a
hasty retreat. Going to the window shortly after midnight he saw that
the snow was falling heavily. He made a hasty cold meal, then strapped
on his pack, took up his rifle and left the house. Now was the time to
go to the cave; the snow might cease by morning.

In the darkness he deemed it wiser to go down by the bridge than to
attempt the steeper passage beyond the head of the lake. They would
not be out in this sort of night watching for him; they would not know
where to expect him. And even if he came within twenty paces of a man
his swift, silent passage in the dark would be unnoticed.

To a man knowing the broken range country a whit less intimately than
Shandon knew it, the trip that night down to the bridge, across it,
across the Leland ranch and to the cliffs where the cave was would have
been a sheer impossibility. The storm, howling and snatching at him,
would have taken the heart out of a man less grimly determined than he
had grown to be. The snow, while it befriended him, covering his trail
in the rear, drove its shifting wall of opposition across his way in
front. The darkness tricked him and baffled him again and again. But
still, head down and dogged, he pushed on, certain always of his
general direction, confident of being under the cliffs in the first
faint glow of the new day.

It was an endless night, torturous with cold and uncertainty. But at
last, before the day broke, he made his heavy way up the great cedar,
climbing perilously with numbed hands. He knew that if his pursuers
came here now they would see where he had knocked the thick pads of
snow from the wide horizontal branches. But he knew, too, that before
they could arrive the steadily falling snow would have hidden the signs
he had left behind him. And at last, wearily, he threw himself down
before a crackling fire, and went to sleep.

For upwards of two weeks his life was like that of a rat in a cellar.
Silence, monotony, darkness, loneliness. Already the snowfall was as
great as that of most winters. He could guess that by this time the
fences about Wanda's home were hidden under a smooth covering that
thickened day by day, night after night. When he looked out from the
screen across his doorway he saw that the smaller trees were blotted
out and reckoned that upon the level floor of the valley the snow lay
ten feet deep. Now and again, when he went out in the early dawn or
the last glimmering light of dusk for woo