detect Lance Harriott in this hideous masquerade of dust and
grime and tatters, still less would any passing stranger have recognized
in this blond faun the possible outcast and murderer. And, when with a
swirl of his spattering sleeve, he drove back the gopher in a shower of
spray and leaped to the bank, he seemed to have accepted his felonious
hiding-place as a mere picnicking bower.

A slight breeze was unmistakably permeating the wood from the west.
Looking in that direction, Lance imagined that the shadow was less dark,
and although the undergrowth was denser, he struck off carelessly toward
it. As he went on, the wood became lighter and lighter; branches, and
presently leaves, were painted against the vivid blue of the sky. He
knew he must be near the summit, stopped, felt for his revolver, and
then lightly put the few remaining branches aside.

The full glare of the noonday sun at first blinded him. When he could
see more clearly, he found himself on the open western slope of the
mountain, which in the Coast Range was seldom wooded. The spiced thicket
stretched between him and the summit, and again between him and the
stage road that plunges from the terrace, like forked lightning into the
valley below. He could command all the approaches without being seen.
Not that this seemed to occupy his thoughts or cause him any anxiety.
His first act was to disencumber himself of his tattered coat; he then
filled and lighted his pipe, and stretched himself full-length on the
open hillside, as if to bleach in the fierce sun. While smoking he
carelessly perused the fragment of a newspaper which had enveloped his
tobacco, and being struck with some amusing paragraph, read it half
aloud again to some imaginary auditor, emphasizing its humor with an
hilarious slap upon his leg.

Possibly from the relaxation of fatigue and the bath, which had become
a vapor one as he alternately rolled and dried himself in the baking
grass, his eyes closed dreamily. He was awakened by the sound of voices.
They were distant; they were vague; they approached no nearer. He rolled
himself to the verge of the first precipitous grassy descent. There was
another bank or plateau below him, and then a confused depth of olive
shadows, pierced here and there by the spiked helmets of pines.

There was no trace of habitation, yet the voices were those of some
monotonous occupation, and Lance distinctly heard through them the click
of crockery and the rin