idn't mean for you to start to-night. I just thought--"

"There is no time like the minute," answered the Canadian quietly.
"To-night, you shall be Ba'teese, _oui_, yes. Ba'teese shall be you."

Pulling his knit cap on his head, he went out into the darkness and to
the guardianship of the mill that belonged--to a man who looked like
his Pierre. As for Houston, the next morning found him on the
uncomfortable red cushions of the smoking car as the puffing train
pulled its weary, way through the snowsheds of Crestline Mountain, on
the way over the range. Evening brought him to Denver, and the three
days which followed carried with them the sweaty smell of the
employment offices and the gathering of a new crew. Then, tired,
anxious with an eagerness that he never before had known, he turned
back to the hills.

Before, in the days agone, they had been only mountains, reminders of
an eruptive time in the cooling of the earth,--so many bumpy places
upon a topographical railroad map. But now,--now they were different.
They seemed like home. They were the future. They were the housing
place of the wide spaces where the streams ran through green valleys,
where the sagebrush dotted the plateau plains, and where the world was
a thing with a rim about it; hills soft blue and brown and gray and
burning red in the sunlight, black, crumpled velvet beneath the moon
and stars; hills where the pines grew, where his life awaited him, a
new thing to be remolded nearer to his own desires, and where lived
Ba'tiste, Agnes--and Medaine.

Houston thought of her with a sudden cringing.

In that moment as he stood outside the door of Ba'tiste's cabin, he had
heard himself sealed and delivered to oblivion as far as she was
concerned. He was only an acquaintance--one with a grisly shadow in
his past--and it was best that he remain such. Grudgingly, Barry
admitted the fact to himself, as he sat once more in the red-plush
smoking car, surrounded by heavy-shouldered, sodden-faced men, his new
crew, en route to Empire Lake. It was best. There was Agnes, with her
debt of gratitude to be paid and with her affection for him, which in
its blindness could not discern the fact that it was repaid only as a
sense of duty. There was the fight to be made,--and the past. Houston
shuddered with the thought of it. Things were only as they should be;
grimly he told himself that he had erred in even thinking of happiness
such as comes to other men.