reafter the air
softened and filled with swirling snow. Gloria could not see if they
were in an open valley or shut in by canon walls or upon the slope of a
mountain. Nor did she greatly care. She waited until King prepared some
kind of a shelter, and then went wordlessly to it; she felt fir-boughs
under her aching body and was, in pure animal fashion, conscious of
blanket and canvas over her and of a grateful warmth. Through a tangle
of bushes she saw the flicker of a small fire; she smelled coffee; she
drank half of the hot cup which he brought to her. Then she let go her
grip upon a wretched world and passed like a child into a heavy sleep.

By his fire of little cheer Mark King sat, with his canvas drawn over
his slumping shoulders, his head down, his heart as black as the night,
his soul possessed by ravaging blue demons. At the end of a fool's day
came a fool's night. He should have paid heed to the first threat of a
thin film across the sky; he should have turned back with Gloria the
first thing this morning; he should have done anything in the world save
exactly what he had done. He should not have married her; he should not
have brought her with him; it was even sheer idiocy to come after this
blind fashion into the mountains in the late fall. Though the season was
early the hour was ominous. The storm might pass before dawn. There
remained the equal likelihood that it would not. Were he alone, or had
he a man, or, yes, by heaven! a real woman with him, things would not be
so bad. The wind jeered at him through the trees; the storm drenched his
fire; he cursed back at both.

"One thing," he thought when his pipe brought him a solitary instant of
peace, "I won't be worried with Gratton and Brodie and his
double-dealing crowd. If they ever started they would have sense enough
to turn back long ago."

After the cold, wet night came a sodden morning. King stood up and
looked about him curiously; his first thought was to make sure that they
had really camped upon the edge of that particular upland valley which
he had striven for. And a glint of satisfaction came into his eyes; it
is something to have followed such a trail aright upon such a night.
Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which
many miles further on flowed into the American. Rising abrupt beyond it
were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the
mountain tributaries of the American. The rocks, like