d
steadily into his brilliant eyes.

"Proceed miss, if you are so amiable," he said softly.

She wrote on: "-- One finger for every day's delay. The whole hand at
the week's end. The other hand then, finger by finger. Then, alas! the
right foot----"

Eve trembled.

"Proceed," he said softly.

She wrote: "If you agree you shall pay what you owe to Jose Quintana in
this manner: you shall place a stick at the edge of the Star Pond where
the Star rivulet flows out. Upon this stick you shall tie a white rag.
At the foot of the stick you shall lay the parcel which contains your
indebt to Jose Quintana.

"Failing this, by to-night _one finger_ at sunset."

The man pause: Eve waited, dumb under the surging confusion in her
brain. A sort of incredulous horror benumbed her, through which she
still heard and perceived.

"Be kind enough to sign it with your name," said the man pleasantly.

Eve signed.

Then the masked man took the letter, got up, removed his hat.

"I am Quintana," he said. "I keep my word. A thousand thanks and
apologies, miss. I trust that your detention may be brief and not too
disagreeable. I place at your feet my humble respects."

He bowed, put on his hat, and walked quickly away. And she saw him
descend the rocks to the eastward, where the peak slopes.

When Quintana had disappeared behind the summit scrub and rocks, Eve
slowly stood up and looked about her at the rocky pulpit so familiar.

There was only one way out. Quintana had gone that way. His men no
doubt guarded it. Otherwise, sheet precipices confronted her.

She walked to the western edge where a sheet of slippery reindeer moss
clothed the rock. Below the mountain fell away to the valley where she
had been made prisoner.

She looked out over the vast panorama of wilderness and mountain, range
on range stretching blue to the horizon. She looked down into the
depths of the valley where deep under the flaming foliage of October,
somewhere, a State Trooper was sitting, cheek on hand, beside a
waterfall -- or, perhaps riding slowly through a forest which she might
never gaze upon again.

There was a noise on the rocks behind her. A masked man came out of the
spruce scrub, laid a blanket on the rocks, placed a loaf of bread, some
cheese, and a tin pail full of water upon it, motioned to her, and went
away through the dwarf spruces.

Eve walked slowly to the blanket. She drank out of the tin pail. Then
she set asid