pictures of her swift and
graceful body, her sunny smile, her sweet, grave eyes. He recalled the
first time he saw her on the street in Sibley, and groaned to think how
basely he had planned against her. "She never knew that, thank God!" he
said, fervently.

Then came that unforgetable drive to the ranch, when she put her hand in
his--and on this hour he dwelt long, searching his mind deeply in order
that no grain of its golden store of incident should escape him. His
throat again began to ache with a full sense of the loss he was
inflicting upon himself. "'Tis a lonely trail I'm takin' for your sake,
darlin'," he whispered, "but 'tis all for the best."

Slowly the train creaked and circled up the heights, following the sharp
turnings of the stream, passing small towns which were in effect summer
camps of pleasure-seekers, on and upward into the moist heights where
the grass was yet green and the slopes gay with flowers. A mood of
exaltation came upon the doomed man as he rose. This was the place to
die--up here where the affairs of men sank into insignificance like the
sound of the mills and the rumble of trains. Here the centuries circled
like swallows and the personal was lost in the ocean of silence.

At one of these towns which stood almost at the summit of the pass the
conductor brought a telegram, and Mart seized it with eager, trembling
hands. It was (as he expected) a warning from Bertha. She implored him
to let the mine go and to return by the next train.

He was too nerveless of fingers to put the sheet back within its
envelope, and so thrust it, a crumpled mass, into his pocket. It was as
if her hand was at his shoulder, her voice in his ear, but he did not
falter. To go back now would be but a renewal of his torture. There
could not come a better time to go--to go and leave no suspicion of his
purpose behind him.

Just over the summit, at a bare little station, the train was held for
orders, and Haney, who was again suffocating and almost blind, took
another dose of the mysterious drug, and with its effect returned to a
dim perception of his surroundings. He was able vaguely to recall that a
trail which began just back of the depot mounted the hill towards his
largest mine. A desire to see Williams, his faithful partner, his most
loyal friend, came over him, and, rising to his feet, he painfully crept
down the aisle to the rear of the car and dropped off unnoticed, just as
the conductor's warning cry s