n found the trail again lower down the valley, and he and
another tireless man headed for the river through a country no horse
could traverse all that day, leaving Seaforth behind them worn-out at
noon. He sat down to wait for Horton considerably disturbed in mind,
and his anxieties would not have been diminished had he known that
Alton was starting for Somasco by the Atlantic express that afternoon.

It was next day when Alton reached the settlement and found the few
women there in a state of excitement, while when he had heard their
story he borrowed the best horse he could find and rode out at a gallop
towards the ranges. He had also spent several days in the bush without
finding any trace of the party when he camped one evening on the edge
of one of the many deep ravines the torrents wear out of the hillsides.
It stretched, a dim shadowy chasm, across his path, and looking down he
could faintly see the firs that clung here and there to the sides of it
loom faintly black through the drifting mist. It was too dark to seek
for a way of descending or round the head of it, and he decided to
remain where he was until the morning. Twenty minutes sufficed to make
his simple camp, and he sat with his back to a cedar-trunk and a can of
green tea beside him, while the shadows crept higher up the hillsides
and night tame down to meet them out of the dimness of the east.

The fire crackled joyously. There was hope in all the smells of
spring, and the stir of life in every growing thing, while the chill
that came down from the white peaks fired the blood like wine; but
Alton sighed as he glanced up at the stars above him and his face was
sombre. There was, it seemed, no possibility of the railroad being
built to Somasco, he could only see disaster in front of him, and knew
that with the hope of prosperity a brighter one had gone. He would be
a poor man, and was a cripple, and--for he had not forgotten his
deficiencies--could have laughed at the folly which had led him to
grasp at that which could never be his. Then his slow, enduring
stubbornness came to his help again as he remembered that there yet
remained to him the fight with Hallam.

"I was a fool. She only wanted to be kind," he said.

Still, he groaned in a fit of passion as the memory of one moment at
midnight in Somasco ranch returned to him, for all his pulses throbbed
feverishly as he felt in fancy the warm white arm steal round his neck.

"I must have dr