ward 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
t