the way; and at Ballard's
"Good dog! Fine old fellow!" he padded along with still graver dignity,
once more catching the step in advance and looking neither to right nor
left.

At another time Ballard might have wondered why the great St. Bernard,
most sagacious of his tribe, should thus attach himself to a stranger
and refuse to be shaken off. But at the moment the young man had a
heartful of other and more insistent queryings. Gained ground with the
loved one is always the lover's most heady cup of intoxication; but the
lees at the bottom of the present cup were sharply tonic, if not bitter.

What was the mystery so evidently enshrouding the tragedies at Elbow
Canyon? That they were tragedies rather than accidents there seemed no
longer any reasonable doubt. But with the doubt removed the mystery
cloud grew instantly thicker and more impenetrable. If the tragedies
were growing out of the fight for the possession of Arcadia Park, what
manner of man could Colonel Craigmiles be to play the kindly, courteous
host at one moment and the backer and instigator of murderers at the
next? And if the charge against the colonel be allowed to stand, it
immediately dragged in a sequent which was clearly inadmissible: the
unavoidable inference being that Elsa Craigmiles was in no uncertain
sense her father's accessory.

Ballard was a man and a lover; and his first definition of love was
unquestioning loyalty. He was prepared to doubt the evidence of his
senses, if need be, but not the perfections of the ideal he had set up
in the inner chamber of his heart, naming it Elsa Craigmiles.

These communings and queryings, leading always into the same
metaphysical labyrinth, brought the young engineer far on the down-river
trail; were still with him when the trail narrowed to a steep one-man
path and began to climb the hogback, with one side buttressed by a low
cliff and the other falling sheer into the Boiling Water on the left. On
this narrow ledge the dog went soberly ahead; and at one of the turns in
the path Ballard came upon him standing solidly across the way and
effectually blocking it.

"What is it, old boy?" was the man's query; and the dog's answer was a
wag of the tail and a low whine. "Go on, old fellow," said Ballard; but
the big St. Bernard merely braced himself and whined again. It was quite
dark on the high ledge, a fringe of scrub pines on the upper side of the
cutting blotting out a fair half of the starlight. Balla