ed fright, it seemed, as if it had no heart
to witness the storm which the wind and the clouds foreboded--to fairer
skies somewhere behind those western mountains. Soon even its vague
light would encroach no more upon the darkness. The great hotel would be
invisible, annihilated as it were in the gloom, and not even thus dimly
exist, glimmering, alone, forlorn, so incongruous to the wilderness that
it seemed even now some mere figment of the brain, as the two horsemen
came with a freshened burst of speed along the deserted avenue and
reined up beside a small gate at the side.

"No use ter ride all the way around," observed Emory Keenan. "Mought jes
ez well 'light an' hitch hyar."

The moon gave him the escort of a great grotesque shadow as he
threw himself from his horse and passed the reins over a decrepit
hitching-post near at hand. Then he essayed the latch of the small gate.
He glanced up at Dundas, the moonlight in his dark eyes, with a smile as
it resisted his strength.

He was a fairly good-looking fellow when rid of the self-consciousness
of jealousy. His eyes, mouth, chin, and nose, acquired from reliable
and recognizable sources, were good features, and statuesque in their
immobility beneath the drooping curves of his broad soft hat. He was
tall, with the slenderness of youth, despite his evident weight and
strength. He was long-waisted and lithe and small of girth, with broad
square shoulders, whose play of muscles as he strove with the gate was
not altogether concealed by the butternut jeans coat belted in with his
pistols by a broad leathern belt. His boots reached high on his long
legs, and jingled with a pair of huge cavalry spurs. His stalwart
strength seemed as if it must break the obdurate gate rather than open
it, but finally, with a rasping creak, dismally loud in the silence, it
swung slowly back.

The young mountaineer stood gazing for a moment at the red rust on the
hinges. "How long sence this gate must hev been opened afore?" he said,
again looking up at Dundas with a smile.

Somehow the words struck a chill to the stranger's heart. The sense of
the loneliness of the place, of isolation, filled him with a sort of
awe. The night-bound wilderness itself was not more daunting than these
solitary tiers of piazzas, these vacant series of rooms and corridors,
all instinct with vanished human presence, all alert with echoes of
human voices. A step, a laugh, a rustle of garments--he could have swor