
+been hungry thus for four days. There remained coffee and sugar enough
+for another half-dozen meagre meals; here the affluence ended. The bacon
+was down to a piece of fat two inches thick and seven inches long; there
+was bacon grease a couple of inches deep in a tomato-can; there was a
+teacup of flour; there was one small tin of sardines and a smaller one
+of devilled meat. To-day they were hungry, to-morrow they would be a
+great deal hungrier, the next day they would begin to starve.... King
+got up and went out, down the cliffs in the dark, for a last load of
+wood. When he came back she was lying on her bed, her face from the
+light. He stood a moment looking at her. Then for the last time he spoke
+to her:
+
+"If I am long gone, you understand why. It would be best to save food
+all you can; not to stir about much, since exercise means burning up
+more strength, which must be renewed and by still more food.... There is
+not a chance in a thousand now that those men will find this place; if
+they do, there is not a chance in another thousand that they will find
+the middle cave. You will be safe enough.... And, if I do not get back
+to-morrow, you will know that within three days more, or four at most,
+there will be a party in here to bring you out."
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVII_
+
+
+Gloria awoke with a start. She had not heard King go, yet she knew that
+she was alone in the cave. Alone! She sat up, clutching her blankets
+about her. Objects all around her were plunged into darkness, but where
+the canvas let in the morning she saw a patch of drear, chill light.
+Full morning. Then by now Mark King was far away.
+
+Oh, the pitiless loneliness of the world as she sat there in the gloom
+of the cavern, her heart as cheerless as the drear light creeping in, as
+cold as the dead charred sticks where last night's fire had burnt itself
+out. And, oh, the terrible, merciless silence about her. She sat plunged
+into a despondency beyond the bourne of tears, a slim, white-bodied,
+gaunt-eyed girl crushed, beaten by a relentless destiny, lost to the
+world, shut in between two terrors--the black unknown of the deeper
+cavern, the white menace of a waste wilderness. And far more than pinch
+of cold or bite of hunger was her utter solitude unbearable.
+
+She sprang up and built a fire. Less for the warmth, though she was cold
+to the bone, than for the sense of companionship. The homely flames were
+like flames in remembered fireplaces; their voices were as the voices of
+those other fires; their light, though showing only cold rock walls and
+rude camp equipment, was the closest thing she had to companionship. She
+came close to the fire and for a long time would not move from it.
+
+She went to the wall King had built, moving the canvas aside just enough
+to look out, and stood there a long time. A dead hush lay over the
+world. There was no wind; the snow in great unbroken, feathery crystals
+fell softly, thick in the sky, dropping ceaselessly and soundlessly. It
+clung to the limbs of trees, making of each branch a thick white arm,
+stilling the pine-needles, binding them together in the sheath which
+forbade them to shiver and rustle. It lay in sludgy messes in the pools
+of the stream and curled over the edges of the steep banks and coated
+the boulders; it lay its white command for silence upon the racing
+water. A world dead-white and dead-still. That unbroken silence which
+exists nowhere else as it does in the wastes of snow and which lies upon
+the soul like a positive inhibition against the slightest human-made
+sound. No wind to stir a dry twig; no dry twig but was manacled and
+muffled; no dead leaves to rustle, since all dead leaves lay deeper than
+death under the snow. Gloria's sensation as she stood as still as the
+wilderness all about her and stared out across the ridges was that of
+one who had suddenly and without warning gone stone-deaf. The stillness
+was so absolute that it seemed to crush the soul within her. She went
+back hastily to her fire, glad to hear the crackle of the flames,
+grateful to have the emptiness made somewhat less the yawning void by
+the small sound of a bit of wood rolling apart on the rock floor.
+
+She was hungry, but she had no heart for cooking. She ate little scraps
+of cold food left over from last night; she nibbled at a last bit of the
+slab chocolate; she filled a pot with snow gathered at the cave mouth
+and set it on the coals to get water to drink. And again, having nothing
+else to do and urged restlessly to some form of activity, she hurried
+back to the canvas flap and watched the falling snow, hearkening to the
+stillness. For in the spell of the snow country one is forced to the
+attitude of one who listens and who hears the great hush, and who, like
+the enchanted world about it, heeds and obeys, and when he moves goes
+with quiet footfalls.
+
+Endlessly long were the minutes. Hours were eternities. She stood by the
+rock wall until she was chilled; as noiselessly as a creeping shadow she
+went back to her fire and shivered before it and warmed herself, turning
+her head quickly to peer into the dark of the hidden tunnel, turning
+again as quickly to glance toward her rude door, her heart leaping at
+every crackle of her fire; she thawed some of the cold out of her and
+went to look out again. A hundred times she made the brief journey.
+
+From being lightning-swift, thought became a laborious, drugged process;
+her excited mind had harboured throngs of vivid visions; she had known a
+period of over-active mental stimulation; she had seen, as in the actual
+flesh, Mark King ploughing through the snow, going over ridges, pushing
+on and on and on. Always further away, driving on through limitless
+distances. She had seen him fall, his body crashing down a sheer
+precipice; she had seen him lying, his face turned up, the snowflakes
+falling, falling, falling, covering it.... She had seen him going on
+again; she had seen him breaking his way to the open, getting back among
+other men, falling exhausted, but calling upon them to go back to her.
+She had seen men hurrying; dog-sleds harnessed; packs of provisions; men
+on snow-shoes. She had seen them coming toward her across the miles.
+Some one else was coming, too. It was big Swen Brodie, his face
+horrible. There was a rabble at his back. It was a race between these
+men and those other men. She had felt that Brodie was putting out a
+terrible hand toward her; she had seen other men leap upon him, dragging
+him back.... King had returned; King and Brodie were struggling.... Then
+again she saw King, fighting his way through the snow, going for help.
+She had tried to reason; he could be only a few miles away....
+
+But at last a tired brain refused to create more of these swift
+pictures. She stared out and did not think. She merely felt the weight
+of the silence, the weight of utter loneliness. With dragging feet she
+returned to her fire and looked into the coals, and from them to the
+further dark, and from it back to the pale light about her canvas. She
+sank into a condition of lethargy. The silence had worked a sort of
+hypnosis in her. Briefly, in her wide-opened eyes there was no light of
+interest. Vaguely, as though she had no great personal concern in the
+matter, she wondered how long it would be before one left alone here
+would go mad. And would the mad one shout shrieking defiance at the
+silence?--or go about on tip-toe, finger laid across his lips?
+
+The morning wore on. At one moment she was plunged into a deep, chaotic
+abyss that was neither unconsciousness nor reverie, and yet which
+strangely partook of both. A moment later she was vaguely aware of a
+difference; it was as though a presence, though what sort she could not
+tell, had approached, were near her, all about her. That instant of
+uncertainty was brief, gone in a flash. She turned and a little glad cry
+broke from her lips. A streak of sunshine lay across the rocks at the
+cave's mouth.
+
+It was like the visit of an angel. More than that, like the face of a
+beloved friend. She ran to her canvas and looked out. There was a rift
+in the sombre roofing of clouds; she saw a strip of clean blue sky
+through which a splendid sun shone. And yet the snow was falling on all
+hands, snow bright with a new shining whiteness. She watched that little
+strip of heaven's blue eagerly and anxiously; was it widening? Or were
+the clouds crowding over it again?
+
+But though this seemed the one consideration of importance in all the
+world for her just now, in another instant it was swept from her mind,
+forgotten. Far below her, down in the gorge, she saw something moving!
+And that something, ploughing laboriously through depths and drifts of
+loose fluffy snow, was a man. Now her thoughts raced again. It was King.
+He was coming back to her.... No; it was not King; it was Swen Brodie!
+She began to tremble violently. She had barely strength to draw back, to
+pull the canvas closer to the rocks, to strive to hide. If Brodie came
+now, if Brodie found her here, alone----That fear which is in all
+female hearts, that boundless terror of the one creature who is her
+greatest protector, her vilest enemy, more dreaded than a wild beast,
+gripped her and shook her and swiftly beat the strength out of her. But,
+fascinated, she clung to the rocks and watched.
+
+The man struggling weakly against the pitiless wilderness, wallowing in
+the snow, seemed to make his way along the gorge inch by inch. He
+carried something on his back, something white under the falling snow
+which whitened his hat and labouring shoulders. A sack with something in
+it, something to which he clung tenaciously. How he floundered and
+battled against the high-heaped white stuff about him which held him
+back, which mounted about his legs, up to his waist; at times, when he
+floundered he was all but lost in it. He lay still like a dead man; he
+struggled, and began crawling on again. He stopped and looked about him
+--how her heart pounded then! He was looking for something, seeking
+something! Her!
+
+She was so certain it must be Brodie. Yet she remained motionless,
+powerless to move though she remembered King's word of the hiding-place
+where she would be safe; she peered out, fascinated.
+
+In time the man came closer and the first suspicion entered her mind
+that, after all, it might not be Brodie. He stopped; he was exhausted;
+he pulled off his hat and ran his hand across his face. Then, still
+bareheaded, he looked up. It was Gratton!
+
+Gratton alone; Gratton looking back over his shoulder more often than he
+quested far ahead; Gratton in a mad attempt to make haste where haste
+was impossible. Now his every gesture bespoke a frantic haste. He was
+escaping from something. Then, what? He had left the other men; he was
+running away from them. She knew it as well as if he had screamed it
+into her ears. A sudden spurt of pity for him entered her heart; he
+seemed so beaten and bewildered and frantic and terrified; who, better
+than she, could sympathize with one in Gratton's predicament? She looked
+far down the gorge; she could see, like a bluish crooked shadow, the
+trail which he had made after him. No one else in sight! Then she forgot
+everything saving that she and Gratton were alone, that they had been
+friends, that they were bound in a common fate. She leaned as far out as
+she could; he was just below now; she called to him.
+
+He stopped dead in his tracks; he jerked his head up and stared wildly;
+his mouth dropped open, and in the shock of the moment speech was denied
+him. She called again.
+
+"You!" Had not the silence been so complete his gasping voice would have
+failed to reach her; as it was she barely heard it. "You, Gloria? Here?
+My God--have I gone mad?"
+
+The man's villainy of so few days ago appeared now, in the biassed light
+of circumstance, a pardonable, a forgettable offence. He had loved her;
+he had wanted to marry her; he had, with that in mind, tricked her. He
+had taken advantage of the universal admission that in love as in war
+all things were fair. The ugliness of what he had done was chiefly ugly
+because it had lain against a background of commonplace and convention;
+here, at the time when no considerations existed save the eternal and
+vital ones, all of Gratton's futile trickery was as though it had never
+been. She was calling to him again, urging him to clamber up the cliff,
+bidding him hurry before he was seen.
+
+"How came you here?" was all that he could find words for. "You! And
+_here_!"
+
+She would tell him everything! But he must not tarry down there. He must
+make haste----
+
+Her words cleared his bewilderment away; he glanced again over his
+shoulder. The gorge was empty of other human presence. He looked back up
+at her. And then, before her eager eyes, he slumped down where he stood,
+lying in the snow.
+
+"I can't." She heard his voice as across a distance ten times that which
+separated them. In it was bleak despair. "I've gone through hell
+already. I am--nearly dead. I couldn't climb up there. I----Oh, my God,
+why did I ever come into this inferno!"
+
+She begged, she urged. But he only turned a white face up to her and lay
+where he had fallen, his body shaking visibly, what with the strain he
+had put upon it and the emotions which only his own soul knew.
+
+"But it is so easy," she cried to him, forgetful of her now terror at
+mounting up here. "I have done it. Twice. I will show you just which
+way, where to set your feet."
+
+"I can't," he said miserably. "It was all I could do to get this far.
+I--I think I am dying----"
+
+Again and again she pleaded with him. But he had either reached the
+limit of his physical endurance or, shaken and unnerved, he had not the
+courage to attempt the steep climb. He lay still; his eyes were shut,
+and to Gloria, too, came the swift fear that the man might be dying.
+
+"I am coming to you!" she called.
+
+She began making the hazardous descent. She did not take time to ask
+herself if she could make it; she knew only that she must. She set foot
+on the narrow, sloping ledge outside, brushing off the snow with her
+boot, clinging with her hands to a splinter of granite, feeling her way
+cautiously, careful to move inch by inch along the way down which she
+had gone twice with Mark King. Her fingers, already cold when she
+started, went numb; they were at all times either in pits and pockets of
+snow or gripping the rough stone that was ice-cold. Painfully but
+steadily she climbed down and down. She strove not to look down; she had
+no eyes for Gratton, who now sat upright, his jaw still sagging, and
+marvelled at her. A dozen times he was prepared to see her slip and
+fall.
+
+After a weary time she came to the base of the cliffs. Gratton was not a
+dozen paces from her. He looked to her like a sick man, gaunt,
+hollow-eyed; unkempt, unshaven, as she had never seen him before, he was
+like some caricature of the immaculate Gratton of San Francisco. He did
+not move but looked at her in a strange, bewildered fashion. Plainly he
+had had no knowledge of her being here; he could not explain her
+presence; he was every whit as dumbfounded as he would have been had she
+dropped down upon him out of the sky. Seeing that he made no attempt to
+move, she started to come to him. She was standing upon a rock; she
+stepped off into the snow, and in a flash had sunk to her breast. A cry
+broke from her as thus, for the first time in her life, she learned
+what it was to seek to force a way through deep, loose-drifted snow.
+Feather-light in its individual flakes, in mass it made haste
+impossible; to push on six inches through it was labour; to come a dozen
+paces to Gratton was hard work. She floundered as she had seen him
+flounder; she threw herself forward as he had done, and, sinking with
+every effort, at last reached his side.
+
+"It's you--Gloria Gaynor!" he muttered. "But I don't understand."
+
+"I came with Mark King. The storm caught us. Just as it caught you. But
+you must come with me; if you lie here you will be chilled; you will
+freeze. Later we can tell each other everything."
+
+He shook his head. "I can't," he groaned. "I am more dead than alive, I
+tell you. I have been living through days and nights of hell; hell
+populated by raging demons. I have been since before dawn getting here."
+He cast a bleak look up along the cliffs and shuddered. "I'd rather lie
+here and die than attempt it."
+
+Once more Gloria was urging and pleading. But in the end she gave over
+hopelessly, seeing that Gratton would not budge. And it was so clear to
+her that he would perish if he lay here.
+
+"There's a hole in the cliffs just yonder," Gratton said drearily. "God
+knows what wild beasts may be in it. But I was going to crawl in there
+when you called."
+
+Then Gloria saw for the first time the opening to that cave which in Gus
+Ingle's Bible had been set down as Caive number one. It was almost
+directly under King's cave, at the base of the cliffs. The snow came
+close to concealing it entirely; as it was, just a ragged black hole
+showed a couple of feet above the snow-line.
+
+"Come, then," she said. "Let's see if it's big enough for a shelter. It
+may do as well as the other."
+
+Gratton heaved himself up with a groan. Gloria did not wait for him, but
+began the tedious breaking of a path the few feet to the hole, too
+earnest in the endeavour even to note how Gratton came along behind
+without suggesting that it was the man's place to break trail. Thus
+Gloria came first to the lower cave. She hesitated and listened, her
+fancies stimulated by his suggestion of storm-driven animals, and sought
+to peer into the dark. She could see nothing; she heard nothing. Nothing
+save Gratton's hard breathing close behind her. She got a grip upon
+herself and made a step forward, paused, extended her arms to grope for
+a wall, and made another step. There was still no sound; she breathed
+more freely, assuring herself that save for herself the cavern was
+empty. She stumbled over a rock, stopped again and called to Gratton.
+Only now was he entering.
+
+"Light a match," she commanded.
+
+"My hands are dead with cold," he muttered. "I don't know if I have a
+match. Wait a minute."
+
+He began a slow search. Finally she knew that he had found a match; she
+heard it scratch against a rock. Then she heard Gratton curse nervously;
+the match had broken and his knuckles had scraped along the rock.
+
+The second match he gave to her. She struck it carefully, cupped the
+tiny flame with her hands, and strove to see what lay about her. The
+little light gave but poor assistance to her straining eyes; but she did
+see that there was a litter of dead limbs about her feet. She began
+gathering up some of the smaller branches, groping for others as her
+match burned out. Again Gratton searched his pockets; he found more
+matches and some scraps of paper. It was Gloria's hands which started
+the fire and placed the bits of dry wood upon it. The flames crackled;
+the wood caught like tinder; the flickering light retrieved much of the
+cavern about them from the utter dark.
+
+"Here I stay," said Gratton. He dropped down and began warming his
+shaking hands. A more abjectly miserable specimen of humanity Gloria had
+never looked upon. He was jaded, spiritless, cowed.
+
+But he was a human being, and she was no longer alone! Across the empty
+desolation he had come to her, one who had lived as she had lived, who
+knew another world than this, who could understand what she suffered
+because he, too, suffered. There came a space of time, all too brief,
+during which her heart sang within her. She was lifted from despair to a
+realm bright with hope. King had gone for succour; she had a companion
+to share with her the dread hours of waiting. She began a swift
+planning; she caught up a burning brand as she had seen Mark King do,
+and holding it high made a quick survey, going timidly step by step
+further from the entrance, deeper into the cavern. It was much like the
+one so high above, of what shape she could hardly guess, so many were
+the hollows in floor, roof, and walls, so many were the tunnel-like arms
+reaching further than she dared go. Gratton could not, or would not,
+climb to the higher cave; then why should they not make this their
+shelter? She would have to climb the cliffs again; but she would have to
+do that in any case. Once up there it would be so simple a matter to
+toss down blankets and food and cooking utensils; a half-hour would see
+her camp moved from one cave to the other. Eager and excited, she began
+to tell Gratton what she meant to do.
+
+"Wait a while," he urged her. "I am terribly shaken, Gloria. I have
+lived through experiences which a week ago I would have thought
+unbearable." He shuddered; she saw that when he said he was "terribly
+shaken" he had not exaggerated. And in the glare of his eyes she read
+that, utterly unnerved, he dreaded to be left alone even while she went
+up the cliffs. "I would say that a man would have died--or gone
+mad--with the strain that I have lived through."
+
+"I know," she said gently. "I can guess. But when you get good and
+warm--and rest--I will make you a hot cup of coffee----"
+
+"I have this. It's better than coffee for me now." He untied the mouth
+of the bag with shaking fingers, groped through its contents, and at
+last brought out a flask nearly full of an amber liquid. "It's the
+stuff Brodie's crowd makes," he explained, unstoppering the flask.
+"They've got more of it than food with them, curse their bestial hearts.
+Stuff which, way back in ancient history, ... which means a week ago!...
+I'd no more have thought of drinking than I'd drink poison. But it has
+saved the life in me."
+
+He put the bottle to his lips and swallowed three or four times. He sat
+afterward making a wry face, his full eyes blinking. But gradually a
+faint bit of colour made his pasty cheeks something less dead-white, and
+the powerful raw corn whiskey injected into his blood a little
+reassurance.
+
+"Let me rest a bit and get warm?" he asked of her. "I--I'd rather you
+didn't leave me just yet, Gloria."
+
+Knowing so well what it was to have raw, quivering nerves, she tried to
+smile at him, and saying as lightly as she could, "Why, of course;
+there's no hurry," began to gather what bits of wood lay about, piling
+them on the fire. Thus she noted where, evidently long ago, there had
+been another fire kindled against the wall of rock; some one else had
+camped here, perhaps during summer-time, and this explained the fuel
+wood so conveniently placed.
+
+Meanwhile Gratton took a second pull at his flask, set it carefully
+aside and stood up, swinging his arms to get the blood running, beating
+his hands against his thighs, stamping gingerly. He began looking at her
+curiously. Presently he said: "Do you think we are ever going to get out
+of this alive?"
+
+"Yes." Her voice rang with assurance. "Mark King has gone for help. All
+we have to do is wait for a few days."
+
+His pale brows flew up.
+
+"King? He has gone? He has left you alone here?"
+
+Again she said: "Yes." Gratton began plucking at his lip, striding up
+and down now. It became obvious to her that there had been nothing wrong
+within him beyond what his frantic terror had done to him. Perhaps, left
+alone, he would have died out there in the snow; now, having already
+leaned on her, having her company and the hope she held out, he began to
+look his old self.
+
+"Now I'll go for the things in the other cave," she suggested. And as an
+afterthought: "Now that you are feeling better, perhaps you will go up
+with me and help?"
+
+"Why," he said, "why--of course. Yes, we'll both go."
+
+For in his new mood, warmed by the fire and the raw whiskey, and,
+further, having seen that she had done the thing with no mishap, he was
+willing to do what before he could not do.
+
+"Come," he said. "Let's hurry."
+
+Along the paths they had already made it was a much easier matter to
+make the return trip. At the cliffs Gratton allowed Gloria to go ahead,
+since she knew the way up and he did not. He followed her closely, and
+at first with little difficulty or hesitation. The higher they climbed,
+however, the slower he went; once he hesitated so long that she began to
+believe that dizziness had overcome him and that he was coming no
+further. But at length she came to the ledge and the wall King had made,
+and Gratton, looking up and seeing her above him, began climbing again.
+
+Gloria held aside the canvas flap; he followed her into the cave. Her
+fire, though low, still burned. For the sake of more light she put on
+more dry wood from the great heap King had left for her. She began to
+look about, planning swiftly just how easiest to move the few belongings
+which must go with her. She could pile odds and ends into a blanket; she
+could remake the canvas roll as King had done so often; she and Gratton
+could drag the bundles to the front of the cave and push them over, down
+the cliffs.
+
+"First, we'll get things together, all in a heap," she said aloud.
+
+He came forward and stood warming his nervous hands at her fire, his
+eyes everywhere at once. He marked the shipshape air of the cavern, the
+parcels which were to-night's supper and to-morrow's three poor little
+meals, each set carefully apart from the others on the rock shelf. He
+saw how the firewood was piled in its place, not scattered; how Gloria's
+bed and King's looked almost comfortable because of the fir-boughs; how
+the clean pots and pans were in their places. Then he turned his full
+eyes like searchlights upon the girl.
+
+"And you," he said, marvelling, "_you_ actually came with a man like
+King into a place like this!"
+
+"I was a fool," cried Gloria. "A pitiful little fool. Oh!"
+
+Had she been thinking less of Gloria and more of this other man with
+whom she was now to cope she must have marked a certain swift change in
+his attitude. It became less furtive, more assured. His eyes left her to
+rove again, lingered with the two couches, and returned to her.
+
+"You found King wasn't your kind," he announced. "You have quarrelled!"
+
+"From the very beginning," she replied quickly. "He is unthinkable. I
+would have left him long ago, only ..."
+
+"Only there was no place to go," Gratton finished it for her. "And now,"
+he continued slowly, studying her, "you are willing to come with me."
+
+"Yes," she told him unhesitatingly.
+
+"But," he offered musingly, "you refused me once and turned to him."
+
+"Haven't I told you I was a fool? I didn't know then quite what men
+were ... some men."
+
+She was not measuring every word now. She meant simply that she was
+determined to have done with Mark King, holding bitterly that she hated
+him; that she would go to any one to be definitely through with King.
+Yet he had time to weigh her words and draw from each one his own
+significance.
+
+His eyes followed her as she gathered up her few personal and intimate
+possessions, comb, brush, little silken things of pale pink and blue. A
+faint colour seeped into the usually colourless lips at which his
+dead-white teeth were suddenly gnawing. When she saw the look in his
+eyes, she stared at him wonderingly.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, her voice puzzled.
+
+"What is what?" Gratton laughed, but the look was still there. His eyes
+did not laugh.
+
+"What makes you look like that? What are you thinking?"
+
+Now it was he who was vaguely puzzled. Then he shrugged.
+
+"I was just thinking how superb you are," he replied, not entirely
+untruthfully. For his ulterior thought had been reared upon the vital
+fact of her triumphant beauty.
+
+The compliment was too much like hundreds she had received in her life
+to alarm her. Rather, it pleased; what word of praise had she heard
+during these latter days?
+
+His voice sounded queerly, as though his breath came with difficulty.
+Maybe it did, since he was no outdoors man, and to him the climb up the
+rocks and the brief journey along the mountain flank was a painful
+labour. Certain it was that the faint flush was still in the sallow
+cheeks. Suddenly he lifted his hands, putting them out toward her. She
+saw again the strange look in his eyes.
+
+"Gloria!" he said hoarsely, "you are wonderful! And you have come to
+me!"
+
+Gloria met his rather too ardent admiration with that cool little laugh
+which had been her weapon in other days. She was not afraid of Gratton.
+To-day she had led and he had followed. She had commanded and he had
+obeyed. Here was a pleasant change from King's masterfulness, and she
+fully intended to hold Gratton well in hand.
+
+"I came to you," she said frankly, "because I was a woman in distress
+and had no alternative. That there has ever been any unpleasantness
+between us does not alter that fact. You understand me, don't you?"
+
+He hardly heard her. To his mind the situation was clearness itself.
+Gloria had come alone into the forest with Mark King. She had been with
+him all these days and nights. But she and King had quarrelled; tired of
+each other already, perhaps. Gratton did not care what the reason was;
+he was gloatingly satisfied with the outcome. He had always coveted her;
+it took much to stir his pale blood, and only the superb beauty of
+Gloria Gaynor had ever fully done so. King had stolen her away, but she
+had left him and had come straight to Gratton!
+
+He came a step closer and the firelight showed how the muscles of his
+throat were working. Gloria's eyes widened. But not yet did she fully
+understand and not yet did she fear.
+
+"Mr. Gratton," she began.
+
+"Gloria!" he cried out. "Gloria!"
+
+His hands, suddenly flung out, were upon her. She tore them away,
+wrenched herself free from him, and started back. As she did so her
+little silken bundle dropped at her feet. Gratton caught it up and
+buried his face in it. Now as he looked up at her his eyes and all that
+she could see of his face were stamped with that which lay in his heart.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, shrinking not so much from him as from the thing she
+read so plainly at last. "Surely, you do not think ... you do not
+misinterpret ... my being here at all, my being with Mr. King...."
+
+"No," cried Gratton wildly. "I misinterpret nothing. You came alone with
+him into the mountains. What chance is there for two interpretations
+there? You gave yourself to him; you saw your mistake; you hated him.
+You have come to me. I have always loved you; I want you."
+
+Her cheeks flamed red with hot anger. There was a flutter in her heart,
+a wild tremor in her blood. She drew back from him. He followed, his
+arms out. She was amazed, for the moment shocked into consternation. And
+yet she knew no such terror as had been hers when King had advanced on
+her, rope in hand. Her new contempt of Gratton was too high for that.
+Now she marked the small stature, little taller, little stronger, than
+her own; the pale face, the narrow chest, the slender body.
+
+"You know what I mean, what I want," he was muttering. "That sweet
+young-thing innocence is all right in its place but that place is not
+here alone in the mountains with a man."
+
+"Man!" she burst out scathingly. "You, _a man_! Why, you wretched little
+beast!"
+
+But Gratton, his brain reeling with hot fancy, came on.
+
+"You were afraid of King. You said that he made you do what he wanted.
+What about me? You are going to do what I tell you. I ...By God, I will
+make you! Beast, you call me? No more beast than any other man. I have
+wanted you all these years. You have wanted me, or you would not have
+been so glad to see me. Only a few days ago you were ready to marry me!
+And now ..."
+
+His arms groped for her. Gloria swept up a dead pine limb that lay by
+the fire and swung it in both hands and struck him full across the face.
+He reeled back and stood, half in the shadow, his shoulders to the rock
+wall, his hands to his face.
+
+"You beast!" she panted. "You cowardly, contemptible beast."
+
+From the way in which he brought his hand down and looked at it and laid
+it back upon his lips she knew that his mouth was bleeding. And she read
+in the gesture and in the man's whole cringing attitude that the danger
+of any physical violence from him was past and done with. In the grip of
+his passion, ugly as it was, he had risen somewhat from his essential
+weakness; in the moment he had at least thought of himself as a
+conqueror. Now he was again what he always really was at heart, a
+contemptible coward.
+
+An absolutely new sense of elation sang through Gloria's blood. She was
+fully mistress of the situation, and had found within her an unguessed
+strength. Physically superb at all times because nature had richly
+gifted her, now she was magnificent.
+
+"Mr. Gratton," she said swiftly, "you have made a mistake. Mr. King has
+never offered me violence of that sort. Remember that, though we are
+alone, and in the mountains, I am the same Gloria Gaynor that you have
+known. And be sure that you treat me as such."
+
+He nursed his battered lips and stared at her. The blow had dazed him.
+Slowly, as his mind cleared, there dawned in it the realization that he
+_had_ made a mistake. The stick was still in her hands; a shiver ran
+through him. His desire went out of him.
+
+"I wish to God I had never seen you," he groaned.
+
+She had meant from the first to take the upper hand. Now she was almost
+glad that this had happened. For now she was very sure of herself;
+Gratton had merely been bold like other young men who had sought to
+presume; he had been cruder simply because the situation seemed to his
+mind to offer the opportunity; now a blow from her had accomplished the
+work of a haughty look in drawing-room encounters with those other young
+men. She dropped the stick and wiped her hands.
+
+"We have other things to think of," she said. She might have been a
+young queen who had punished a subject and now from her exalted place
+condescended to consider that the indignity offered her royal person had
+never occurred. She began dragging the blankets from her bed, tumbling
+them to the floor. "Take these," she commanded.
+
+"I was a fool for ever leaving San Francisco," he muttered bitterly.
+"You let me think that you cared for me, and now you treat me like a
+dog. I spent time and money trying to be the one to find gold in these
+infernal mountains, and I find nothing but storm and starvation. I don't
+believe there ever was gold here."
+
+_Gold!_ He stopped at his own words, his eyes flying wide open. During
+these later hours, fleeing from Brodie's men, stumbling upon Gloria,
+swirled away by mad longings, he had not thought of gold. But here was
+King's camp; straight here had King come after Gloria had brought him
+her father's message and old Honeycutt's secret. Then the gold was here!
+The cupidity which in the man never slept long was awake on the instant.
+He began looking about him eagerly. King was gone? Then not for men to
+bring help to Gloria but to aid him in carrying off the gold. Having
+brought Gloria here so that she could not tell others what she knew, he
+left her here with the same purpose; so Gratton would have done! King
+would have hidden it here; at least some of it. He began questing
+feverishly, shuffling about in the shadows while Gloria, busy with her
+plans for moving, wondered at him. He was striking matches, running back
+and forth; she could hear his mutterings. And presently, when Gloria had
+called and he had not heard, he came upon the bag which King had meant
+to take out with him that day the horse was lost. He hovered over it; he
+struck other matches, he came hastening back dragging it after him.
+
+He went down on his knees by the sack, got a heavy lump in his hands,
+rubbed at it, held it closer to the firelight, rubbed again more
+excitedly, and finally sat back, staring up at her with new flames of
+another sort leaping in his eyes.
+
+"It's next thing to solid gold!" he gasped. "There are
+thousands--thousands----Millions!"
+
+She looked at him and marvelled. In his shallow soul no emotion lived
+long; greed of gold now obliterated the little ripples that another
+greed had fleetingly made. How had she thought well of him down in the
+city? How had she so much as tolerated him? On the instant it struck her
+that there was small justice in Gratton reaping any reward, having done
+nothing to earn it. "We have the things to move. Come; hurry."
+
+"Why should we move, after all?" he demanded sharply. "Now that I have
+got up here, why not stay? There's wood here; everything is fixed up
+after a fashion. King would know where to send for us, and--and those
+cursed dogs of Brodie's would never think of looking up here, even if
+chance did lead them along the gorge."
+
+Gloria, recalling King's warning, remembering Brodie's brute face, said
+hastily:
+
+"Do you think there is any real danger that they will come this way?"
+
+"I hope not," he groaned. "They couldn't follow my trail if they tried
+to. You see, I left them last night, as early as I dared; I struck out
+in a straight line down the slope; then I made a turn off to the side
+and along the ridge where there was but little snow. By now all those
+tracks are wiped out, what with wind and new snow. There's nothing to
+lead them this way."
+
+"Then, if we go down quickly, if we get your bag of food and put out the
+fire down there, and come right back up, it won't be very long before
+our tracks will be gone. And we'll not budge from here until help comes.
+Come; let's hurry."
+
+"Coming," said Gratton. "Yes; we must hurry."
+
+She went ahead and began to clamber down the cliffs. Half-way down she
+wondered why he was not following. She found a place where she could
+cling and look up. Thus she was just in time to see him, standing at the
+mouth of the cave, clutching a heavy bag; he had been tying the mouth of
+it. Now he cast it outward so that it fell, striking against the
+cliff-side, and then rolling and dropping to disappear at last in the
+snow-bank below. And then he began, though hesitantly, to follow her.
+
+"That's one thing Mark King won't get," he announced with emphasis. At
+last he stood beside her in the snow. "No matter how the game breaks,
+whether he comes back or not, and no matter who gets away with the rest,
+that bagful is mine! There's a fortune in it, and it's mine." He began
+tossing double handfuls of loose snow into the hole which the bag of
+gold had made. "When I get a chance," he muttered, "I'll move it
+somewhere else."
+
+His avarice disgusted her. Just now the thought of gold sickened.
+
+"We are wasting time," she reminded him.
+
+He followed her again, casting a last look behind him, then looking up
+at the sky, grey everywhere except for a long patch of blue.
+
+"What we want is another three or four hours of steady snowing," he was
+saying when they slipped into the mouth of the lower cave. "Enough to
+hide that and to cover up our paths."
+
+Gloria was already trying to put out the fire; if ill fortune should
+lead Brodie's crowd here, it would be just as well if they found no
+smouldering sticks to tell them that the fugitives had been here so
+short a time ago and could not be far off. She called to Gratton to help
+her. He stamped out burning brands while she hastened back and forth,
+bringing handfuls of snow with which to extinguish the last glowing
+coals. She worked vigorously and swiftly; he only half-heartedly, since
+his thoughts were elsewhere.
+
+"Maybe," he said thoughtfully, "I'd better bring that bag in here and
+hide it somewhere--far back in the dark."
+
+"No," she said. "Leave it where it is. We must hurry back to the other
+cave."
+
+But he grew stubborn over it. The storm might end at any time; the sun
+might melt all this fluffy snow; the bag then would be for any one to
+see. Heedless of her expostulations, he left her extinguishing the fire
+and went back for the gold. He was gone several minutes, digging after
+it. She had finished her task when he reappeared, dragging the heavy
+sack after him. He disappeared swiftly, going into the deeper dark of
+the further end of the cave; she heard him moving with shuffling feet.
+What a treacherous, thieving, petty animal he was----
+
+She started and whirled about. There was a new sound in the air, a low
+mumble, a vague murmur. Men's voices. Outside, coming nearer swiftly,
+were men. Her first thought was of King; then she knew that it was too
+soon for him to have gotten out of the mountains, found assistance, and
+returned. A deep, heavy bass voice drowned out the others; it was like a
+low-throated growl, ominous, sinister.
+
+Gloria whirled again, this time toward the dark into which Gratton had
+gone. Blindly she hurried after him; she stumbled but kept on. She could
+hear him at work, hiding his gold. At last she was at his side; she
+clutched at his sleeve.
+
+"Listen!" she whispered. "They are outside. They have followed you!"
+
+She felt his arm stiffen as from head to foot he grew rigid. She heard
+his breath whistling through his nostrils. She could hear the beating of
+his heart--or was it her own? The voices came nearer, rose higher.
+Gratton began to shake as with a terrible chill.
+
+"If they find me--oh, my God, if they find me--Benny killed a man he
+thought had the bacon--I had it all the time! My God, Gloria, if they
+find me----"
+
+"Sh!" she commanded. "Be still! Maybe they will go by----"
+
+The voices came nearer--passed on. Two or three men out there were
+speaking at once; then all were silent. The silence lasted so long that
+Gloria began to breathe again. Surely, surely Brodie and his men had
+gone----
+
+Then again came Brodie's deep, sinister voice:
+
+"Back this way, boys," he shouted. "He's gone in here. We've trapped the
+dirty white rat."
+
+Gloria and Gratton clung to each other, too terrified to move.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXVIII_
+
+
+Gratton, had he been left to his own devices, would have stood
+stock-still where he was, frozen to the ground in terror. Gloria tugged
+at him, whispering over and over: "They are coming! Don't you hear them?
+Quick! We must try to hide."
+
+At last he seemed to awaken from a trance; he started and began hurrying
+with her, crowding by her, stumbling on ahead in the darkness, seeking
+the cave's unfathomed depths of darkness. She heard him stumble and
+fall; she ran blindly and caught him by the arm again, whispering
+fiercely:
+
+"You must be silent! If they once hear us we have no chance. If we are
+still, maybe they won't find us."
+
+After that he moved more guardedly. But still he crowded ahead; once in
+his excitement, when she brushed against him and he thought that she was
+going to get in his way, he shoved her violently aside. It was then
+that Gloria, looking back, saw Brodie's great bulk outlined against the
+snow outside. He came in; she saw his rifle; his figure was absorbed in
+the shadows. She saw other men following him; how many she did not know.
+One by one they bulked black against the daylight; one by one, as they
+entered, they were lost among the shadows. She had bumped into a wall of
+rock. Gratton was there, groping in all directions with his hands; she
+could hear his quick, dry breathing.
+
+They could go no further. This was the end. Brodie called out loudly,
+his speech dripping with his habitual vileness; he shouted: "Gratton!
+Better step out lively like a man now. We got you anyway." Then he began
+to gather the scattered firewood; a match flared in his hand; his face
+leaped out of the dark like a devil's. Or a madman's, a man's mad with a
+rage which lusted for the killing of another man. Gloria's heart sank in
+despair; she felt as though she were going to faint.
+
+But all the time her hands, like Gratton's, had been groping. At the
+moment when she felt that her knees were giving way under her, she found
+where an arm of the cave continued, narrow, slanting upward steeply,
+cluttered with blocks of stone. She tugged at Gratton's sleeve; she
+crept into this place and felt him close behind her, crowding, trying to
+press by her. She gave way briefly, felt him scrape past, and began
+crawling, following. Again only a few feet further on she came up with
+him again; once more he had come to the end of the tunnel. He was
+crouching, flattened against the rock wall. They were in a pocket with
+no outlet save the way they had come. She stood, turned toward the front
+of the cave, and waited.
+
+"Get a fire going, boys," Brodie's rumbling bass was calling. Assured
+now of having run his quarry to earth, he took a wolfish joy from the
+moment. There was a horrible note in his laughter, booming out suddenly.
+"The little skunk's run to a hole; we'll smoke him out."
+
+He spoke of Gratton as though he were a frightened animal, and like a
+frightened animal Gloria felt. She stooped and looked toward the
+pursuers; thus only could she see them, since when she stood erect the
+irregularities of the rocks above hid them from her.
+
+Brodie lighted his fire. The other men--dully she counted them now;
+there were five of them all told--were gathering wood, heaping it on.
+The flames leaped, crackled, lifted their voices into a roar; volumes of
+white smoke shot out, thinned, were gone. The light flared higher,
+brighter. Dark corners and crevices were made palely fight. She could
+see the faces of the men now, their eyes reflecting the fire, looking
+like the eyes of wolves. Brodie carried his rifle as though he fully
+intended using it. At his side Benny Rudge fidgeted and blinked. By
+Benny stood that scarecrow of a man, Brail. Close by, interested
+spectators, were the squat Italian and the man who had brought the
+"judge" to marry her to Gratton, the leering Steve Jarrold.
+
+"More fire, boys," called Brodie. Again his ugly laughter boomed out. "I
+think I see where he is."
+
+Whether or not Brodie already saw them, it appeared clear that immediate
+discovery was inevitable. For there was no further hiding-place here to
+creep into; no such refuge as King had urged Gloria to hasten to if
+Brodie came. She remembered the caution all too late; she thought of
+King with wild longing, while Gratton cringed and pulled back and tried
+to screen his body with hers.
+
+"Here's the grub he stole!" It was Benny's cracked, nervous voice, full
+of wrath.
+
+She could feel Gratton shiver as he crouched against her. Sudden disgust
+filled her. They knew that he was here; they would take him in a minute;
+his seeking further to hide was so futile. And yet he was not man enough
+to stand forth at the end; he was the type who must be dragged
+whimpering and pulling back, pleading for mercy even when he knew so
+well that he deserved no mercy, and would have none meted out to him.
+Gratton had his one last chance to show if there was the spark of
+manhood in him; they did not yet know of Gloria's presence, and had he
+stepped out now, he might have given her a chance to remain unseen. But
+no such heroism suggested itself to Gratton.
+
+"Come on, Gratton," shouted Brodie. "Or do you want me to begin shooting
+from here?"
+
+The light of the fire flared higher, brighter. The eyes of the men who
+had just entered from the outside were growing accustomed to this place
+of shadows. Suddenly the man Jarrold called sharply:
+
+"There's some one with him. There's two of 'em, Brodie. Go easy!"
+
+Brodie cursed him for a fool.
+
+"I don't care how many's with him or who they are," he bellowed. "The
+grub-stealing thief has got his coming to him. Step out, you
+lily-livered sneak, and take your medicine."
+
+"That's all right," muttered Jarrold. "But it won't hurt to see who they
+are first, Brodie."
+
+"Gratton's got no gun with him," cackled Benny Rudge. "Neither's that
+other guy. Come ahead, Steve. Me an' you'll pull 'em out."
+
+Gloria pressed back against the rock, her flesh quivering. She saw two
+men and then another two coming toward her. The first sound broke from
+Gratton's lips now, a little gurgling moan. The men came on; one had
+heard and laughed. Then Gloria, with more shuddersome thought of rough
+hands upon her than of a rifle-ball, broke away from her cowering
+companion and came hastily to meet them.
+
+"I'm coming out," she cried out to them.
+
+It was all that she could do to hold herself erect and come back into
+the more open cave. Jarrold and Benny and the men after them came to a
+dead halt and stared at her. In the flickering half-light she looked a
+slim frightened boy.
+
+"All of a sudden the woods is gettin' all cluttered up with folks,"
+grunted Benny. "Who in blazes are you, kid? An' where's your mamma?"
+
+His companions laughed; they laughed at anything. One of them, Steve
+Jarrold, came closer to look into her face. She saw that his steps were
+uncertain; she had heard how thick was his vocal utterance; now she
+smelled the whiskey with which he reeked.
+
+A shout broke from Jarrold. He clutched her shoulder with a great claw
+of a hand and drew her closer to him, his face thrust down to hers.
+
+"Let me go!" she cried, trying to jerk away from him.
+
+"Easy does it," said Jarrold. "Easy--_kid_! I'm of a notion I've seen
+that face of yours somewheres."
+
+"Never mind the kid," Brodie was growling savagely. "It's Gratton first.
+Out with him, Benny."
+
+The others bore down upon Gratton. He had found his voice now; he
+shrieked at them; he begged shrilly; he battered them with his fists,
+striking weak, vain blows. Benny, though the smaller man, had him by the
+collar. The Italian caught an arm, and as they dragged him half-fainting
+toward the fire, Brail struck at him with a heavy boot.
+
+"So," said Brodie heavily.
+
+Gratton began an incoherent pleading, arrested impatiently by Brodie's
+great voice.
+
+"Shut up! You've had your innings; it's mine now. You swiped grub when
+it's the same thing as slitting a man's gullet. You let another man be
+killed for what you done. Now you get yours!"
+
+He jerked up his rifle. Benny and the Italian let Gratton go and jumped
+nimbly aside. Gratton stumbled and sagged, staggering like a drunken
+man. Brodie, with his rifle-barrel not six feet from Gratton's
+terror-stricken body, laughed again.
+
+"Stop!" Gloria shrilled. She broke away from Jarrold's grasp and ran
+toward Brodie. "You don't know what you are doing. You----"
+
+"Close your trap, kid," Brodie thundered at her. "Unless you want the
+second bullet."
+
+Jarrold's big boots came clumping noisily across the rock floor.
+
+"Easy does it, Brodie," he shouted. "She ain't no kid, I tell you. She's
+a girl. That's Ben Gaynor's girl, the one Gratton wanted to marry, the
+one King took away from him. Keep your eye peeled; King would be around
+somewhere!"
+
+"Hidin' back there in the dark somewhere," muttered Benny.
+
+Brodie, though his rifle had not swerved, was listening.
+
+"No, not hiding in the dark corners," he said ponderously. "Not Mark
+King, rot him.... Ben Gaynor's girl, you say? Then we're red hot on the
+right trail, boys! You know what her and King would be after!"
+
+Gratton's stunned brain began to function wildly.
+
+"The gold is here, Brodie!" he cried out wildly. "King had got to it
+before us, but I've found it. I was coming back to tell you----"
+
+Brodie had small liking for a coward and now his bull's voice cut
+Gratton's chatter short.
+
+"No solid mountain of gold is going to save your hide----"
+
+Benny began to jig up and down in a frenzy of excitement.
+
+"Hold your hand, Brodie, you big fool," he shouted. He even jumped to
+Brodie's side and caught the rifle-barrel, shoving it downward. "If he
+does know where it is, give him a show to lead us to it. Ain't you got
+any sense? Before King gets back. If you popped him off now, how would
+we know where to look?"
+
+Brodie snarled at Benny and whipped the rifle clear of the nervous
+clutch. But he understood what Benny had in mind and saw wisdom in
+obeying the command to hold his hand. His gross, heavy-muscled face,
+half in light, half in darkness, showed a look of hesitation. Gratton
+began a rapid, vehement talking, explaining, arguing, pleading; he had
+not meant to steal the food; he could lead them to the gold; he wanted
+none of it; all that he asked was to be allowed to live----
+
+"Shut up!" Brodie cried again disgustedly. "You ain't dead yet, are you?
+So's you keep your lying face closed I'll give you one show. Step
+lively; _where is it_?"
+
+Gratton, like a hound in leash suddenly freed, turned and sped toward
+the spot where he had hid the gold. Brodie, his rifle shifting in his
+hands, leaped after him, keeping close to him. Gratton was down on his
+hands and knees, scratching among the loose stones like a dog digging
+for a buried bone. Brodie put a heavy hand on his shoulder and jerked
+him back, hurling him to one side. Thus it was Brodie who found the bag
+and dragged it forward to the fire, dumping its contents on the ground.
+Benny was with him now, pawing over the heavy lumps. Brail, the Italian,
+Steve Jarrold--all rushed forward and snatched up bits of the ore that
+had rolled from the sack; one of them shouted in wonder; another seized
+the nugget from his hands; they all talked at once; Benny squealed in
+high rage as Jarrold shoved him backward; the Italian trod in the fire
+and cursed and kicked at it savagely, sending burning brands in all
+directions.
+
+Gloria had stood powerless to move. Now she saw that in their flush of
+excitement no one was looking toward her. She began slowly, silently,
+edging toward the side of the cave, toward the way out. Her one thought
+was to slip away while none noted her; to dart out and hurry up the
+cliff to come to the hiding-place of which Mark King had told her.
+
+"I never see such gold, and me an old-timer in the mines." It was Steve
+Jarrold muttering. "It's like they'd took clean gold down to the mint
+and rolled it and lumped it into nuggets. _This was broke off the mother
+lode_. Oh, my Gawd!"
+
+Gloria made another quiet step--and another. Still no one saw her. If
+she could only make half a dozen more steps before these men awoke from
+the first moments of a spell that had made them oblivious of everything
+on earth except that little heap of rock! Another step; she went
+quicker; their backs were toward her. And still no one saw. Yes, Gratton
+alone had seen. She made a quick frightened gesture. His jaw sagged
+open; he watched her with bulging eyes. She could read his thought so
+plainly: he was thinking of his own ultimate chances for life, he was
+screwing up his courage to make a dash for the open himself. His eyes
+followed her step by step. Oh, if only he would look in some other
+direction! If any one of them saw Gratton's tell-tale face----
+
+Then Gratton began a slow withdrawal from the others; he meant to do as
+he saw her doing.
+
+"Heavy laka hell," the Italian was saying. "Justa da gold do that!"
+
+"Give me that, Tony," snarled Brodie. He snatched the mass from the
+other's hands. "That's the biggest nugget any man living ever saw."
+
+Gloria tasted the clean fresh outside air; she was within three paces of
+the line of snow. Then there was a sudden noise; Gratton, inching off
+backward, had stumbled over a dead stick. The men by the fire were
+startled out of their oblivion. Steve Jarrold, the one nearest Gloria,
+swung about, saw her, dropped what was in his hands, and lunged towards
+her. She made a dash for the exit. In two great strides Jarrold was upon
+her and had caught her by the shoulders, dragging her back. And Gratton
+stood again, his feet glued to the ground; she could see the flash of
+his teeth gnawing at his fingers.
+
+"Trying to make a sneak for it!" boomed Brodie. "I'll show you----"
+
+"Not yet, Brodie, you big fool!" yelled Benny. "This is only a sackful,
+and not full at that. It's the rest of it we're after--the whole lousy
+mess. He's got to show us where this come from."
+
+"I am not trying to get away," said Gratton, though his tone did not
+convince. "Haven't I made good already? Haven't I kept my promise? Am I
+not ready to do whatever I can?"
+
+"Talk's cheap," retorted Brodie. "Get busy, then."
+
+Gratton, struggling already in the meshes of the net drawing ever
+tighter about him, pointed to Gloria with shaking finger. He swallowed
+twice and moistened his lips to speak.
+
+"King found it first. She was with him. I made her show me the sack of
+gold. I was going to go back to your camp, to tell you----"
+
+"Cut it," commanded Brodie. "Leave out the lies and talk straight and
+fast. Where is the rest of it? Where did this come from?"
+
+"I'm trying to tell you," said Gratton hurriedly. "There--there's
+another cave; up above. That's where King had his camp; that where's I
+got the sack. It's up there----"
+
+"No wonder she wanted to skip out," jeered Steve Jarrold, his great
+bony hand locked about Gloria's shrinking shoulder. His ill-featured
+face, the small, pig eyes, always jeering, the black bristle of beard,
+not unlike a hog's bristles, were thrust close to her face. "Where's
+King all this time?" he demanded. "Up in the other cave, maybe?"
+
+"No," she said dismally, seeking to jerk away from his evil glance and
+whiskey-laden breath. "He has gone----"
+
+"That's good; let him go. We don't care, do we? Eh, girlie?" But again
+his hand tightened until the hard fingers hurt her. "But gone where?"
+
+"We were short of food--he is hunting--maybe he has gone for help----"
+
+"And you showed Gratton where he hid his gold? That's a nice little
+she-trick, ain't it? Well, while the showing's good, lead us to the rest
+of it."
+
+"That's the eye, Steve," said Brodie. He stepped forward, shoved his
+rifle-muzzle against Gratton's body, and commanded: "You, too. Go ahead,
+you and her, and show us the way. And no monkey business, either of you,
+or I'll blow a hole square through you."
+
+Gratton, grown nimble, darted ahead with Brodie always close at his
+heels. Gloria, forced on by Jarrold, came next, and after them the
+others. Benny was the last; he had taken time to put the gold back into
+the sack and set it aside among the shadows. For Benny believed in
+making sure of what they had, even while they quested better things.
+Then he caught up his rifle, the only other gun besides Brodie's, and
+came hurrying after them.
+
+They went up the cliff in a long file, clawing their way, cursing the
+steepness, now and then one or another of them fumbling uncertainly,
+close to a slip and a fall. It was clear that, with the possible
+exception of Swen Brodie, not a man of them was entirely sober. But they
+made the climb safely and hastened into the upper cave eagerly.
+
+"It's somewhere back there," said Gratton.
+
+"More fire," shouted Brodie. His voice exulted; his blood would be
+running now with the gold fever. He tossed on an armful of dry wood; the
+flames caught and roared; shadows quivered and danced. Already Benny was
+at the far end of the cave; the others ran after him. Even Jarrold
+relinquished Gloria's arm, eager to be in at the finding. But he called
+to her as he went:
+
+"You stick where you are. I'm not forgetting you this time."
+
+Fascinated, she watched them. They ran like blood-lusting dogs that had
+briefly lost their quarry, that were seeking everywhere, in every
+cranny, with slavering jaws. They turned aside into side-pockets of the
+main cavern; they got torches and looked high and low; they went back
+and forth, up and down; they stumbled against one another and cursed
+angrily; they caught up bits of stone, ran back to the fire to see if
+the fragments were shot with gold; cursed and hurled the useless things
+from them, and ran back again, to jostle and seek and be first; they
+were not so much like dogs now as human hogs, fighting to get first into
+the trough.
+
+But they did not forget Gratton, and they did not forget Gloria. All the
+time both Brodie and Benny kept their guns in their hands; two
+significant looks had been all that was needed to keep their two
+prisoners in mind of the fact that no escape now was possible.
+
+To Gloria it seemed inevitable that in this quest which overlooked
+nothing, and which as time wore on grew less frenzied and more
+systematic, they would find what King had found before them. She tried
+to think consecutively; she recalled all that King had told her of these
+men, all that Gratton had hinted at. She recalled with a shudder the
+look in the moist eyes of Steve Jarrold. It seemed to her that her only
+slim chance for safety lay in their finding the gold. For only gold,
+gold unlimited, could cause them to forget her.
+
+For an hour they sought tirelessly. It appeared that there were many
+fingers to the further end of the cave, narrow, irregular channels into
+which they pressed. Their faggots burned out; the smoke choked them;
+they coughed and cursed, came out for fresh air, dived into the dark
+again. The short day was passing; the entering light, where they had
+torn the canvas aside, grew dimmer. And still they searched.
+
+At last Brodie returned and stood looking from Gloria to Gratton.
+
+"One of you knows," he said shortly. "Which one?"
+
+"I swear to God----" began Gratton.
+
+"Shut up! Then it's you?" The little, shiny blue eyes, never so coldly
+evil, drew her own frightened eyes, fascinated and held them. "You know"
+
+"I don't know! All I know----"
+
+"Don't lie to me! It'll do you no good." He lifted a hand and held it
+over her, the enormous fingers apart and rigid. "I'll make you tell!"
+
+"Listen to me," she managed to cry out. "I don't know, I tell you. But I
+know where it might be. In a place you would never think of looking. Not
+in a thousand years----"
+
+Blue fire sprang up in the gleaming eyes. The other men, drawn close,
+watched and listened, their eyes alive with many lights.
+
+"What you know I'll know. I'll choke it out of you----"
+
+"I'll tell you--if you will keep your hands off me! I'll make a bargain
+with you. I'll show you the place; if there's gold there, I don't care
+what happens to it--if you'll only agree to let me alone--to let me
+go----"
+
+Brodie laughed at her. But Benny cried out:
+
+"Of course we'll let you go! What do you suppose we want of you? Once we
+get our hands on it she can go, Brodie. Tell her so, you big----"
+
+"Sure," said Brodie, with a wide grin. "It ain't women we're after this
+trick; it's something better. And--and it would be very nice of you to
+show us--Miss Gaynor." He treated her to a grinning mock respect, so
+obviously spurious that her fear of him rose higher, choking her. "Very
+nice, ain't it, boys?"
+
+"I--I am not sure what you'll find," whispered Gloria. "I only know
+that----Oh, dear God, I hope you find all the gold in the world!"
+
+Hastily she ran by Brodie toward the dark end of the cave. Then she
+stopped and tried to think; how many paces had King said? She came back
+to the fire; thirty, thirty-five? She began counting as she walked while
+they watched her wondering and following slowly after her. She found
+several boulders in her path; but she had not gone far enough. She kept
+on; thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three----She could hardly see about her.
+She stumbled against a rock in her way.
+
+"Try here," she said. Already Brodie and Steve Jarrold were at her side.
+"This rock. See if it will move----"
+
+They thrust her roughly aside. Brodie set down his rifle, laid his big
+hands on the boulder, and as if it had weighed only ten pounds, tossed
+it out of the way. He knelt, feeling along the ground. A sudden shout
+burst from him:
+
+"Down here! There's a big hole; there's a dark cave underneath. That's
+where it is?"
+
+They brought faggots; at the edge of the hole they hastily built another
+fire. They crowded round, peering down. Brodie tossed a brand through;
+it dropped a short distance, a few feet only, struck, and began to roll;
+it caught against a rock, smoked and smouldered, and went out. Brodie
+set his legs over the opening, called to the Italian to grab his rifle
+and keep an eye on Gloria and Gratton, and went down. The others crowded
+about the hole, waiting impatiently for him to go through, and then
+began piling down after him. Gloria could see their figures dimly; they
+went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had
+smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit.
+She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still
+downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see
+them. Suddenly they were silent. Then there were swift mutterings. And
+then a great, triumphant, many-voiced shout. In Gus Ingle's
+treasure-cache they had at last come to Gus Ingle's treasure. And, among
+other things, to the skeleton of Gus Ingle himself, sprawling here for
+sixty years in the dark over a great heap of gold.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXIX_
+
+
+Swen Brodie, whose will had at all times directed, was now absolute
+dictator. Big and brutal and fearless, drunken with gold, he loomed
+above his companions, driving them, commanding them, swearing violently
+that they would do what he told them to do or he'd dash their brains
+out.
+
+"I led you to it," he reminded them in a great shouting voice. "But for
+me never a man of you would of smelled it. There's enough here to make a
+thousand men rich, and that's lucky for you! But we've got to hold what
+we got, and we got to get out of here with it--somehow. That somehow is
+for me to figure out. And, being as one man's got to run any job and the
+rest has got to take orders and take 'em on the jump, you're doing what
+I say! If any man jack of you don't like that, let him open his head
+right now!"
+
+"There's no sense scrappin'," muttered Benny. "An' we're all satisfied,
+I'd say. But there's no call to start wavin' a red flag."
+
+"We're going down to the lower cave," said Brodie. "Everything we can
+pry loose is going down with us. We'll pitch the loose chunks of gold
+over the cliff and we'll stow 'em away somewhere else--where King, if
+things break some way we don't look for, won't find 'em! We start right
+now, while there's daylight. What's more, we move our camp from down the
+canon to the cave below. Steve Jarrold, you and Tony are elected to that
+job, and you'd better get a move on. Bring up what grub's left, and the
+blankets and stuff. The rest of us will start in firing gold overboard
+and putting it somewhere more safe--all that's loose. And at that, think
+of the great, big, wide, yellow, rotten-soft seam of it down below!"
+
+"Where are you goin' to put it?" demanded Jarrold.
+
+"Not hiding it from you and Tony, Steve," cried Brodie sharply. "Put
+your suspicious ways in your pocket. And, if you're on the jump, you'll
+have our camp truck moved before we're done. Look alive, will you? A
+man never knows what's going to happen."
+
+"Why not leave it here until we know----?"
+
+"For one thing, because Mark King knows this place. Now, move! Come
+ahead, you other fellows. You, too, Gratton; we ain't forgot you." An
+uglier note crept into the harsh voice. "You can help. And so can you,"
+whirling on Gloria. "Woman or no woman, you got hands and feet."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Night, pitch-black, had come when they had done. Gloria, scarcely able
+to stand from exhaustion, her body bruised, her hands and arms wounded
+from many a jagged rock as she had gone back and forth carrying heavy
+loads, went with the others into the lowest cave in which already the
+gold had been stowed away. She sank down wearily; she closed her eyes
+rather than watch the men about their fire, eating noisily, drinking
+noisily from the bottles which Steve and Tony had brought from their
+other camp. Trying to remain unnoticed in the shadows was Gratton.
+Brodie, having commanded that a rude rock wall like King's be built
+across the mouth of the cave to shut out the cold, and having laboured
+with the others at the task, came back to the fire. He took a long pull
+at a bottle, emptying it and smashing it to tinkling fragments as he
+hurled it behind him. He caught up a big piece of dried beef and gnawed
+at it like a dog; though Gloria kept her eyes away from him she could
+hear the tearing and grinding of the monstrous teeth.
+
+"It's been a day's work, at that," he said with a full mouth. "But we
+ain't done. I noticed how no man has said a word about how we split what
+we found."
+
+"There's five of us," said Benny quickly. "We split it five ways, even,
+like pardners."
+
+Brodie turned on him slowly, still rending at his meat, still clutching
+his rifle and holding it so that no man might forget that he held it.
+
+"Think so, Benny?" he said ponderously. "Being as I've worked on this
+lay a long time, since I let you others in on it, since I led you to
+it--think that's the fair way to split it? Now suppose you listen to
+me. You boys ain't mentioned a split because it was none of your say and
+you knew it. Say, in round numbers--but there's ten times that--that
+there's a million dollars tucked away here. Why, there's mines all
+through these mountains that never thought of stopping at a million;
+that was just a fair start! Well, to get going, say there's an even
+million. I get just half that; that leaves half a million, don't it?
+Now, shut up a minute!" he commanded truculently as more than one man
+stirred. "Listen to me. That's five hundred thousand to split between
+four of you; that's over a hundred thousand for every man jack of you.
+And that's what I call a fair split."
+
+They growled in their throats at that, but no man took it upon himself
+to speak out definitely, though they glanced sidewise among themselves.
+Benny, who always had a thought of his own, said quietly:
+
+"What are you doin' about Gratton? He'll claim his share, won't he? And,
+if you say him no, he'll shoot his face off, won't he?"
+
+"No," said Brodie. "He won't." He paused, swallowed the last of his
+beef, caught up a bottle from Benny's side, and drank deeply. Benny,
+afraid that this bottle, too, still nearly full, would be broken,
+hastily snatched it back when Brodie had done.
+
+"No," said Brodie heavily. "Gratton won't talk." He grew suddenly
+quick-spoken--he broke into a volley of accusation; his tongue lent
+itself to such a rush of vileness that Gloria, shrinking back, covered
+her ears with her hands. "Gratton stole grub. When grub-stealing was the
+same as slitting a man's throat. And what next does he plan? Why, to
+make trouble; to swear that Benny killed a man; that we was all in it;
+to get us all hung, if he can, or in the pen; then to grab what's ours.
+Look at him. You can see it in his frog eyes! He's done, that's what he
+is!" With a swift gesture his gun was at his shoulder.
+
+Gratton scrambled to his feet with a choking cry. Gloria, too, had
+sprung up, sick with horror. She looked from Brodie to Gratton, who was
+not two feet from her. She saw that he was panic-stricken; his fear was
+choking him, stopping his heart, paralysing his muscles. He wanted to
+run and could not; he tried to speak but now not even a whisper came
+from between his writhing lips.
+
+Slowly, an unshaken, senseless piece of machinery, Brodie raised his
+rifle. Now Gratton's voice returned to him; a strangling cry broke from
+his agonized soul. A hand, wildly outthrown, caught at Gloria's sleeve.
+
+"You, there," called Brodie, "stand aside. Unless you're wanting yours
+too!"
+
+Her own heart was stopping, her feet were leaded. She understood what he
+said--she knew that it was to her that he spoke--but she wouldn't
+believe, couldn't believe that he meant--_that_!
+
+Gratton was pressing tight to Gloria, seeking futilely to get behind
+her. He began to articulate--to beg--to promise----
+
+Brodie fired. A great reverberating roar filled the cavern. Gloria, her
+brain gone suddenly numb, felt the grip on her arm tighten convulsively.
+Then it relaxed--slowly. Gratton, his eyes bulging, his mouth wide open,
+was sinking----
+
+Gloria put her hands over her eyes and screamed. Again and again her
+scream broke from her. She tried to draw back, to run. But all her
+strength was gone. She crumpled and settled down almost as Gratton had
+done, and so close to him that she brushed him with her knee. She felt
+the body twitch. She leaped to her feet and ran blindly, screaming. She
+struck against the rock wall and sank down again.
+
+The wonder was that she did not swoon outright. As it was, her soul
+seemed to float dizzily out of her body and through an utter dark. She
+thought that she was dying. As though across a vast distance she heard
+voices.
+
+"Well?" It was the man who had done the shooting, his voice truculent.
+"Anybody got anything to say? Say it quick, if you have."
+
+There was a silence. Then a shuffling of feet. Then an answering voice,
+thin and querulous. It was Benny; he, too, had killed his man.
+
+"He had it coming," he said eagerly. "Any judge would say so. Stole
+every bit of grub when stealing grub is the same as cutting a man's
+throat, just like you said, Brodie. He had it coming. You done right."
+
+"You, Jarrold," demanded Brodie. "Got anything to say?"
+
+Again silence. Then again a voice, Jarrold's, saying hurriedly:
+
+"No. Benny's right. He had it coming. Damn fool."
+
+"And you, Brail? And you, Tony? Got anything to say? Talk lively!"
+
+Brail and Tony, like the others before them, were quick to excuse
+Brodie's act. They spoke briefly and relapsed into silence. Then,
+beginning far away and coming closer with the speed of an onrushing
+hurricane, Gloria heard heavy feet crunching in the dirt and gravel. A
+hard hand gripped her shoulder, jerking her to her feet.
+
+"You, friend," said Brodie. "What have you got to say about it?"
+
+She hung limp in his powerful hand, speechless.
+
+He dragged her closer to the firelight, peering at her with his
+red-flecked eyes.
+
+"Don't forget who she is," another voice was saying. Steve Jarrold's.
+"Remember what I told you."
+
+It was as though he prided himself on the fact that he alone knew her
+for Gaynor's daughter, and from it derived a sort of ownership of her;
+for while the others had never caught a glimpse of her until now, he had
+filled his eyes with her before. "We got to think this out. She came
+along with King. Got enough of him and switched to Gratton. That's like
+a woman."
+
+Brodie let her slip down and turned away from her. His mood was not so
+soon for a woman.
+
+"See she keeps her mouth shut," he said threateningly. "If she ain't got
+sense enough for that she ain't got sense to go on living."
+
+Benny stooped and feasted his eyes on her. Then, straightening up, he
+turned to Jarrold with nodding approval.
+
+"She skins anything _I_ ever saw," he admitted.
+
+In some strange way it seemed to Gloria that both Benny and Brodie had
+consigned her to Jarrold as though they admitted his prior claim; as
+though, among these three, she was looked upon as the property of one.
+She struggled to her feet.
+
+"Don't let her go," said Brodie. "That's all I got to say about her
+right now."
+
+She made an uncertain step toward the mouth of the cave. Jarrold moved
+at her side. She went faster. He put his hand on her.
+
+"Didn't you hear what he said?" he asked.
+
+She tried to break away and run. He held her One clear thought and only
+one formed in her mind. As she had never longed for anything in her
+life, she yearned for Mark King.
+
+"Mark!" she screamed, "Mark King! Save me."
+
+Jarrold clapped a big dirty hand over her mouth. He put a wiry arm about
+her and lifted her and carried her back to the fireside.
+
+"None of that," he growled in her ear. She shrank away as she felt the
+tensing of his arm and was conscious of the contact of his rag-clothed
+body. She grew silent, cowering. She heard a sound of something dragging
+and could not hide her fascinated eyes. Thus she watched as Brodie
+gripped the slack of Gratton's coat shoulders and shoved the body out
+into the snow. She even marked how the living man spat after the dead.
+
+"Go to the coyotes," he muttered. "They're your kind."
+
+Gloria knew that if she took a step Jarrold would clutch her again. So
+she stood very still. Brodie came back and threw some wood on the fire
+and squatted down over the provisions, seeming to be taking stock of
+them. Perhaps he was but strengthening his heart, digesting the evidence
+of the case, assuring himself again after the accomplished fact that the
+deed was just. Still squatting, he drank again, this time from the
+bottle which had been Gratton's. As he tilted it up she saw that it was
+two-thirds full. When he put it down with a long sigh and wiped his wet
+mouth it was not over half-full. He brooded over the fire, he gave no
+sign of noticing her.
+
+"Let me go," she said to Jarrold. "I am sick. I'd die here. Please let
+me go."
+
+Jarrold shifted and looked to his companions. Benny shook his head.
+
+"There ain't no hurry," he stated judicially. "What sort is she, Steve?"
+
+"She come up to Gaynor's place along with Gratton," answered Jarrold as
+though he knew all about her. "He was crazy gone on her, crazy enough to
+want to marry her, even. Sent me for the judge. Then Mark King showed
+up. She fell for him and gave Gratton the go-by. Then she comes into the
+mountains with King, I guess. Next she gets tired of him and goes back
+to Gratton."
+
+"'Frisco woman?" asked Benny.
+
+Jarrold nodded. Benny clacked his tongue. Brodie still brooded at his
+fire, his eyes sullen upon the fitful flame and red embers.
+
+"Where is King?" asked Brodie.
+
+"Where is King?" repeated Jarrold to Gloria.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, speaking with difficulty. "I ... Oh, for
+God's sake, let me go. I won't say anything about what I saw; I promise.
+If you will only let me go."
+
+"They promise easy and break promises easier," said Jarrold.
+
+Benny came up and touched Brodie on the shoulder. The squatting man
+started and scowled. Benny stooped and whispered. Brodie got up heavily
+and together the two withdrew, going further back in the cave. They
+talked, but Gloria could not catch the words. She saw the flare of one
+match after the other as they fell to smoking; the smell of strong
+tobacco came to her. She looked appealingly to Jarrold. He sidled
+closer, standing between her and the open.
+
+"I'll pay you a thousand dollars when I get back to San Francisco," she
+whispered eagerly. "Ten thousand! If you'll let me go now."
+
+Jarrold pondered, his stupid little eyes steady and unwinking on her.
+
+"A thousand dollars," he returned slowly, "wouldn't do me any good if I
+never got it: as I wouldn't if none of us got clear of this damn' snow;
+neither would ten I And it wouldn't do me any good if Benny and Brodie
+shot me full of lead. And it wouldn't be much, anyhow, if we got away
+with what we found to-day! Everything being as it is, I ain't half as
+strong for a thousand dollars, nor yet ten, right now as I am for you!
+And you know it, don't you?"
+
+He tried to ogle her, and her sick dread nearly overwhelmed her.
+
+"And you got sense, too," went on Jarrold, leering meaningly. "It won't
+be bad to have a man stuck on you that's got all kind of kale, will it,
+girlie?"
+
+As he poured out his wretched insinuations she was trembling; in her
+heart she thought that she had spoken truly and would die if they kept
+her here.
+
+"I am married. To Mr. King," she said as steadily as she could. "I want
+to go to him. You have no right to keep me here."
+
+"But you don't even know where he is," Jarrold reminded her slyly.
+
+Brodie and Benny had given over their whispering and came back to the
+fire, where Brail and the Italian looked up at them sharply. Here was
+another guarded conference among the four; Gloria, though she could
+watch them, was unable to hear what they were saying. Jarrold began to
+grow uneasy, so soon is distrust bred amongst those who have found
+treasure.
+
+Brodie made a last remark and laughed; the others laughed after him, and
+the four looked toward Jarrold and Gloria. Brodie, leaning back, caught
+up a bottle and drank, and thereafter passed the bottle to the man
+nearest him. Gloria was quick to see that he had set his rifle away
+somewhere against the rock wall in the shadows. Only Brail still clung
+to his gun; if he should set it aside--if there should come a moment
+when she could slip to the cave's mouth--in the outside dark, despite
+the deep snow, she would at least have a chance to escape from them.
+Even though she had nowhere to go, she longed wildly to be away from
+them. When their eyes roved toward her she thought that she would rather
+be dead, out in the clean, white snow, than here.
+
+She wondered if these men were as utterly callous as they seemed.
+Gratton, so newly dead, appeared forgotten. They laughed and drank, they
+smoked and spat, they soiled her with their eyes and their talk, quite
+as though they had neither knowledge nor memory of manslaughter done.
+Benny alone, for a brief period, appeared nervous. She wondered what he
+was doing; he had rolled back his coat-sleeve; he was jabbing at his
+bare forearm with something which now and then caught and reflected the
+firelight. After a long time she heard a long sigh from Benny; he pulled
+down his coat-sleeve. The others laughed again.
+
+"It's time we had a little talk," said Brodie out of a short silence.
+"Without anybody's skirt listening in. Leave her back there, further
+from the front door, Jarrold. Where she can't get an earful, and where
+she can't make a getaway; you come on over here a minute."
+
+Gloria made no resistance but sank down limply where Jarrold left her
+and watched him as he slouched over to the fire. She sought to hear
+their words, to read the looks on their faces. But she caught only a
+monotonous mutter, unintelligible but evil, and saw only the bottle
+passing from one to the other. Brodie finished it and hurled it from him
+so that it broke noisily. A few times she heard them laugh; she could
+distinguish Brodie's throaty, bull tone and Benny's nervous cackle.
+Jarrold did not appear made for mirth, and him she feared most of all;
+yes, even more than Brodie, whom she had seen do murder, and Benny who,
+she knew, had done murder. Brail and the Italian said little; they were
+men to follow where other men led. She fancied that several times Steve
+Jarrold's little eyes left the bottle, the faces of his companions, and
+even the pile of gold to quest for her face in the dark.
+
+"Come here," commanded Brodie.
+
+She started. He was calling to her! She got up and moved forward slowly.
+It was obey or be dragged to him. In the pale light by the fire,
+standing so that the blaze was between the five men and herself, she
+stopped. Until now she had been very white; suddenly she knew that her
+face must be flooded with bright red; she could feel the burn of it.
+The eyes of the men seemed veritably to disregard her clothes, to make
+her feel another Lady Godiva.
+
+"Gratton's, then King's, then Gratton's again?" Brodie chuckled. "I
+don't care whose before Gratton's the first time; but whose after
+Gratton's the last time, that's it! Who are you for, Bright-Eyes? Me or
+Steve?"
+
+"No!" she cried, her hands at her breast. "No! I am not like that! I was
+not Gratton's; I am ... I am Mark King's wife!"
+
+"So?" admitted Brodie good-humouredly. "Well, that cuts no ice; it's
+open and shut you'd gone back to Gratton. Now, come over here. Closer."
+
+"I won't," she shuddered. "You don't dare make me! I ... Oh, won't you
+let me go? You have your gold there; you have gold and whiskey; you
+don't want me...."
+
+"Whiskey, gold, and women," muttered Brodie. "They go together fine. And
+quit that little schoolgirl dodge; you make me sick. If you wasn't what
+you are, you wouldn't be where you are. Come over here and give us a
+kiss." He jerked from his pocket a dull lump, one of the smaller, richer
+nuggets. "I'm no pincher; come across and I'll give you a whole handful
+of gold!" His tone was playful.
+
+But Jarrold cut in less playfully:
+
+"Leave her alone, Brodie," he advised. "She don't cotton to you, and,
+what's more, whose gold is it, anyhow? We ain't divided yet. And
+she.... Well, if she belongs to anybody, she's mine!"
+
+"So?" Brodie's monosyllable was expressionless. "Well, I was asking
+_her_. And she ain't answered yet."
+
+Fast as the girl's heart beat, her thoughts sought to fly faster. These
+men were brutes; here she began, and, alas, here she ended. She had
+never known what brute meant; she had called Mark King that! And now, if
+only Mark King could hear her call, could come to her.... But that was
+less thought than prayer. These were brute beasts; their bestiality when
+they had first come upon her was terrifying; now, as the alcohol burned
+in their half-starved stomachs and the further intoxication of gold
+crept into their blood, her terror was boundless. In a moment she would
+feel upon her either the hands of Brodie or the hands of Jarrold. And
+she was helpless and hopeless. Until, since life connotes hope, there
+came a faint flicker of light. And with it came a sudden, compelling,
+swift longing. If she might set them to quarrelling over her, to send a
+snarling man at a snarling man's throat.... Her hands dropped to her
+sides, and were clenched; she lifted her chin; with all that strength
+that lay in the innermost soul of Gloria King she strove to drive her
+great fear out of her eyes, to hide it from their wolfish regard, to
+summon up in its stead a mocking inscrutability. There was but one thing
+left to do, but one part to play----Oh, God, if she could play the
+part! She stood motionless, silent; she battled with herself; she
+struggled mightily for a calm utterance. And in the end she said in a
+tone which she managed to make full of challenge:
+
+"Which of you is the better man?"
+
+They stared at her, all of them puzzled by her change of attitude as by
+her words. Then Brodie, with a noisy explosion of laughter, smote his
+thigh and, after him, Benny giggled foolishly.
+
+"The better man!" Brodie shouted. "Hear her, Steve, old horse? The
+better man!" He lunged to his feet; he stood solidly, unswerving though
+more than ever slow and ponderous. "I'll go you, Steve. The lady's
+right; she goes to the man who's man enough to get her. That's big Swen
+Brodie, the best man in these mountains! I'll go you for her, Steve. By
+God, she's worth it, too."
+
+But Steve Jarrold sat where he was, glaring.
+
+"She's sly," he grunted, cursing before and after. "Can't you see what
+she's up to? She wants us to fight one another; she'd be glad if we both
+killed one another. You don't understand women, Brodie; they're sly like
+cats."
+
+"Make a auction out'n it!" was Benny's mirthful suggestion. "Why just
+you two guys, anyway? Where do you get that stuff? Free for all, that's
+what I say!" He waved his bottle. "Auction her off, that's what I say!
+I'll give a bottle of whiskey for her; hey, Brodie?"
+
+Brodie had laughed when Jarrold spoke; he laughed now. But he looked to
+Jarrold and not Benny as he spoke; he extended his great hands, the
+fingers crooked, curving slowly inward, like steel hooks.
+
+"I can eat you alive, and you know it, Steve," he mocked. "What's more,
+_she_ knows it! That's what she wants; she's picked me, Steve! That's
+just her way of letting you down easy; she don't aim to hurt your
+feelings. Will you come on and take a fall for her? Or is the lady mine?
+What's the word? Speak up, man!"
+
+Gloria saw that Jarrold, though he sent a black, scowling look at the
+bigger man, was afraid. And yet they must fight--they must be driven to
+blows--she must somehow set them at each others' throats. It was so hard
+to think at all! Yet she could think forward to one occurrence only that
+could give her respite and a frail chance for freedom: if they would
+only fight as, in some dim instinctive way, it was given her to
+understand that such men would fight once a wrathful blow had been given
+and taken--if the others would only watch them and not her, if she could
+come to one of the rifles--or outside----
+
+She turned to Jarrold. She gathered herself for the final supreme
+effort. She made her eyes grow bright through sheer force of will; she
+made her lips cease trembling and curve to a smile at the man; she even
+concealed her loathing and put a ringing note, almost of laughter, into
+her voice as she said softly:
+
+"I know you are not afraid--and I think--yes, I am sure, that you could
+whip him!"
+
+Steve Jarrold's eyes flashed. Then they left hers lingeringly; Brodie
+was stamping impatiently, calling to him.
+
+"Take her!" snapped Jarrold. "Hell take both of you."
+
+The laughter and challenge went out of Swen Brodie's bloodshot eyes; a
+new red surged all of a sudden into them. He turned and came slowly
+about the fire, his arms still uplifted, the crooking fingers toward
+Gloria.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXX_
+
+
+Scream after scream burst from Gloria's lips; taut nerves seemed to snap
+all through her body like over-stressed violin strings. She ran, ran
+anywhere, ran blindly. She ran into Benny, who clutched at her; she fled
+away from him, back toward the darker end of the cave. The low rumble of
+a man's laughter answered her; drunken laughter from Brodie. Whether
+drunk with whiskey or with gold or with lust did not matter; drunk he
+was. Gloria's shriek rose like a madwoman's; Brodie's thick laughter was
+its sinister echo. Another man called out something; the slow, heavy
+feet of Swen Brodie were following, following. Boots scuffling, Brodie
+pursuing with a wide, patient grin; he was in no hurry, he was so sure
+of her!
+
+His hands were almost on her. Gloria whipped aside and ran again. He
+kept between her and the front of the cave; with all of his grinning
+patience he was as watchful as a cat. She was driven back and back,
+deeper and deeper into the narrowing tunnel. He came on. He would be
+upon her in another half-dozen slow, ponderous strides. She could not
+pass him; she could not dart forward and out; his arms were widely
+extended on either side. He was expecting that. She could only save
+herself from him second by second--and the seconds were running out
+swiftly.
+
+She prayed to God in wild passionate supplication. She prayed for sudden
+death, death before those horrid, crooked fingers touched her. But while
+she prayed to God it was of Mark King that she thought. And Mark King,
+because of her usage of him, was miles and miles away, so far that her
+despairing shrieks died without penetrating one-millionth part of the
+empty wastes across which he had trudged. And still she drew back and
+back and still she prayed for the miracle as she had done that day when
+she had seen King coming toward her with a rope in his hand, prayed for
+the earth to split asunder, for a flame to leap out and consume the
+beast crowding closer upon her--to consume him or herself.
+
+At last she was at the end. The end of the passage-way, the end of hope.
+Brodie came on, his arms out. She could hear him breathing. She could
+smell the whiskey he reeked with.... Beyond him she saw Jarrold
+squatting by the fire; Brail leaning on his rifle, guarding the
+entrance; Benny and the Italian lounging in the shadows. Figures of
+hell, watching Brodie's actions with aloof interest ...Brodie made the
+last step; she felt his hand on her arm, closing, drawing her forward;
+the last agonized shriek burst from her....
+
+"Oh, God--oh, dear God----"
+
+She did not hear and Brodie did not hearken to a sudden new sound in the
+cave grown suddenly still; the sound of a cascade of loose stones. They
+came with a rush, they piled up near the middle of the open cave,
+dropping from the shadowy rock roof above. But Benny, always on nerve
+edge, shrilled:
+
+"Look out! A cave-in"
+
+She heard--God had heard----Better crushed under a falling mountain
+than in those brute arms.
+
+And then she saw. From ten feet above, straight down dropped something
+else. Taut nerves of those who saw fancied it a great boulder falling.
+But no boulder this, which, striking the little pile of rocks, became
+animated, rose, whirled, and----
+
+"Mark!" screamed Gloria. "Mark!"
+
+Turned to stone, incredulous of their eyes, bewildered beyond the power
+to move, were those who saw. It was Brail who first understood, Brail
+the one man with a gun in his hands. He whipped it up and began firing,
+nervous and excited. It was after the second shot that King's rifle
+answered him; it roared out like the crash of doom in Gloria's ears; she
+saw the stabbing spurt of fire. Brail sagged where he stood, crumpled
+and pitched forward, his rifle clattering loudly against the rocks.
+
+But by now the brief stupor that had locked the other men in staring
+inaction was gone. Gloria saw figures leaping forward; she knew that
+Brodie's hands had relinquished her; she saw Brodie bearing down on
+King, roaring inarticulately as he went; she saw Benny and Jarrold and
+the Italian bearing down upon him; King was in the midst of all that.
+They were upon him before Brail's head had struck the ground. They gave
+him no time, no space for another shot. He swept his clubbed rifle high
+over his head; she heard the blow when he struck, the hideous sound of a
+crushing skull. A man went down, she did not know which one. Only it was
+not Mark--thank God it was not Mark King!
+
+And now King had a little room and an instant of his own as two other
+men swerved widely about the falling figure. He fired again, not putting
+the rifle to his shoulder. Another man fell, lay screaming, rolled
+aside--was forgotten.
+
+"Where's my rifle?" Brodie was yelling.
+
+He couldn't find it in the dark; he couldn't stop to grope for it. But
+Gloria knew; she remembered. She ran for it, found it, straightened up
+with it in her shaking hands.
+
+Again King was using his weapon as a club, since they pressed him so
+closely. Again came that terrible sound; Steve Jarrold it was who went
+down. And with it another sound, that of hard wood splintering. The
+rifle was broken over his head, the stock whirled close to Gloria, King
+had only the short heavy steel barrel in his hands.
+
+Benny had circled to the far side; Brodie had caught up a great thick
+limb of wood. They were coming at King from two sides at once.... Gloria
+tried to aim, pulled the trigger, tugging frantically. Only then she
+remembered to draw the hammer back; it was Brodie's ancient rifle and
+she struggled to get it cocked. She shuddered at the report. The bullet
+sang in front of Benny, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He was near
+the cave's mouth. Gloria pointed, forgot the hammer remembered, got the
+gun cocked and fired again. Benny plunged wildly forward; she did not
+know if she had hit him. He hurled himself headlong toward the narrow
+exit and through.
+
+She had forgotten Brodie and King! She turned toward them. She did not
+dare shoot now; King was in the way. He moved aside as if he understood
+her trouble; Brodie, grown unthinkably quick of foot, moved with him.
+Brodie, too, understood. She saw him leap in and strike. The blow
+landed, a glancing blow. King seemed to have grown tired; he moved so
+slowly. But he did move and toward Brodie; he swung his clubbed
+rifle-barrel and beat at Brodie's great face with it. Beat and missed
+and almost fell forward. Again Brodie struck; again King beat at him.
+They moved up and down, back and forth; Brodie was cursing under his
+breath, and at last jeering. King was moving more and more slowly; his
+left arm swung as if it were useless; Brodie swept up his club in both
+hands, grunting audibly with every blow.... Oh, if she could only
+shoot ... if she only dared shoot! But Brodie, nimble on his feet that
+had been so patiently slow just now, kept King always in front of him,
+between him and Gloria's rifle.
+
+"I'll get you, King. I'll get you," shouted Brodie, his voice exulting.
+"I always wanted to get you--right!"
+
+There was a crash, the splintering of wood against steel. Both men had
+struck together; Brodie's club had broken to splinters. And the
+rifle-barrel in King's hands flew out of his grip and across the cave,
+ringing out as it struck. The two men, their hands empty, stood a moment
+staring at each other. Then Brodie shouted, a great shout of triumph,
+and sprang forward. And Mark King, steadying himself, ignoring the hot
+trickle of blood down his side where Benny's second bullet had torn his
+flesh, met him with a cry that was like Brodie's own. In his hot brain
+there was no thought of handicap, of odds, of Brodie's advantage. There
+was only the mad rage which had hurled him here, one man against five in
+a girl's defence, that and a raving, unleashed blood lust, the desire,
+overshadowing all else, to have Brodie's brute throat in his hands, to
+batter Brodie's brute face into the rocks. They met in their onrush like
+two bodies hurled from catapults; they struck and grappled and fell and
+rolled together, one now as they strove, locked in the embrace of death.
+An embrace in which Brodie's was the greater weight, the greater girth,
+the greater strength--and Mark King's the greater sheer, clean manhood.
+
+Gloria ran toward them, the rifle shaking in her hands. Brodie feared
+her and strove to turn and twist so that she could not shoot. King saw
+her and shouted in a terrible voice which was not like Mark King's
+voice:
+
+"Don't shoot--let me--"
+
+She did not heed; she would shoot--if ever she could be sure that she
+would not shoot him. But she did not dare--they thrashed about so madly.
+They were like octopuses in mortal combat; their arms flailing seemed
+more than four arms----
+
+Brodie had his hands at King's throat--King's hands were at Brodie's
+throat. She saw Brodie's bestial face gloating. He was so confident now.
+She saw his great hands shut down, sinking into the flesh. King's face,
+when she got one swift glimpse of it, was set, void of expression.
+King's hands, with tendons bursting, sank deeper and deeper. Then she
+understood that each man had the grip that he wanted; that it was a mere
+matter now of strength and endurance and will--and that glorious thing,
+sheer, clean manhood.
+
+They were breathing terribly; they lay stiller, stiller. They did not
+thrash about so much. Their eyes were starting out of their sockets;
+their faces were turning purple--or was it the firelight? Men's faces
+could not look like that--not while the men lived. They gasped now; they
+did not breathe.
+
+One of Brodie's hands came away hastily. He began battering at King's
+face, battering like a steam-piston. The blows sounded loudly; blood
+broke out under the terrific pounding. King's grip did not alter, did
+not shift. His eyes were shut but he clung on, grim, looking a dead man,
+but a man whose will lasted on after death. Brodie wrenched; they rolled
+over. Still King's hands did not leave their grip.
+
+They were on their feet, staggering up and down, two men moulded
+together like one man. Brodie struck blow after blow, and with every
+thud Gloria winced and felt a pain through her own body. And still King
+held his grip, both hands sunk deep into the thick throat.
+
+They were apart, two blind, staggering men. What parted them they did
+not know and Gloria could not see. Thus they stood for a second only.
+Brodie lifted his hands--weak hands rising slowly, slowly--uncertainly.
+King saw him through a gathering mist; Brodie opened his mouth to draw
+in great sobbing breaths of air. King, the primal rage upon him, saw the
+great double teeth bared, and thought that his enemy was laughing at
+him. It was King who gathered himself first and struck first. All of the
+will he had, all of the endurance left in his battered body, all of the
+strength God gave him, he put into that blow. He struck Brodie full in
+the face, between the little battered blue eyes. And Brodie fell. He
+rose; he got to his knees and sagged up and forward. King's shout then
+was to ring through Gloria's memory for days to come; he bore down on
+Swen Brodie, caught him about the great body, lifted him clear of the
+floor and hurled him downward. Brodie struck heavily, his head against
+the rocks. And where he fell he lay--stunned or dead.
+
+"Come," said King to Gloria. "Come quick."
+
+He turned toward the cave's mouth and with one hand began to drag away
+the stones so that they could go out. His other hand was pressed to his
+side. His work done, he picked up the rifle at his feet and went out.
+Gloria, swaying and stumbling, came after him. Neither spoke a word as
+they made a slow way through the snow. King went unsteadily with
+dragging feet. They climbed the cliff laboriously. They were in their
+cave--it was like home. She dropped down on the fir-boughs, stumbling to
+them in the dark.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXI_
+
+
+Gloria did not know if she had slept or fainted. When she regained
+consciousness, though it was pitch dark and dead still, there was no
+first puzzled moment of uncertainty. That last wonderfully glad thought
+which had filled brain and heart when she sank down on her fir-boughs
+had persisted throughout her moments or hours of unconsciousness,
+pervading her subconscious self gloriously, flowering spontaneously in
+an awakening mind: Mark King had come back to her in her moment of
+peril; he had battled for her like the great-hearted hero that he was,
+he had saved her and had brought her home. Back home! She had prayed to
+God when utter undoing seemed inevitable, when death had seemed more
+desirable than life, and He had answered. He had sent Mark King to her!
+
+She was saved, and though it was cold and dark and still, she felt her
+heart singing within her. Having lived through all that she had endured,
+having been brought safely through it, she was as confident of the
+future as though never had evil menaced her. She felt new strength
+coursing through her blood, new hope rising within her, new certainty
+that all was right with her and Mark King, that all would be right
+eternally. Terror and anguish and despair that had surged over her in so
+many great flooding waves now receded and were gone; in their place
+shone the great flame of life triumphant; she thrilled through with the
+largeness of life.
+
+Never, thank God, would she forget how Mark King, forgetful of self,
+contemptuous of the frightful odds against him, had hurled himself into
+the midst of those drunken brutes; never would she forget how godlike he
+had stood forth in her eyes as those others leaped upon him and he beat
+them back. Forgetful of self--he had always been forgetful of self! She
+could not think of him as she had ever thought of any other man she had
+ever known--for what other man would have come to her as he had done,
+courting death gladly if only he could stand between her and the hideous
+thing that attacked her? The rush of great events had swept her mind
+clear of pettiness and prejudice; they bore her on from familiar
+view-points and to new levels; like roaring winds out of a tempestuous
+north they cleared away the wretched fogs that had enwrapped a
+self-centred girl; they made her see a man in the naked glory of his
+sheer, clean manhood.
+
+To her now he stood forth clothed in magnificence. She could think upon
+him only in superlatives. He was fearless and he was unselfish; he was
+kind and generous and as honest-hearted as God's own clear sunshine.
+She knew now, suddenly and for the first time, because he had shown her,
+what the simple word _man_ meant. How far apart he stood from such as
+Brodie, the beast! How high above such as Gratton!--And once, in the
+city, she had been ashamed of him and had turned to Gratton! Because he
+had appeared to her without just so much black cloth upon his back cut
+in just such a style! And now how bitterly she was ashamed of her shame.
+But for only an instant. Thereafter she forgot shame of any sort and
+exulted in her pride of him and in her pride that she was proud.
+
+Yes, in glad defiance of a Gloria that had been, she was proud of the
+manhood of a man who had beaten her! He had been right; he had done that
+as the last argument with an empty-headed, selfish girl who deserved no
+better at his hands, a girl who had been like the Gratton whom she so
+abhorred and despised--despised even in death. She had been like Gratton
+the cowardly, contemptible, petty, selfish--dishonourable! All along
+Mark King had been right and she had been wrong, at every step. He had
+been gentle and patient after a fashion which now set her wondering and,
+in the end, lifted him to new heights in her esteem. When, without
+loving him, she had lied with her eyes and married him, that had been a
+Gratton sort of trick--like stealing his partners' food----
+
+_Without loving him_! No, thank God; not that! She had always loved him;
+she loved him now with her whole heart and soul, with an adoration she
+had saved for him. When in the springtime she had ridden with him
+through the forest-lands, when their hands had touched, when he had held
+her in his arms--when she had seen him that first time from the stairway
+and had looked down into his clear eyes and through them into his
+heart--she had always loved him! She wanted suddenly to go to him, to
+slip into his arms, to make herself humble in pleading for his
+forgiveness. She was not afraid that he would not forgive; he was so big
+of heart that he would understand.
+
+"Mark!" she called softly.
+
+In the utter dark she could see nothing. The absolute stillness was
+unbroken. She called anxiously: "Mark, where are you?" There was no
+answer. She sprang up and called to him over and over. When still there
+was no reply she began a hurried search for a match; there were still
+some upon the rock shelf. Then it was that she stumbled over something
+sprawling on the floor.
+
+"Mark!" she cried again. "Oh--Mark----"
+
+She found a match; she got some dry twigs blazing. In their light she
+saw him. He lay on his back like a dead man, his arms outflung, his
+white face turned up toward hers. There was a great smear of blood
+across his brow, the track of a bloody hand as it had sought to wipe a
+gathering dimness out of his eyes. The fire burned brighter; she saw it
+glisten upon a little pool of blood at her side. She knelt and bent over
+him, scarcely breathing. If he were dead--if, after all this, Mark King
+were dead----His eyes were closed; his face was deathly white, looking
+the more ghastly from the dark stain across it. She lifted her own hand
+that had touched his side and looked at it with wide frightened eyes;
+it, too, was red. At that moment King's face was no ghastlier than hers.
+
+For a little while she sat motionless, her brain reeling. But almost
+immediately her brain cleared and there stood forth as in a white light
+the one thought: _Mark King was about to die, and he must not die_! For
+he was Mark King, valiant and full of vigour and vitality, a man strong
+and hardy and lusty, a man who would not be beaten! He was the victor,
+not the vanquished. And, further, she, Gloria King, Mark King's wife,
+would not let him die! He was hers, her own; she would hold him back to
+her. Had he not come to her when she needed him, and done his uttermost
+for her? If now she was filled with life and the pulsating love of life,
+it was his doing. And now it was her task--her glorious, God-given
+privilege!--to do for him, to fight for him, ignoring the odds against
+her, to save him. She sprang up filled with stubborn, confident
+determination. He was hers and she would not let him die. She had
+learned to fight; she had fought against Gratton, against Brodie; she
+would fight as she had never done until now against death itself.
+
+He was big and she little, yet she dragged his bed close to his side and
+got her arms about him and lifted him enough to get him upon the
+blankets. She ran to her fire and piled and piled wood on it until the
+flames roared noisily and brightened everything about her. She ran back
+to him and knelt again and slipped her hand inside his shirt, seeking
+his heart. The deep chest was barely warmer than death; the heart
+stirred only faintly. But it did beat. She sought the wound Brail's
+bullet had made and found it in his side. There was blood on her hands
+but she did not notice it now. She found where the bullet had entered
+and where it had torn its way out through his flesh. She did not know if
+any vital organ lay in that narrow span or if any major artery had been
+severed or if the rifle-ball had merely glanced along the ribs and been
+deflected by them; she only knew that he had lost much blood, that it
+must have gushed freely while he strove with Swen Brodie, and that now
+it must be stopped utterly. There seemed to be so little blood left in
+the pale, battered body! She did see how in the intense cold it had
+coagulated over the wounds, checking its own flow. But she did not mean
+for him to lose another precious drop. And then it was that Gloria's
+hands achieved the first really important work they had ever done in her
+life. She tore bits away from her own under-garments and made soft pads
+over each wound; with their butcher-knife she cut a long strip from a
+blanket. This she wound about his limp body, making a long, tight
+bandage. All this time he had not moved; she had to bend close to be
+sure that he still breathed. She got snow and wiped his face clean of
+blood, touching the closed eyelids gently.
+
+When still the eyes remained shut and he looked like one already dead,
+she longed wildly for some stimulant. There was coffee; she would make
+hot coffee do. She got the coffee-pot among the coals, filled it with
+snow to melt, recklessly poured coffee into it. Then, while she awaited
+the slow heating, she returned to him and for the first time saw how wet
+his boots were.
+
+She got the boots off and felt his feet; she stooped over them until
+for an instant she laid her cheek against a bare foot. It was like ice.
+She recalled how he had ministered to her. She heated a blanket and
+wrapped it about his feet and ankles. She heated other blankets and put
+them about him. The canvas at the cave's mouth had been torn down; she
+got it back into place to make it warmer for him. She put fresh wood on
+the fire. She hastened the coffee boiling all that she could by placing
+bits of dry wood close all about the pot.
+
+She knelt at King's side; she got an arm under his shoulders and managed
+to lift him a little; she rolled up a blanket and put it under his head.
+Then she brought the cup of black coffee and with a spoon got some of it
+between his teeth. She spilled more than went into his mouth but she was
+rewarded by seeing the throat muscles contract as involuntarily he
+swallowed. Thus, patient and determined and very, very gentle with him,
+she got several spoonfuls of coffee down him. Thereafter she let him lie
+back again while she sought to plan cool-thoughtedly just how she must
+care for him, just what she could do for him. She knew little of nursing
+and yet knew instinctively that his condition was precarious, that he
+must be kept warm and still, that what strength remained in him must be
+saved by proper nourishment. _Proper nourishment_!
+
+There were scraps of food left; Brodie and his men, in their gold fever,
+had not so much as thought to gather up the few bits of scanty
+provisions. She began taking careful stock; she found a scrap of bread
+that had been knocked to the floor and kicked aside; she picked it up
+and, carrying a torch with her, began seeking any other fallen morsels.
+In this search she came once to the hole in the floor through which
+Brodie and the others had gone down into Gus Ingle's treasure-chamber.
+And at its side she found something which at this moment was a thousand
+times more precious in her staring eyes than if it had been so much
+solid gold. It was a great hunk of fresh meat. Instantly she knew how it
+had come here. King had killed his bear! That was why he had returned
+to-night. He had brought it here; had missed her; had dropped it here.
+And then? She understood now, too, how he had come so unexpectedly into
+the lowest cave. He had gone down through this hole and had known a
+passage-way which led on down. She stood by the hole, bending over it,
+listening, wondering if any man stirred down there. But that was but for
+a moment. She caught up the bear meat, carrying it in both arms, and
+hurried back to her fire.
+
+Though she knew little more of cookery than of nursing, she set about
+the very sensible task of making a strong broth. The proper nourishment
+that had seemed so impossible a moment ago was now ready at hand.
+
+"God is good," she whispered, a sudden new gush of love and reverence in
+her heart. "He will help me now."
+
+For herself, since her own strength must be kept up, she cooked a strip
+of the meat on the coals. Then she went to King and for a long time sat
+at his side, her eyes upon his white face, her hand clasping his. Again
+and again she stooped and laid her cheek against the strong but now lax
+fingers; once she put her lips to his forehead; when she sat back her
+eyes were wet and the slow tears welled up and trickled unnoticed down
+her cheeks. But they were tears which left the heart sweetened, tears of
+tenderness, of gratitude, of sympathy and love.
+
+As the night wore on, since she was determined that King should not be
+chilled, her fire consumed a great part of the wood. More wood must be
+brought; to-night or in the morning. She went to the canvas flap and
+looked out. There were clouds, but also there were wide rifts through
+which the stars blazed in all of that glorious crystalline beauty of the
+stars of the winter Sierra. While she stood looking out the moon, almost
+at the full, gilded a cloud edge, and after a moment broke through like
+an augury of joy. Stars and moon made the wilderness over into a land of
+fairy; at ten million points the snow caught the light, flashing it back
+as though the white robe spread over the solitudes were sewn with gems.
+Never had the world looked so white as now with a rare light shining
+upon its smooth purity; it was clean and fresh, gloriously spotless.
+Where black shadows lay they but accentuated the whiteness across which
+they fell.
+
+Out of this sleeping, enchanted land, rising above it, sweeping across
+it, a low voice like a whisper came to her, a whisper in her ears that
+became a song in her heart. The snow that had, clung to the pines,
+muting their needles and stilling their branches, had dropped on during
+the day. Now the night wind which drove the clouds lingered through the
+pine tops and set them swaying gently in the vast, harmonic rhythm which
+is like the surging of a distant ocean. The everlasting whisper of the
+pines, that ancient hushed voice which through the countless centuries
+has never been still save when briefly silenced by the snow; which had
+borne its message to Gloria when on that first day she went with Mark
+King into the mountains; which many a time had mingled with her fancies,
+tingeing them, leading her to dream of another life than that of city
+streets; which now, suddenly, set chords vibrating softly in her own
+bosom. All these days it had been stilled; had it called her ears would
+have been deaf to it. But now insistently it bore a message to her, such
+a message as from now on she would hear in the quiet voices of her
+little camp-fire. To her, attuned by those varying emotions which
+latterly had had their wills with her, it was the ancient call; the
+summons back to the real things of his, to the bigness and the true
+meaning of life. Rising in response to it, awakening in her own breast,
+were the old human, instinctive influences, sprouting seeds in the blood
+of her forbears. It was the eternal call of the mother earth that one
+like Gloria must hear and hearken to and understand before she could set
+firm feet upon the ashes of a vanquished self to rise to the true things
+of womanhood. It was the
+
+  "... one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated--so:
+  Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
+  Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"
+
+Gloria understood. In her heart, lifting her eyes from the white glory
+of the earth to the bright glory of the sky, she thanked God that she
+understood.
+
+Benny and the Italian were still alive and might be near? That did not
+in any way affect the fact that there must be wood brought for King's
+fire. She turned back for the rifle and the rope. She saw that King had
+not stirred; that he seemed plunged in a deep, quiet sleep. She stood
+over him, looking down at him with her love for him softening her eyes.
+He was going to get well--_if she did her part_. And her part was so
+clearly indicated; to give him broth and to keep his fire going. She did
+not hesitate and she was not afraid as she went down the cliffs. She
+meant to be Mark King's mate; she meant to be worthy of being his mate.
+He had not hesitated, he had not been afraid, when one man against five
+he dropped down into the lowest cave. She, like him, was of pioneer
+stock. She remembered that impressive monument to pioneer fortitude
+which stands in the mountains where the highway runs by Donner Lake; as
+in a vision she saw the little group that crowns the rugged pile. The
+woman, the pioneer mother, holding her baby to her breast, pressing on
+with her own mate, looking fearlessly ahead, daring what might come, not
+lagging behind the man, rather ready to lead the way should he falter.
+It was a glorious thing to have blood like that in her veins; it was the
+finest thing in the world to be a woman like that woman.
+
+She stepped down into the packed snow at the base of the cliffs. Here
+she stood looking up and down the gorge for any sign of Benny or of the
+Italian or of any other of Brodie's crowd who might be alive and astir.
+But she saw no one; even Gratton's body, where it had been tumbled out
+into the snow, was hidden. She heard the deep, quiet breathing of the
+pines; the canon stream rushed and gurgled and babbled, shouting as it
+leaped over fails, flinging spray which the moonlight and starlight made
+over into jewels.
+
+Gloria worked at her fuel-gathering, working in the snow until her hands
+and feet were nearly frozen. But her heart was warm. Though she made
+haste and was ever watchful and on the alert, her mind filled with such
+thoughts as had never come trooping into it before. Fragmentary, they
+were like bright bits spinning about a common centre. She looked up at
+the wide sky and it was borne in upon her that the universe was mighty
+and wonderful and infinite; she looked into her own heart and saw where
+she had been small and silly and finite. She saw that the snow-covered
+ridges stretching endlessly were like a concrete symbol of that infinity
+which extended above and about her; that they were clothed in beauty.
+She knew that when Mark King was made whole again and had forgiven her
+and they stood together, hand locked in hand, she would have no fear any
+more for his mountains, but rather a great, abiding love. She saw that
+her life had been empty; that only love could fill it, love and service
+such as she was rendering to-night. Pretty clothes, dress suits, did not
+matter, and strong, loyal hearts did matter. To-night she would rather
+have Mark King hold her in his arms and say "I love you" than to have
+all of the red gold in all of the world.
+
+Three times that night she made the trip up and down the cliffs,
+bringing wood. At the end, though near exhaustion, she sank down by the
+fire for but a few minutes. The bear meat was boiling and bubbling; she
+poured off a little of the broth, cooled it, and then, as she had given
+King the coffee, she forced some of the strong soup between his teeth.
+She touched his cheek and dared hope that it was not so icy cold; she
+chafed his feet and wrapped them again in a not blanket. And then, with
+all of her covers given to him, she drew a coat about her shoulders and
+sat down at his side, on the edge of his blankets. And here, throughout
+the night, she sat, dozing and waking, rising again and again to keep
+the fire burning.
+
+She started up to find it full day; she had been asleep, her head
+against his knee. The fire was dying down; she jumped up and replenished
+it, setting the broth back among the coals. King lay as he had lain last
+night; his continued coma was like a profound quiet sleep. He was very
+pale, and yet certainly not paler than when she had first looked upon
+his blood-smeared face.
+
+She went to the canvas screen and looked out. The sun was shining. And
+oh, the glory of the sun after these long dark days! The sky was a deep,
+serene, perfect blue. The snow shone and glittered and sparkled
+everywhere. Down in the gorge she saw a little bird in quick flight. It
+skimmed the water; it Lighted on a rock in the spray; it put back its
+head and seemed to be bursting with a joy of song. A water-ouzel! A
+friend from out a happy past----To Gloria it seemed that the world was
+full of promise.
+
+All day long she ministered to King, going back and forth tirelessly,
+since love and hope inspired every step she made. None of Brodie's men
+had come; she felt a strange confidence that they would not come. They
+were afraid of King as jackals are afraid of a lion; further, they did
+not know that he was wounded. She thought little of them, having much
+else to think of. She wound King's watch, guessing at the time; she
+judged it sensible to force a little nourishment upon him at regular
+intervals and brought him his broth every two hours.
+
+At a little before noon Gloria, stooping over the fire, started erect
+and whirled about. King's eyes were open! She ran to him, dropping on
+her knees beside him, catching up his hand, whispering:
+
+"Mark! Oh, Mark--thank God!"
+
+He looked at her strangely. There was a puzzled, bewildered expression
+in his eyes. He strove to move and again looked at her with that strange
+bewilderment. She saw his lips move--he wanted to say something, to ask
+something and, deserted now by all of that magnificent strength on which
+he had always leaned, was as weak as a baby.
+
+"Don't try to talk, Mark," she cried softly. "Please; not yet. You are
+better; everything is all right."
+
+She gave his hand a last squeeze and hurried back to the fire; his eyes,
+still shadow-filled, followed her curiously. She came back to him with
+cup and spoon. This he could understand; he opened his lips for the
+spoon, he accepted what she gave him and when she had finished lay
+looking up at her wonderingly.
+
+"You mustn't talk, Mark," she commanded him gently as, again, she knelt
+by him. "You are getting so much stronger! I'll tell you everything. It
+was last night; you have been unconscious ever since. None of the other
+men have been near; I haven't even seen one of them."
+
+She saw his eyes clear.
+
+"Mark," she whispered, "we are safe here because--because you are so
+wonderful! You were like a god--the bravest, noblest, best man in, all
+the world! You came in time; you saved me, Mark; they had not put hand
+upon me. And I am well and strong now; I am going to take care of you;
+you must just lie still and get well--_Oh, Mark_----"
+
+His eyes closed again; he seemed very faint, very weary. Hushed, she sat
+tense, her eyes never moving from his face. After a long time he opened
+his eyes again; he tried again to speak; when the words did not come he
+managed a strange, shadowy smile with his bloodless lips and in another
+moment had sunk again into that heavy sleep that was so like death.
+
+When next, two hours later, she again brought his broth, he stirred at
+her touch and awoke. This time his eyes cleared swiftly; he remembered
+the other awakening and her words. He looked at her long and searchingly
+and she understood what lay back of that look; he was wondering how she
+managed, how she endured to care for them both, how without his active
+aid she withstood hardship. And this time she smiled at him.
+
+"I have been dining sumptuously on bear steaks," she told him lightly.
+"And I have slept and kept warm. There has been no one near. And the
+days are fine again. It was clear last night; the sun has been shining
+all day. Now, when you've had your own lunch, I'll tell you anything you
+want to know. Only you must not try to talk yet, Mark; not until
+to-morrow. I want you strong and well again, you know; it's lonesome
+without you."
+
+She gave him, for the first time, a whole cup of broth, glorying in the
+certainty that already he was stronger. But even yet his weakness was so
+great that, before she had spoken a dozen sentences, he was asleep
+again. Clearly, even to Gloria, if but a little more blood had ebbed
+out of the wounded side, he would never have awakened; clearly to
+Gloria, triumphant, it had been she who had held him back from death.
+She, Gloria King, alone, had fought the great grim battle; hers was the
+victory. For at last she knew with her brain, as all along she had known
+in her heart, that it was to be victory.
+
+So the hours passed. For the most part King slept, lapsing into the deep
+stupor of a drugged man. But at times he stirred restlessly; with slowly
+returning strength his wounds pained him; in his sleep he muttered;
+Gloria, watching him, winced as she saw his brow contract and saw how he
+tried to shift his body as though to pull away from something that hurt
+him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+King was awake. Awakening, he tried to move. His utter weakness, like a
+great weight bearing down upon him, held him powerless. But his mind,
+slowly freeing itself from the shadows of sleep, was suddenly very
+clear. He could turn his head a little. It was late afternoon; outside
+the sun was still shining, for a patch of light lay at the side of the
+canvas flap. At first he did not see Gloria; but his eyes quested until
+at last they found her. She lay by the fire, her head upon her arm,
+sleeping. The little huddled body looked weary beyond expression.
+
+For a long time his haggard eyes remained with her. She lay on the
+rocks, without a blanket. His hand moved weakly; there were blankets
+under him, blankets covering him; his feet were wrapped in a blanket. He
+remembered that a long, long time ago she had said to him: "It was last
+night." All this long, long time he had had all the blankets.... He
+looked again at Gloria, at the fire; he saw wood piled near by. For many
+minutes he puzzled the matter; in the end it was obvious, even to a man
+as sick as King, that she must have gone for wood. Perhaps more than
+once. He closed his eyes and lay very still. He knew now that he had
+been desperately hurt; that, wounded, his fight with Brodie had brought
+him very near a weakness from blood loss that was pale twin to death.
+And yet he was alive and warm; he had had broth and blankets and the
+fire had been kept blazing. He managed to slip a hand inside his shirt;
+before his fingers found it he knew that the bandage was there. Gloria
+had done all this ... Gloria, whom he had struck ...
+
+Ever since that blow, the one act of his life which he would have given
+so much to have undone, he had been ashamed. He had rejoiced in his
+battle with the men who had threatened Gloria with worse than death,
+rejoiced that in some way he might make reparation. But now, beginning
+to understand all that Gloria had done for him, how great were the
+sacrifices she had made for him, lying unconscious of all she did, it
+seemed to him that the thing that he had done was a very small thing set
+in the scales against her own acts. He wanted to get up and go to her;
+to put his blankets about her; to play the man's part and protect and
+shelter. But he could not so much as raise his voice to call her to
+him.... Ever since that blow, upbraiding himself, he had said: "She was
+only a little, terrified girl and you were a brute to her." And now he
+thought wonderingly: "After that, she has worked for you, has nursed
+you, has saved the worthless life in you when she should have let you
+die." Again his eyes flew open; now they clung to her with a strange
+look in them, born of many emotions.
+
+Gloria, as though she felt his eyes upon her, stirred, rose, pushed the
+hair back from her eyes and came quickly to him. And as she came, she
+smiled. She went down on her knees beside him and took his hand in her
+two and held it tight. She had never seen in his eyes a look like the
+one now burning in them. She could not understand its mute message, but
+she spoke softly:
+
+"Everything is all right, Mark. And you are better every time you wake."
+
+His lips strove to frame words. She bent close to them and heard his
+wondering whisper:
+
+"Every--thing--all right?"
+
+"Yes, thank God," she whispered back to him. "Everything in all the
+wide, wide world!"
+
+No, he could not understand that. She saw perplexity in his eyes now.
+But she did not mean to let him talk yet and it was time for broth
+again. But again he was whispering:
+
+"Blankets--yours----"
+
+"Yes, Mark. After you have had your nourishment. When I need them."
+
+But when he had taken his cup of hot broth he slipped off to sleep again
+and Gloria, smiling a tender smile, sat by her fire watching him as a
+mother watches a sick baby who, the doctor has just told her, will live.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXII_
+
+
+That night Gloria, listening now to King's breathing, now to the
+crackling of her fire, grew restless, restless. Again and again she went
+to look out into the quiet moonlight night, across the glittering
+expanses of pure white glistening snow. It was the restlessness of one
+who had taken a giant determination; who but awaited impatiently for the
+time to do what she was bent upon doing. In her heart was still that
+new-born gladness; in her bosom there was still something singing like
+the liquid voice of a bird. It had sung for the first time when first
+she had ministered to King, when she had understood what love's service
+was, when she had gone down the cliffs for firewood, when, because of
+her tireless nursing, she had been rewarded by his opening eyes; as the
+hours wore on it had grown into a chant triumphant. She, Gloria, had
+lived to do something that was noble and unselfish and brave; she,
+Gloria, had been unafraid and unswerving; she had saved a man's life.
+And that life was Mark King's! She had made amends; she had set her feet
+unfalteringly in a new trail; throughout her being she was aglow with
+the consciousness of one who had gladly done love's labour.
+
+Now she waited only for the hour when again King must have his broth.
+She gave it to him, smiled at him, commanded him to go back to sleep,
+promising to talk with him in the morning. And then, when again he
+breathed with the quiet regularity of one sleeping, she went eagerly
+about her task.
+
+Now, at her hour of need, she was buoyed up by a great and wonderful
+confidence that she could not fail. Thus far she had accomplished each
+duty as it had stood before her, and from successes achieved grew the
+new faith that in to-night's task, perhaps the supreme and final labour,
+she would succeed again. They must have more meat; to-morrow or the next
+day, at latest, for the steaks which she had eaten and the strong broths
+to maintain and rebuild strength in. King had cut deeply into their
+supply. And she knew Mark King well enough to be very certain that, the
+moment he could summon strength enough to command his tottering body to
+stand on two legs, he would go. Now, while he was still too weak to
+observe greatly what went on about him and while he slept most of the
+time, it was for her to be before him. Fortunately--and were not all
+omens bright with hope?--it had not snowed since King made his kill; she
+could follow in the trail he had made and it would lead her unerringly
+to the spot where he had left the rest of the meat. She had everything
+ready, rifle, small packet of food, knife, even matches and strips torn
+from the sack for her feet. Down in the gorge, clutching her rifle, she
+stood looking, listening. Always the thought of Benny and the other man
+was on the rim of her consciousness, and fear is a basic and elemental
+emotion. But, though the moon set forth all details in clear relief
+against the snow, there was no man in sight, and, in the intense
+determination possessing her, she throttled down all fear-thoughts. She
+clung with a deep fervour to the thoughts that she and Mark King had put
+disaster behind them, that ahead lay hope and happiness, that God was
+with her and about her, and that all danger was gone. Down the canon she
+saw the broken, uneven snow where Brodie and his men had left their
+tracks, irregular trails up which Gratton had come, down which Benny and
+the Italian had fled. Upward along the gorge was one deep, straight
+path, wide and hard packed, the track of Mark King's crude snow-shoes.
+Into this she stepped, thinking even at the time how even Mark King's
+trail was characteristic of him and different from that of the other
+men; it looked purposeful and confident and, like the man himself,
+driving straight on. There was a sense of comfort in treading where he
+had trodden before her.
+
+The world slept, but its quiet breathing she seemed to hear as the air
+drew through the pines. She turned up the gorge, a tiny dark figure in
+an immense white wilderness. The stars shone and she loved them; they
+were like bright companionable candles. The moon shed its soft lustre
+and she loved it; it thrust shadows back and drove out the dark. The
+night was all quiet splendour and peace and serenity. The snow was
+crisp, crunching underfoot; sunny days had thawed, clear, cold nights
+had frozen, and the crust had begun to form. Before she had gone a dozen
+feet she discovered this and its importance to her; where King's weight
+on the snow-shoes, along a twice-travelled trail, had packed the snow
+and where now the sun and cold had done their work, there was a crust
+which upbore her slight weight; she could walk swiftly; there was to be
+no more floundering. She could run!
+
+And run she did, when she had crested the first ridge and had started
+down the far side. It was like flying! The crisp air cut her glowing
+cheeks; her blood leaped along her veins; she breathed deeply, a great,
+uplifting elation bore her along. Love--God is love--smoothed the way
+before her; the stars ran with her, the great blazing stars to which
+again and again she lifted her eyes. They spoke to her; they came close
+to her; when she stopped, resting, they were all about her, bending
+down, and she was lifted up among them. Fervour and the ecstasy of the
+hour in which was doing to the uttermost, forgetful of pettiness and
+selfishness and cowardice--she prayed mutely that she was done with them
+for ever, that never again would she be such a woman as Gratton had been
+a man--made her over into a radiant, glorious Gloria. The night stamped
+itself upon her for all time; out of the night she drew, as one draws
+air into his lungs, a new faith that was akin to the man's whom she
+served. For one cannot be alone with the stars and be unmoved by them;
+they are serene with eternity, refulgent with the perfect beauty of a
+perfect creation, eloquent to the heart of man and woman of true values.
+Under the fields of their vastitude, confronted by their infinity,
+Gloria, like thousands before, understood that man in fevered times is
+prone to turn to false gods. Gus Ingle's gold--her own gold, one
+day--was a thing to smile at. Or, at best, not a thing to expend wildly
+for gowns and gowns and shoes and stockings and limousines; to-night
+Gloria felt that she had had her fill of vanities like those, that she
+was done with them; that if, for every moan and agony and slow death and
+thought of envy Gus Ingle's gold had brought into the world, she could
+create a smile here and a hope fulfilled there and a glow yonder, she
+would ask nothing else of the yellow dirt. For dirt or rock or dross it
+was, and that was as clear as starlight. If her hand but lay in the hand
+of Mark King, what did gold matter? Or dresses--or what people thought
+or said of her or him? A strange little smile touched her lips.
+
+"I love you," she whispered, as though Mark were with her--as in her
+soul he was.
+
+Had there not been a great, glowing love in her heart she would have
+been afraid. But there was no room for fear. Had she not felt that he
+was with her and that God was with her she must have felt an
+unutterable, dreary loneliness; but she was upborne at every step and
+gloried in every exertion.
+
+And exertion, until she came close to the limits of endurance, was to be
+hers that white night; hers the knowledge of supreme endeavour. On and
+on she went across the immense glistening smooth fields through which
+the trail ahead was the only scar, through groves of black pines
+whispering, whispering, whispering, down into shadow-filled canons, out
+into the open again, up and down and on and on, a tiny dot upon the
+endless wastes. Fatigue came upon her suddenly, when she had forgotten
+to save her strength and had gone over-fast. She rested, lying on her
+back, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes, she saw the stars, she rose
+and went on. She had gone miles; how many she could not guess. Always,
+after for a little while she had dropped down wearily, she rose again
+and went on; she learned that, though beaten down, one might rise again.
+That was Mark King's way; it would be her way. Despite the rags about
+her boots her feet were soon dangerously cold. She passed into the
+embrace of a forest of black trees casting blacker shadows. Their
+branches seemed motionless, but they sang to her with hushed voices. And
+always there was the trail King had made, leading her on; where he had
+gone before, she followed.
+
+Where he had made slow progress, seeking game and breaking trail, she
+went swiftly on the packed snow. So, in the full splendour of the moon,
+she came at last to the final ridge, whence, looking down into the
+canon, she saw the end of her trail: hanging from a bent pine sapling
+was what she knew must be his bear. Down the steep slope she went, half
+sliding, half rolling. In the bed of the ravine she landed softly in the
+drift; here she rested, sitting in a nest of snow. And before she had
+stirred to begin the last short span of her journey, there came suddenly
+out of the silence a strange, quivering cry, bursting out upon her; a
+sobbing, throbbing scream.
+
+"A woman!" cried Gloria, aghast.
+
+A woman in an agony of terror, she thought. Or a lost soul, the
+wandering spirit of the dead, or God knew what impossible thing. Sudden
+terror leaped out upon her, striking like a knife into her heart. Fear,
+banished all this time, surprised her and clutched at her throat and
+paralysed her muscles. Blind panic gripped her. Then came the piercing
+scream again, and with it enlightenment, and Gloria sank back, seeming
+to melt into the snow about her. Yonder, just upon the next ridge where
+the moonlight carved in fine details the outline of a big bare boulder,
+stood the thing that had screamed; in this light its great body was
+weirdly magnified, so that the entire length of seven or eight feet
+appeared to Gloria's frightened eyes twice that. Long-bodied and lithe,
+small-headed and merciless, steel-muscled and chisel-clawed, the big cat
+in silhouette twitched its restless tail back and forth nervously, and
+from snarling jaws sent forth its almost human call to cut across vast,
+still distances.
+
+Gloria drew back and back where she crouched, her body pressed into the
+snow-bank, in a panicky desire to hide. The big cat had smelled the
+meat, she guessed swiftly. When it leaped upward, seeking to snatch down
+the swinging weight, or clambered up the pine, then she must spring up
+and run, run as she had never run in her life, away from this terrible,
+murderous thing, back to King. Unconscious of cold and wet, she cowered
+and waited, scarce breathing. She saw how the big beast put up its head
+and sniffed; did it in reality smell the meat? Or had it sensed her
+presence?
+
+For what seemed a very long time the gaunt-bodied animal stood as still
+as the rock beneath it; then, silent and swift, it turned and, like a
+cat at home leaping down from a table, dropped into the shadows at the
+base of the rock, and was lost to Gloria's sight in a little hollow. She
+waited, her eyes staring.
+
+Again, all of a sudden, she saw it. Moving with the stealthy caution
+which is its birthright, it appeared fleetingly a score of feet lower on
+the steep slope, the body and its shadow, a twin for stealthy silence,
+gone in a flash, reappearing once more still lower on the slope and just
+beyond the pine sapling. It was coming on. Fascinated, Gloria sat like
+stone, with never a thought of the rifle lying across her knees.
+
+The mountain-lion leaped downward softly from stage to stage of the
+canon-side, paused under the pine, lifted its head, and sent forth again
+its hunger-cry. All this time Gloria sat breathless; the
+fear-fascination still held her powerless. She watched the animal crouch
+and gather its strength and hurl its lean body upward. The lion fell
+back, the ripping claws having missed the meat by some two or three
+feet, and Gloria heard the low, rumbling growl. Again it sprang; again
+it missed. And then, for a weary time of silence it sat still, its head
+back, its eyes on the desired meal. In the moonlight Gloria saw the
+glistening saliva from the half-parted jaws.
+
+But in the end feline craft found the way, and the cat set its paws
+against the tree trunk, and began to climb. Limbs broke under the two
+hundred pounds of weight; the bark was torn under slipping paws, but
+upward the sinuous body writhed. Swiftly now it would come to King's
+kill.
+
+King's! Gloria started; this was Mark's kill: he had stalked it, he had
+ploughed many miles through deep snow to get it. To get it for her as
+well as for him. To keep the life in her--now, without it, King would
+die. And now the lion was going to take it, while she watched and did
+nothing!
+
+"Oh, God, help me!" She sprang to her feet, she jerked up her rifle and
+fired at the black bulk crawling upward in the pine. "It shall not have
+Mark's meat! It shall not!"
+
+At the first shot the mountain-lion dropped through crashing branches.
+She had shot it--she had driven a bullet through its heart. God had
+heard her. That was her first wild thought. But in a flash she saw that
+it was on its feet again, and that with red mouth snarling it had swung
+about, facing her; she saw the cruel white teeth, wet and glistening.
+
+Incoherently Gloria cried out, again sick and shaken with terror. In
+another moment she would have the lean powerful body leaping upon her.
+She fired again and again, taking no time for aim, as fast as she could
+work the lever and pull the trigger; she was trembling so that it was
+all that she could do to hold the gun at all. She prayed and called on
+Mark and fired, all at once.
+
+Never did bullets fly wider of the mark, but never did the roar of
+exploding shells do better service. The lion, though ravenous, was not
+yet starved to the degree to whip it to the supreme desperation of
+attacking a human being and defying a rifle; it whirled and went
+flashing across the snow, seeking the shadows, gone in the drifts,
+vanishing.
+
+Gloria gasped, stared after its wild flight a paralysed moment and then
+ran to the tree where the bear hung. She was shaking like a leaf in a
+storm; she was still terrified, filled with horror at the thought that
+at any second the lean body might come flashing back upon her. But
+through the emotions storming through her there lived on that one
+determination that would live while she lived: that was Mark's meat and
+she was going to save it for him. She began climbing the young pine; she
+fought wildly to get up into its branches; she was handicapped by the
+rifle which she clung to desperately. She got the gun in a crotch above
+her head; she pulled herself upward; she slipped, and tore the skin of
+hands and arms; but hastening frantically she climbed up and up. She got
+the rifle into her hands again, nearly dropped it, thrust it above her,
+jammed it into a fork of a limb and kept on climbing. At last she was
+where she could reach out and touch the swinging carcass. With King's
+keen-edged butcher knife she hacked and cut at the frozen meat, panting
+with every effort. The task seemed endless; the bear swung away from
+her; a branch broke under her foot and she almost fell; she was sobbing
+aloud brokenly before it was done, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
+But at last there was the thud of the falling meat; below her it lay on
+the snow crust. In wild haste she snatched her rifle; holding it in one
+hand, afraid to let it slip out of her grasp for a moment, casting a
+last fearful look in the direction whither the lion had gone, she began
+slipping down. And in another moment, with the precious burden caught up
+with the gun in her arms, she was running back up the ridge, her feet in
+King's trail. _The home trail_!
+
+She looked behind her at every step, picturing the snarling cat
+springing out from every shadow, starting upward from every drift and
+snow-bank. But she clutched her meat tight and struggled on up the
+slope.
+
+Her whole body was shaking; she closed her eyes, overcome with
+faintness. There was a faint wind stirring and it cut like a knife,
+probing through her garments where they were damp. She shivered and
+struggled on and on. She felt that she could run all night without
+stopping. She stumbled and fell and arose, panting and sobbing, and ran
+on. She no longer looked behind her: she had fallen when she did that.
+Again and again from far behind her came the clear, merciless scream of
+the mountain-lion. Time passed; half-hour or hour or two hours, she had
+little idea. Time itself was a nightmare of running, falling, rising,
+staggering, running again until the blood pounded in her temples,
+drummed in her ears. The cry came again, as near as before--nearer?
+Throughout the night as she struggled on she could always fancy the
+stealthy, silent feet following her, keeping time with her own. Cautious
+now, would its caution slowly subside as its hunger grew and as she
+always fled from it? The thought came to her that such a menace would
+follow one day after day; that it would wait and wait; that in the end
+it knew its time would come when sleep or exhaustion broke down its
+prey's guard. Then it would leap and strike.
+
+Her rifle had grown a heart-breaking weight, until it seemed that it
+would drag her arms from their sockets to hold it up; the pack of meat
+on her back was like lead.
+
+She wondered if King had missed her; if he were awake and wondering at
+her absence. She wondered if he would miss her soon; how soon? At the
+first glint of dawn? Would he begin to see, that she was at least, and
+at last, trying? Well, she had tried; though she died, still she had
+tried. She was cold to the bone; her teeth chattered, her body quaked.
+Yet she kept on. She fell; she lay with the tears of exhaustion rolling
+down her face; she struggled to get to her feet; she fell again. But
+always she rose and always she kept on. And so, in the fulness of time,
+after long frightful, hellish hours, Sec.he came to the last terror of the
+night.
+
+The new day was bright on the mountain tops when she felt at first a
+dull sort of surprise and then a sudden, stimulating gladness, noting
+the familiar look of the ridge ahead. Yonder the cave would be. The cave
+and King, success and rest. She straightened up a little, brushing her
+hand across her straining eyes, making sure that she was right. She
+heard the insistent scream behind her, but now she did not heed it, for
+in front of her, stock-still in the trail, was a man. It was Benny.
+
+To-night she had thrilled to an ecstasy descending from the stars,
+welling up in her own heart, and she had shivered with fear and had
+dropped with weariness akin to despair. Now suddenly all emotions were
+upgathered into searing anger. Her thought was: "He will take the meat
+from me! The meat I have brought for Mark." She grew rigid in her
+tracks. She jerked up her rifle in front of her; her tired eyes
+hardened. She had gone to the limits of endurance in a labour of love;
+she had succeeded; and now she would fight for what she had brought
+back.
+
+Then she noted that Benny had not seen her. Though he was in full view
+on the ridge, he had had no eyes for her. He was stooping. She saw that
+he had a small pack on his back; food, no doubt. On the ground by him
+was a second pack, something in a crash sack; Benny was struggling to
+lift it to his shoulders. It must be very heavy. Gloria drew back
+hastily, glancing about her, found the only hiding-place offered, and
+slipped behind the big rock.
+
+Presently Benny came on. She heard him from a distance; he was talking
+to himself excitedly, jabbering broken fragments of sentences, twice
+breaking into his hideous dry cackle of laughter. She shivered; his
+utterances sounded mad.
+
+And mad they were. Perhaps his drug had run out; certainly for a nervous
+man there had been ample cause for jangling nerves. He jabbered
+constantly, his mutterings at last coming to her in jumbled words as
+Benny drew on.
+
+He was talking about "gold," and he chuckled. He mentioned names,
+Brodie's and Jarrold's and Gratton's and another name, and he chuckled
+again. Gloria peered cautiously from the shelter of her rock. He was
+very near now, struggling with the smaller pack and his rifle and the
+heavy bundle in his sack. She thought that he was going to pass without
+seeing her. But just as he passed abreast of her hiding-place something
+prompted Benny to jerk up his head. He saw her and stopped suddenly; she
+saw his eyes. And she knew on the instant that if the man were not stark
+mad, at least he was not entirely sane. She lifted her rifle, cold all
+over; if he came another step nearer she would shoot....
+
+"It's mine!" Benny shrieked at her. "Mine, I tell you!"
+
+He broke into a run, passing her, leaving the trail, floundering down
+the ridge the shortest way. His rifle encumbered him; she saw it fall
+into the snow, while Benny, clutching his gunny-sack in both arms,
+stumbled on. He fell; he rose, shrieking curses. She watched,
+fascinated. The pack on his back slipped around in front of him; Benny
+tore at it and cursed it and hurled it from him. Still hugging his gold
+he was gone, far down the steep slope. Gloria shuddered and stepped back
+into her own trail. She could hear Benny cursing faintly. Like an echo
+came another cry across the ridges; the cry of a starving cat.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter XXXIII_
+
+
+Mark King awakened to a sensation of piercing cold. In his weakened
+condition the chill struck deep, the pain of it sore in his wound. He
+moved a little to draw his blankets closer about him and, as an awaking
+impression, found that his strength, even though slowly, was surely
+returning to him. He was still terribly weak, but, thank God--and
+Gloria!--that hideous faintness in which he had been unable to stir hand
+or foot or to speak above a whisper had passed. He filled his lungs with
+a deep and grateful breath of satisfaction. In a day or two he would be
+able to carry on again, to do his part.
+
+He turned his head, lifting it a trifle; already he had thought of
+Gloria, and now he sought her. The fire had burned down to a handful of
+glowing coals; Gloria, then, must be asleep. For that, too, he was
+grateful. He had but faint remembrance and dim knowledge of what tasks
+must have fallen to her lot, but his mind, active from the moment his
+eyes flew open, was quick to understand that the burdens had fallen upon
+her shoulders and that she must have been in dire need of rest and
+sleep.
+
+He could not see her anywhere; no doubt she lay in the shadowy dark
+beyond the dying fire. He lay back, staring up into the gloom above
+him. It was thinning; day was coming or had come already. A day with
+sunshine! They could go out on the crust by the time that he was able to
+be about----
+
+Then he remembered the blankets! Last night he had had all of them,
+Gloria's as well as his own. He had wanted to make her take her covers
+and she had put him off, and he had gone to sleep, forgetting! He
+stirred again, hastily, his hands groping, even his feet moving. He had
+them yet, his and hers. And she had slept through the cold night with no
+covering while he, never waking until now, had lain warm and
+comfortable. He struggled to turn on his side and got himself raised a
+little despite the pain from the exertion, seeking her. She must be
+frozen----
+
+Gloria was not in the cave. He sank back, sure of that. For she should
+be sleeping close by the fire. Then she had gone down again for wood. He
+frowned and lay staring upward again. Gloria bringing wood while he lay
+here like a confounded log. He grew nervously restive at the thought; it
+was unthinkable that she should do work like that. He saw her in his
+mind, struggling with the unaccustomed labour. And always he saw her as
+he had first seen her, a fragile-looking girl, a girl with sweet little
+hands as soft as rose petals. He remembered her as he had seen her that
+first day, a vision of loveliness in her fluffy pink dress, her skin
+like the skin of a baby, her eyes the soft, tender grey eyes of the girl
+to whom he had given his heart without reservation. The glorious Gloria,
+all slender delicacy, like a little mountain flower, the Gloria for whom
+it had been his duty and his high privilege to labour. He must fight to
+get his strength back, to get on his feet again, to save her from such
+toil as was no woman's work in the world, certainly never the work for a
+girl like Gloria.
+
+He heard a sound at the cave's mouth. Gloria was coming back. He found
+no words with which to greet her, but lay very still, waiting for her to
+come in. An emotion of which he was ashamed and yet which was infinitely
+sweet swept over him: it was so wonderful a thing to have Gloria come to
+him, nurse him, put her hand so tenderly on his. A thrill shot down his
+faintly stirring pulses as already he fancied her stealing softly to his
+side. So he waited and, when she came where he could at last see her,
+watched.
+
+She set her gun down; at first he wondered at that. Poor little Gloria,
+he thought; taking her rifle with her when she went down for wood,
+frightened and yet strong-hearted enough to go in spite of fear. She
+came on, not to him but to the smouldering coals. She had turned toward
+him, but, no doubt, thought him still asleep. He watched her, still
+knowing that presently she would come, awaiting her coming. And again he
+was perplexed; he did not understand why Gloria walked like that. He had
+never seen her walk so before; she had always been so light of foot, so
+graceful--so like a fairy creature, scarcely touching the ground. Now
+her feet dragged; she groped uncertainly; she was like one gone suddenly
+dizzy.
+
+She dropped down by the coals, her face in her hands. The light was bad;
+he could hardly see her now. He heard a sigh that ended in a sob. She
+rose, oh, so wearily. He saw her sway as she walked; she was throwing
+wood on the fire. It caught; a flame flared out; other flames followed
+with their merry crackling and leaping lights. And now he saw Gloria's
+face. It was drawn and haggard; it had been washed with tears; her eyes
+looked enormous and unnaturally bright. He saw her hair; it was in wild
+disarray, a tumble of disorder. He saw that she had sacks wrapped about
+her lagging feet; that her clothes were torn, that her sleeves were
+ragged, that her arms were covered with long scratches! His first
+thought, making his body tense with anger, was that he had not come in
+time to save her from Brodie's hands....
+
+What was Gloria doing? Struggling with something on her back. Something
+which was tied across her shoulders. She got it free; it fell close to
+the fire, played over by the light of the flames. He craned his neck and
+saw; it was a great chunk of bear meat--he could see bits of the hide
+still on it!
+
+He could not understand. Not yet. All that he could do was stare at her
+and wonder and grope confusedly for the explanation. It was clear that
+something was wrong with Gloria; she dropped down by the fire, she
+slumped forward, she lay her face upon her crossed arms. He could see
+the frail body shaking--he could hear her sudden wild sobbing.
+
+The truth came upon him at last, dawning slowly, slowly.
+
+"Gloria!" It was a gasp of more than amazement; consternation was in his
+heart. "_Gloria_!"
+
+She lifted her head and sat up. He saw her great wide-open eyes and the
+tears gushing from them. She fought to control herself, a sob in her
+throat. She rose and came toward him in strange, wildly uncertain steps.
+
+"Gloria! You----"
+
+"Sh, Mark; you mustn't----"
+
+But he couldn't lie still. He lifted himself upon his elbow and looked
+at her with wondering eyes. She stood over him, looking on the verge of
+collapse. Slowly she came down to him, half kneeling, half falling.
+
+"My God," he cried hoarsely. "You went for my bear? _You did it_."
+
+She tried to smile at him, and into his own eyes there broke a sudden
+gush of tears.
+
+"You wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Gloria!" he cried out. "There is no
+girl in all the world could have done that--there is no girl like you."
+
+Her hand was questing his; he caught it and gripped it with all the
+strength in him; he hurt her, and at last, with the pain, her smile
+broke through.
+
+"Gloria----"
+
+"Mark?"
+
+"Can you--not so soon, but some day--forgive me?"
+
+She found only a faint whisper with which to answer him; her eyes were
+as hungry as his.
+
+"Can you forgive, Mark?"
+
+And now, when their eyes clung together as their hands were already
+clinging, each was marvelling that the other could forgive and love one
+who had erred so.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Everlasting Whisper, by Jackson Gregory
+
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