Front matter (continued 5)

"I can't," she said miserably.

He looked up into the sky and not at her.

"You can do what you please," he retorted curtly. "I am going on."

She rose and went stumbling down the slope. She swayed as she tried to mount, but he did not offer his hand. When she was in the saddle he strode on ahead. Blackie looked after them wistfully.

"The leg's not broken," King told her gruffly. "Just a bad sprain. Not your fault it isn't worse, though. He'll take care of himself; God knows he's got as good a chance as we have."

"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.

He merely swung up his arm toward the sky by way of answer and went on. The second big rain-drop hit Gloria's cheek. It was chill; its dullness seemed to drive straight to her heart.

Chapter XX

The storm caught them as it has caught so many a wayfarer before and since. The wintry season was not due for a full four weeks, but the winter had thrust sign and season aside and made his regal entry after his own ancient fashion. There came a crash of reverberating thunder, a scurry in the thickening mass of black clouds, a drenching downpour of rain. For twenty minutes they crouched in what scant shelter was afforded them by a squat, wide-limbed cedar. Then the wind went ripping off through the tree-tops, exacting its toll of flying twigs and leaving in its wake a brief, hushed calm. Through the still air fell scattering flakes of snow, big and unbroken and feathery. King's eyes were filled with concern; his face was ominous like the face of the world about him.

Again Gloria's tired body was assured of rest; again King said expressionlessly: "Come on." This time he helped her into the saddle, being in haste and of no mind to wait for trifles. He hurried on ahead; she followed on Buck listlessly, clinging to the saddle, her eyes often shut.

For an hour it snowed. Though there was no sun it was not dark save in the deeper cañons. Nor was it as cold as Gloria had thought it must be—or else she was too tired to feel the pinch of the sharp air. But presently the flakes grew fewer and then ceased utterly. Those that lay on the ground or clung to branches melted swiftly; and with their departure the last light of the day was gone. Now King led the horse and Gloria rode through a gathering darkness. She wanted to ask why they did not stop; why they did not turn back, but lacked the spirit. Now and then she half dozed.

At last it was pitch dark and the rain was beginning again. King had stopped and was helping her down. She was numb now in body; her brain was numb. The rain hardened into a rattle of hail. Thereafter 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 the river, were black, and looked far colder than the white world which extended in all directions.

If, in truth, there existed heaps of raw red gold somewhere in a cave in these mountains, and there had been any exactness in the description in Gus Ingle's Bible, then the spot was not more than three or four miles away. That was one consideration. It was still snowing. Here was a second consideration. King turned moody eyes to Gloria's canvas-and-fir shelter in the lee of a little bit of cliff. There lay the third. He prepared breakfast without delay but without enthusiasm. He felt a tired man with shackled limbs dragging a dead weight.

When he went to wake Gloria he first stood over her, looking queerly down upon her sleep. She showed less trace of the hard day and wild night than he had expected to see; his preparations for her comfort, instinctive and thorough, had been made with the cunning skill of a man familiar with situations like the present. She had rested; she lay curled up, snug and warm, under the covers, upon which a thin layer of fluffy snow had gathered. Her face was against a curved arm, and the sweetness of it in its tranquil repose was a bitter sweet to him. Her lashes against her cheek stirred and flew apart under his steady gaze. He looked into Gloria's eyes, sweet and soft, heavy with sleep.

"Time to be up," he said. He turned on his heel and went back in haste to his fire.

Gloria, awake, was ravenously hungry. She came sooner than he had expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order. Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him. She shrugged her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands to the small, wind-blown blaze.

"Are we going back?" she asked colourlessly.

"No," he returned as indifferently. "It's about four miles to the caves. We'll be there in a couple of hours. Then we'll see what we see."

Gloria sent a long, searching, and awe-struck look across the broken country. Yonder, then, she realized dismally, lay their destination; bleak, black, rocky heights, at so great an altitude and in a region so barren that but few wind-broken trees grew, and the brutal face of the world was unmasked. She saw bare peaks, steep slopes, a tremendous gorge like an ugly gash; on the far side of the gorge sheer cliffs. Toward them King looked. Was it there that Gus Ingle's caves awaited them? Was that journey's end? She shivered and drew closer to the fire, closer to her companion, shrinking from the menace of the mountains.

"Is it going to keep on snowing?" she asked.

This time he shrugged. That was his only answer. She stared at him, a slow flush came into her cheeks, her eyes hardened.

"Oh, very well," she said coldly.

That was the whole of their conversation save for one curt remark and an impudent laugh in answer at the end of the scanty meal. Gloria tossed a piece of bacon into the fire. King looked at her sternly and said:

"Young lady, we may be up against the real thing right now. Nobody but a fool will do a trick like that."

The laugh was Gloria's.

* * * * *

Once on their way they climbed almost steadily. The air grew rarer and colder. The snowflakes became smaller, at last a fine sifting like sand particles that cut at hands and face viciously. No longer were there groves to shelter them; on all sides bare, hostile rocks, and only occasionally a sparse growth of sprawling, earth-hugging dwarf pine and cedar, over which King strode as over so much low, tangled brush. Then came a long ridge, a spine from which the world dropped almost sheer on both sides, with the wind raging so that it seemed Buck must be blown off his feet, or the girl torn from the saddle and borne far out like a thistledown. With frightened eyes, which she strove vainly to keep closed, she saw long, broken slopes; occasionally when the air cleared, a frothing torrent; and once, at the end of a couple of hours, far down in a distant level land, a growth of giant timber. She thought that King was making his way down there. But his purpose soon became plain even to her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the ravine which lower down cut like a knife across the timbered tract, headed for what he took to be Gus Ingle's cave. A mile away she saw it; a great, ragged, black hole in a high mass of rock, close to the crest of the next ridge.

She was wrapped warmly and yet here the icy breath of the wind pierced the fabric of her wrappings and hurt her to the bone. She watched King wonderingly as he hastened on; did the man have no sense of bodily discomfort? Certainly he gave no sign. He was like an animal; she found room for a flash of scorn in the thought. For so she was pleased to consider him lower in the scale than herself.

At another time she might have seen the world about her clothed in grandeur; now its sublimity was lost I upon her. It was a ravening beast, an ugly thing, big and brutal, and … like King. Oh, how she hated it and him!

When at last he waited for her and told her to get down she had the suspicion that he had gone mad. Certainly here was no spot to tarry; it was on her lips to demur. But she looked at his face and slipped stiffly from the saddle. They were high up on the ridge; Gloria, on foot beside him, clutched at the wind-twisted branch of one of the sprawling cliff growths, in sudden panic that she was being swept from her feet. Just below them was the deepening cleft in the mountain-side which, further down, widened and descended into the steep-walled gorge. Through it shot a mad, frothy stream. A hundred yards further on, high up in the cliffs, was the yawning hole in the rocks. King, holding Buck's bridle, looked about him and at the sky. Gloria read in his manner a hint of uncertainty. Hoping to influence his decision, she said quickly:

"Hadn't we better turn back now?"

He looked at her steadily before answering.

"In what," he replied in that impersonal way which maddened her, "have you so altered as to be worth a man's broken promise?" And then she knew that no thought of going back had had any part in his brief indecision. He was going forward, would go forward in anything he undertook; that was a part of his make-up. He was merely seeking the best place to unpack and a convenient spot to tether Buck. They were going to make camp either right here or nearer the cave, perhaps in it. She looked at the uninviting hole and shivered. She would know his decision when King saw fit to enlighten her.

Now he merely dumped at her feet the roll from the horse's back, setting his rifle down against it. Then he led Buck away, zigzagging tediously, at last passing from sight beyond an out jutting monster crag. Gloria crouched, seeking to shield herself from the whiplashes of the wind. She listened to it as it shrieked about the slabs and boulders of granite; the sound was indescribably eerie, filled with unrest, eloquent of the brutal contempt of the eternal for the feeble and transient. The universe grew utterly lonely; the wind was a whining thing cutting through the silence. And King was so long in coming back….

The terrifying thought electrified her: "What if he had deserted her? What if he had no intention of coming back?" She should have known better; perhaps, deep down within her, she did know better. But the suspicion brought its wild flutter; she sprang up and grew rigid in tense fright; she felt a strange, glad rush of joy as she saw his hat bobbing up and toward her along the mountain flank. When he rejoined her she was staring off at nothingness, her back to him.

He lashed the two canvas rolls together, swung them up to his shoulders, took frying-pan, coffee-pot, and rifle in his free hand, and nodded toward the small pack of provisions which had been left over from lunch. "Better bring those," he advised briefly. "There's no telling what may be in the cards." He went on along the knife-edge of the ridge, down into a little depression, up beyond. She hesitated, saw that he had not looked, bit her lip angrily, and snatched up the parcel. Then she followed him, stooping against the wind.

When she came up with him he had thrown down his pack at the very edge of the gorge. She came to his side, leaned forward, and looked down. Far below plunged the wildest torrent she had ever seen; it hurled itself in mad haste between boulders; it shot down over dizzy falls; it made for itself a white mantle of frothing waters; it looked as black as ebony in sections of smoother channel and as cold as death; it spun in whirlpools, it filled the air with its din. And King meant to go down to it; to cross it; to climb the dizzy cliff upon the further side! She knew from his look, without asking. For just across the chasm from them in the highest of the cliffs was the yawning black-mouthed place of horrors. If one slipped on those bare rocks, clambering down or climbing on the further side! She sat down suddenly; now when her lip was caught between her teeth it was to fight back the tears. The world was so cold and stern and brutal; this man was so much like the environment; she was so woefully, desperately heart-sick. On this lofty crest of a devil-tossed land she felt the insignificance of a fly clinging to the brow of an abyss.

King went about his task methodically. Gloria watched him rather than look across the rocky gorges. Slowly and with difficulty he made his way down the steep wall of rocks, dragging and pulling the roll of bedding and provisions after him. It required perhaps twenty minutes for him to get to the bottom. She wondered where he would attempt a crossing; the water looked so black in the pools, so violent over the rapids. He went up-stream; there lay an old cedar log so that it spanned the current, its sturdy old trunk ten feet above the water. For a moment King disappeared under an out-thrust ledge; then she saw him again, the pack on his shoulders. He had climbed up to the top of the log; he was crossing. Where he went now she must follow!

Fascinated, she watched him. Once she thought he was going to fall. But unerringly he trod the rude bridge underfoot, gained the other side without mishap, tossed down his bundle, and lowered himself from the log after it. Gloria marvelled at him; she could see his face and it was impassive. Could he not hear the hostile voices of the raging waters? Could he not feel the ominous threat of the bleak day and the monster cliffs? Was he a man without imagination as he seemed to be without fear?

On he went, down-stream again, clinging to the steep pitch of the gorge, until he was almost under the mouth of the cavern. He put back his head and looked up; it was a hundred feet above him and the cliffs, from where Gloria sat numb with cold and dread, looked unsurmountable. Yet he was going up them!

"And where he goes you will follow." It was as though the wild waters below were chanting it into her ears and thereafter filling the gorge with the mockery of derisive laughter.

Slowly, tediously, but with never a sign of hesitation, King made his way up the cliff. He had been here before; he knew and remembered every foothold and handhold. Nor was the task the impossible one it looked from a distance. There were cracks and crevices; there were seams of a harder material which, better withstanding the attacks of time, were thrust out beyond the general level; on them a man might stand. There were spots of softer material, scooped out into pockets by wind and water; there were flinty splinters; there were places where the wall, looking from across the cañon to be sheer and perpendicular, sloped more gently, and a man might crawl up them.

King had drawn up after him, stage after stage, the roll of bedding, using Blackie's tie-rope to haul it up and to moor it briefly. Gloria saw it swing at times like a huge, misshapen pendulum; watched it crawl up after him. She saw the wind snatch at it and set it scraping back and forth when he let it dangle at rope's end; she saw King's coat flap in the wind. Once she cried out aloud, thinking a second time that King was falling. If he fell from that height—if he were killed—what then would be the fate of Gloria Gaynor!

But at length he came safely to the cave's mouth. He stood upright and looked about him. Then he drew up to his feet the dangling roll; with it in his arms he was gone into that yawning hole. She waited breathlessly for his return. She saw him come again into the light; he had the rope in his hand, was coiling it. He began to come down. He was returning for her.

She did not stir while he made the slow descent, nor while he recrossed on the log and climbed the steep bank to her.

"I am going to spend the day up there," he told her in his studied aloof manner. "I'll know soon enough now what truth there is in the story of Gus Ingle's gold. There's room in the cave to sleep, and there's shelter of a sort. To-morrow morning, if I find nothing, I'll start back with you. If you care to come up now I'll help you."

"What else is there to do?" cried Gloria, with the first flash of passion. "What else do you leave me?"

He slipped a loop of the rope about her waist, taking slow pains not to touch her with his hands, and turned downward again. She followed, filled with sudden fear when they had climbed down ten feet, obeying him hastily when he commanded her to stand still or to move on, feeling her fear grow mightily as they progressed. The wind, strengthening abruptly, tore at her in angry gusts. She was panting and shaking visibly when finally she reached the log spanning the stream. He was up before her, offering her his hand. How she hated to touch it! How she feared to follow him! But her hand went into his, her steps followed his, and without hesitation; for there was nothing left now to choice. She looked down and saw the water raging below; it was like a monster leaping at her, snatching at her. She wanted to look away and could not. Like one moving through the fearsome steps of a nightmare she went on, clinging to King's hand, his hand tight upon hers, cold hands which met because they must. At last the torrent was behind her; she came down into King's arms from the log; she was faint and would have sat down. But he urged her on.

It was another nightmare climbing up the cliffs to the cave. He went ahead; he stopped and braced himself; he tautened the rope about her waist and said: "Come on. Slow and careful does it." She clutched with her cold, sore fingers at the rocks, felt the rope tighten, and went up and up. The wind, as though in a fury at losing its quarry, shrieked in her ears, and in mighty gusts strove to drag her hands from the rocks and to set her swinging as it had swung the roll of bedding. She climbed on. King ordered and she obeyed; she waited for him to go up, further ahead; for him to call to her and draw in on the rope. Stage by stage, weary stages fraught with terror, she toiled up and up and up. And so at last, when it seemed to her that no strength remained in her, she came to King's side at the gloomy entrance of Gus Ingle's cave. The formless black void before her which under other circumstances would have repelled, now invited. It offered shelter and rest and protection. She crept by King with never a backward glance, and threw herself face down on the uneven floor.

Chapter XXI

A long time King stood at the mouth of the cave, looking forth upon the newly whitened world. The look of the thickening sky, the wintry sting of the rushing air, the businesslike way in which the snow swirled and fell created a condition upon which he had not counted and for which he had no relish. This was more like a mid-winter blizzard than any storm had any business being so early in the season. For many hours already the snow had been falling, piling up in the mountain passes; if it kept on at this rate through another day and night—well, he and Gloria had best be getting out without any loitering.

He looked at his watch; not yet eleven o'clock. Need for haste; the day would be short. Before darkness shut down he had half a dozen hours, hours for methodical search. Here was one of Gus Ingle's caves; another, he knew, was directly below and at the base of the cliffs; the third should be near. It was the third that he was chiefly interested in. He recalled the words in the old Bible: "We come to the First Caive and then we come to Caive number three and two!" There lay significance in the order of Ingle's numerals; first, three, and two. Two of the caves were for any one to see; before now King had been in both of them. Hence it must be that Gus Ingle's treasure lay in the third. That one King must locate. And without too much delay. He looked down at Gloria. She lay motionless just as she had thrown herself down.

Taking his rope with him King made what haste he could going down the cliffs. The sides of the ravine were littered with dead wood, drift and limbs that had broken off the few battered trees above. He gathered as heavy a load of dry branches as he could handle, bound them about with his rope, and, fighting his way all the way up, clambered again to the upper cave. Gloria had not stirred. He moved about her, went a dozen paces deeper into the great cavern, and threw down his wood. Breaking branches into short lengths he quickly got a fire going. The flames spurted up eagerly, bright and cheery, and threw dancing light among the wavering shadows. He brought the bedding-roll closer and opened it into a rough-and-ready bed. Then he called to Gloria.

"You'd better lie here by the fire," he told her. "You're apt to catch cold there."

She was sitting up, watching him. Now she rose listlessly and came forward, dropping down into a sitting position upon the blankets, her chilled hands out toward the blaze.

"I don't like the look of this storm," he told her. "It is up to us to hurry. I am going to look around now. I think you had better rest all you can so as to be ready to make a start back as soon as I find out whether we are on a wild-goose chase or not."

"You mean—we may start back to-day?"

"I don't know what I am going to find, of course; whether I am going to find anything. But if we can get only a couple of hours on our way to-day, it's just that much gained."

"You are going to leave me here?"

"I won't be far." With that he set fire to a dry pine faggot, the best torch available, and left her, going deeper into the cave. She watched him, marvelling at the size of the cavern. He went on a score of paces; he seemed to be ascending a steepening slant floor and then to have gone over a sort of ridge and to be descending again. But still going further from her. Presently she knew that the tunnel had turned sharply to the right; she could hear the thud of his boots and for a little while could see the flare of his torch against a wall of rock; he himself had passed out of her sight.

But she knew that he had not gone a great deal further. For he was not so far away that she could not hear him; he was going back and forth; at irregular intervals she saw a dim, ghostly light playing upon the dark cavern walls. And, despite the weary ache of a hardship-tortured body, she began to be interested in his search. If there were, in truth, such gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of—gold for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening wolves on the trail—gold in quantity to make even toughened old gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it—why, then, that gold was half Mark King's and half Ben Gaynor's! And it might be that now, at this very instant, Mark King was finding it; was standing over it, staring down at it by the ghostly flare of a smoking torch. She sat, tense and still, listening, trying to probe with tired but suddenly bright eyes through the dark.

She started, realizing that no longer could she hear King searching back and forth. It was very silent about her, only the crackle of the flames making a sound to be heard against the rush of air outside. It seemed to her that King had been gone a long time. She rose to her feet, tempted to follow him. She was curious to know what he was doing; why he was so silent; where he had gone. But in the end pride restrained her and she sat down again to wait in an attitude of indifference.

But the minutes dragged on and never a sound came back from the far, dark depths of the cavern; fifteen minutes, half an hour. She grew restless and walked up and down; she went to the mouth of the cave and stood looking out into the swirling snow-storm; she returned to the fire, throwing on more wood. She felt sure that an hour had passed—two hours—she began to grow alarmed. Always that dread thought was ready to spring out upon her: "If something had happened to him!" She went a little way in the direction he had taken; stood peering into the dark, listening breathless and rigid. Never a sound. She went back to the front of the cave, looking down, staring out into the grey sky, across the ridge….

Gloria, trembling with a new excitement, was down on her knees before the pack when King returned. She sprang up to face him. And each, with the other's emotions and experiences of the past two or three hours unknown to him, marvelled at what was to be read in the other's face. Gloria was excited; King's excitement was no less. Where she had at least the clue to his altered expression, he had none to hers.

"It's here!" he burst out. "And I've found it. Tons and tons of it, such knobs and nuggets of pure gold as never man laid eyes on! We have here the Magic Lamp to rub: a castle in Spain and an ocean-going yacht and the newest thing in motor-cars and a trip around the world and a presentation to royalty—a fragment of heaven and a very large slice of hell. Ambition fulfilled and love consumed and hate born. We have old Ben made whole and full of power again. And here we have all that is left of Gus Ingle and his friends—except for a pile of bones back yonder!"

She saw that in each hand he carried what looked like a big rough stone; she saw from the way he carried them that they were heavy. The fires leaped higher, brighter in her eyes. Now she saw the way to make Mark King pay for all of his brutality to her; to pay to the uttermost!

"I have nothing to say to you," she said as stiffly as she knew the way. "I care to hear nothing you have to say. I have tolerated all that I mean to tolerate from you."

Her bearing, no less than her words, astonished him. For the first time he saw what it was that she held in her hands. She had been gathering up her own little personal effects; a tiny parcel of silken things, comb and brush, trifling feminine odds and ends. He stared at her wonderingly.

"I don't understand——"

Gloria treated him to cool laughter.

"You will in a minute. I am going."

"Going? You? In God's name, where?"

Deep silence answered him. He frowned at her in puzzled fashion a moment; then, suspecting the truth, since his racing mind could hit on no other possible explanation of her manner, he dropped to the fireside the things in his hands and went swiftly to the cave's mouth. He looked out into the storm, his eyes questing in all directions. Nothing. Only the thickening storm, the ridges dim beyond the swirl of snow——

Then he saw. For a long time he stood, studying it, seeking to make sure. What he saw was beaten down by the falling snow, dissipated by the wind, gone entirely over and again only to rise like a shapeless ghost of disaster. It was a column of smoke. Some one had encamped no great distance away; on the same stream, hidden only by the windings of the gorge. Some one? Why, then, Gratton and Brodie and their crowd, after all! He glowered angrily toward the faint smudge of smoke. Then he swung about and came back to Gloria's side.

"You saw that smoke?" he demanded. "You plan on going to them?"

"Yes," cried Gloria. She sprang up and confronted him angrily. "Yes to both questions."

"You know who they are, then?"

"No; but that doesn't matter."

"Which means as plain as print," he said thoughtfully, "that you would go to any man to be rid of me." He laughed unpleasantly and Gloria's anger flared the higher.

"Do you know," he said presently, "that they are probably Gratton and Swen Brodie and their outfit?"

"What of it?" asked Gloria, erect and defiant.

"You know that Gratton has set out to ruin your father? That he's a double-dealing scoundrel? That Brodie is worse? That neither is hardly the sort for a girl to trust herself to in a place like this?"

"I am not given much choice," Gloria informed him with high insolence.

"That's a fact," he conceded with a grunt.

He'd give a thousand dollars right now to be well rid of her; yes, and have Gratton and Brodie and the rest of them come on looking for any sort of a row that suited their ilk. He told himself that with savage emphasis, but he asked: could he let her go?

"Before I go," said Gloria when she thought that he had nothing further to add, "I want to say just one thing: father has always considered you his best friend. I shall lose no time in telling him what you really are."

Gloria's remark, coming just when it did in King's perplexity, settled his decision firmly on him. The girl was a vicious little fool; so he was determined to think of her unequivocally. But she was, after all, Ben Gaynor's daughter and, furthermore, the apple of Ben's eye. She was in King's keeping; he had been eminently to blame for bringing her here, his was the responsibility. Gratton's eye was the sort that soils a woman.

"You are not going," he said suddenly, turning upon her. "I won't allow you to put yourself in Gratton's or Brodie's dirty hands."

A quick light was in her eyes, a quick spurt of satisfaction in her heart. In King's decision she read the assurance that he was still madly in love with her, that now his jealousy stirred him. She lifted her chin and with her little bundle under her arm came forward, walking confidently.

"Stand aside, please," she commanded. "I am going, I tell you."

Again sensing the familiarity of the battlefield she felt an almost serene confidence, believing herself easily mistress of the situation. So much must have been plain to King from that "Stand aside, please," which Miss Gloria Gaynor of last week might have addressed to a porter, were it not that just now King's thought was not bended to trifles. When she came to his side and he did not stir, she sought to brush by him. There was no hesitation in the way in which he put out his hand and held her back.

"There can be only one captain to an expedition in adventure," he told her seriously. "I have been elected to the job. You'll pardon me if I put matters into one-syllable words? Until we are well out of this, if we are ever out at all, you will have to do what I tell you. You are not going to desert ship."

She stared at him speechlessly. Then:

"By what right do you issue orders to me?" she cried.

"Let us say," he returned in the coin of her own harshness, "by the old right of a husband. If that isn't sufficient you can add to it: by the time-honoured right of the lord and master! For that is just precisely what I intend being until I can turn you over to your dawdling set in the city again. Wait a minute," he added sternly, as he saw her lips opening to a rush of words. "I would be glad to have you go were conditions less exacting. Now I have thought matters over and it appears essential that certain of our marriage vows be remembered. You don't have to love or honour, but by thunder you are going to obey! Reversion to an ancient order of things, eh? Well, the world was better then, largely in that women were worth a man's while. Further, for my part, I fully intend to keep my obligation of protecting you against your own foolishness, the storm, Gratton, Brodie, and the devil himself. And, finally, I mean to keep my promise to your father. He sent me to get Gus Ingle's gold; it's here. So is Gratton with his cut-throat crowd. I will in all probability have my hands full. But, once and for all, you stick with me. Where," he concluded with the last jeer, "the wife's place should be!"

Gloria tried to stare him down, to wither him with the fire of her scorn, to brave by him. But the man, all emotion having receded from his eyes, was once more like so much rock, but rock endowed with dormant power of aggression. She felt as though she had to do with a great poised boulder which offered no menace so long as she let it alone, but which needed but an unwary step of hers to destroy its equilibrium and thus bring it crashing down upon her, crushing her. She began by wondering if she had mistaken his look just now when she had leaped to the triumphant decision that he loved her; she ended by feeling hopeless and tired and uncertain of all things. To keep him from noting how she was trembling she went hastily back to the roll of bedding and dropped down to it. On the instant it became clear to her that physically King was the master. To her, before whom difficulties had heretofore invariably melted, it seemed equally clear that there must be a way out of an unbearable situation. So now, for the first time, she began a certain logical line of thought, seeking to shape her own plans.

"Please listen to me seriously," King said quietly to her. "I won't talk long to you. Your father is on the edge of bankruptcy. He is temporarily out of the running—at the hands of the very men you want to go to. He counts on me for what is in Gus Ingle's caves. I have found at least a part of it and I honestly believe that it is in your hands and mine to pull Ben through and leave him a rich man on top of it. Gratton and Brodie are down there; they'll clean us out if they can. The stake is big enough for them to stop at nothing short of murder, and I am not oversure they'd stop there. Gus Ingle's crowd didn't, and I don't know that men have changed much in half a hundred years."

"I am listening," said Gloria coolly when he paused.

"Here's the point: this is treasure-trove; we got here first. It is up to us to hold it. Can I count on you? You don't happen to have any love for me; well, you shouldn't have any for Gratton or Brodie, either. And you know that you can trust yourself to me. Can I count on you sticking on the job, your father's and your own job as much as mine, until we make a go of it?"

Gloria's logical thinking had barely begun, and as yet had not had time to progress. Her spite was lively and bitter. In her distorted vision, blurred by passionate anger, she cried out quickly:

"So, now that the odds are against you, you come cringing to me, do you?" Again she was misled into fancying that she held a whip-hand over him. "Answering your question, I would trust Mr. Gratton any day rather than you. He, at least, is not quite the brute and bully that you are."

King was hardly disappointed.

"At least you have given a straight answer," he muttered. "That is something."

Now he shaped his plans swiftly and carefully, knowing where she stood. It was characteristic of him that, once having seen clearly his own responsibility toward a foolish girl, he did not seek to simplify his own difficulty by ridding himself of her. Henceforth he would merely consider her his chief handicap, with him but against him. He consoled himself with the whimsical thought that there was never a proper treasure-hunt that did not carry traitorous mutineers on the questing ship.

Chapter XXII

And so, after all, he and Gloria were not alone in the mountains; that other crowd was still to be reckoned with. King stood at the cave's mouth, frowning into the ever-thickening smother of the storm. Their smoke was gone again, beaten down, hidden behind the snow-curtain. But they were there, at no very great distance. Thus, then, they knew something. Just what? Here was the matter of his perplexity; did they know all that he did? Or had they merely such a hint as would lead them as close as this? Or had they followed his trail?

He grew impatient with seeking to speculate. It struck him clearly and forcefully that he had but one thing to do: to trust that they did not have such full information as had fallen into his hands and to see to it that he gave them no help. Though they should come close, very close, still that which he had found might remain hidden from them. There lay his work; to do all that he could to hide Gus Ingle's gold. First he would bring with him more than the two nuggets; all that he felt he could manage to carry with the rest of his necessary load. Enough to help Ben Gaynor over a crisis; enough raw gold to slam down before some San Francisco capitalist, together with a tale which would make any man eager to stake the owner to what loan he asked. With that he'd seek to get back to the open. He would get provisions, snow-shoes, a dog-team, if necessary, a couple of trusted men to come with him; he would be back here within the week. But first, before he went, he would strive to make as sure as a man could that Brodie's crowd did not find the golden hoard.

He went a second time far back into the darkness of the further cave, carrying a smoking torch as before, vanishing from Gloria's eyes. She was alone; nothing stood between her and the cave's mouth; she was free to go! He must have thought of that. He was giving her her chance. She had but to snatch up the few things she meant to take with her, to go out, to find her way down the cliffs——She shuddered. She was afraid! Did he know that, too? Had he thought of that? She moved back and forth restlessly; at one instant she was sure that she would go, only to be certain of nothing before another second passed. How soon would he return? Would he hurry after her, would he bring her back forcibly?… She went where she could look out; the column of smoke had disappeared; the wind tore at her in mighty gusts. She hesitated and time passed.

How long he was gone she did not know. She only knew that she had done nothing when at length he returned. There was a look of grim satisfaction on his face; whatever he had gone to do he had done in a manner to please him. She noted that his coat was off; that in it, as in a bag, he carried something heavy.

"This goes with us wherever we go," he announced triumphantly. "It's a big breathing spell for Ben Gaynor." He dumped it out; there were other lumps like the two he had brought back the first time. She wondered dully if that grimy stuff were gold! She watched him while he emptied a provision-bag and thereafter dropped into it the stuff he had brought in his coat. On top of it went the articles of food.

"If you can whip up enough endurance for the work ahead of us," he announced impersonally, "we stand a good chance of getting out of this. Otherwise, we stand a whole lot better show of being caught here and freezing and starving to death."

Gloria shook visibly. Nervousness and fear and the cold were combined and merciless. Her look sped from King's face to what she could see of the snow-storm.

"But we'll wait," she asked in utter, weary meekness, "until this horrible storm is over?"

"One never knows about a storm like this," he told her. "It may blow itself out soon and it may keep on for a long time. Now, it's beginning to pile up in the drifts, to hide the trails, to make going harder every minute. As it is we'll have our work cut out for us; if this keeps up all afternoon and all night …" He shrugged.

"You mean that then we couldn't get out at all?" she asked sharply.

He looked down on her thoughtfully. "I don't know," he replied slowly, "whether you could make it then or not. I am more or less used to this sort of thing and you are not. I figure that we ought to take no more long shots than we have to. If we start right now and have any luck we can make several miles before night and camp in some of the thick timber. We'd be as well off there as we are here and just that much nearer the outside. If the weather allowed us to travel at all we could be back at your father's place in four or five days at the longest. And," he added significantly, "we have food to last us just about that long."

Gloria sprang up hastily. "Quick," she cried. "Let's hurry."

King nodded and began his preparations. Into the squares of canvas he rolled everything they were to take with them, and he took no single article which he judged was not absolutely necessary. One small frying-pan and one light aluminium pot, with single knife, fork, and spoon, constituted all in the way of cooking utensils. With jealous eye he judged the weight, bulk, and worth of every other article, whether it be a tin of fruit or a slab of bacon. Those delicacies, which his love for Gloria had prompted him to bring with them, he now placed at one side, to be left behind. Bacon, to the last small scrap and fat-lined rind, coffee, to the once-boiled dregs in the coffee-pot, he packed carefully. Then, his roll made and drawn tight, he took up the discarded articles and hid them under some loose dirt in a remote, black corner of the cave. Ten minutes later he had gotten first his pack, then Gloria, safely down the cliffs, and they started. Head down, silent, like two grotesque automatons, they trudged on. They crossed on the fallen cedar, they climbed out of the gorge on the far side, they fought their way on.

Several times King turned. But she soon saw it was not to look at her; his glance passed down the long cañon toward the spot where they had seen the smudge of smoke. She had come near forgetting that other men were near; she had no interest in them now. King had brought her here; King must take her safely back to the world which she had forsaken so stupidly. The obligation was plainly his; the power seemed his no less.

As Gloria fought her way along she was upborne at every step by the expectation of coming presently to their horse, of being placed in the saddle, and of having nothing to do from then on but hold to the pommel and have King lead her on to an ultimate safety. The progress would be long and the way little less than an adventure in hell to her; but at least hers would have become a slightly more passive part and she would be moving on toward the luxury of four walls and a maid and warm comforts. So when they came to the spot where King had tethered his horse, and there was no horse there, Gloria looked her blank, stupefied bewilderment, and then simply collapsed. She dropped down in the snow, her face in her hands, too weary and heartbroken to sob aloud. King stared about him with an almost equal consternation.

Leaving Gloria where she lay inert in the snow, King put down rifle and pack and hurried down into the hollow where he had tethered his horse. Five minutes of reading the signs in the snow told him the story. He had been right; his venture from the beginning had been loaded to the guards with bad luck. There was the end of the broken tie-rope; there the tracks showing the way Buck had gone, in full, headlong flight. The rope was stout and would have broken only were the animal terrified. If frightened, then there had been something to cause fright. Again, since the horse fled straight down the slope, that something startling it would have been at some point directly above. King turned and mounted to the ridge top again. Here were other tracks, all but obliterated by the snow which had fallen since they were made. A bear had come up over the ridge; had frightened the horse into breaking its tether and running. And the equally startled bear had turned tail and raced off the other way. Both animals were probably a dozen miles off by now; the bear, perhaps, twice that distance.

King came back slowly and sat down on his pack. From Gloria's dejected figure he looked to his watch, from his watch again to the four points of the compass. His lips tightened. The afternoon was passing and the dark would come early.

"Are you up to crowding ahead on foot?" he called to Gloria. "If you have the nerve we can really make better time that way, anyhow, from now on. Can you do it?"

At first she did not try to answer. But when he shouted to her again, his voice hard with anger, she moaned miserably:

"I am sick; I am dying, I think. I can't go on."

King grunted disgustedly.

He let Gloria lie where she was until she had rested. Then he went to her and put his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. She was limp and pale, her eyes shut, her lashes looking unusually black against the pallor of her pinched cheeks.

"We'll go back to the cave for the night, after all," he told her quietly. "It's the inevitable, and that's one thing there's no sense bucking against. Stand up!"

But the slight figure in its boyish garb drooped against him; Gloria's head moved the slightest bit in sidewise negation; her pale lips stirred soundlessly.

"What?" asked King.

"I can't," came her whisper.

He judged that here was no time for foolishness, but rather the time for each one to do his part if the two of them lived to make all of this an unpleasant memory.

"You've got to," he informed her crisply. "I can't carry you and the pack and rifle and everything, can I? I am going back; the rest is up to you. Do you want to lie here and die to-night?"

"I don't care," said Gloria listlessly.

He looked at her curiously. As he drew his hands away she slipped down and lay as she had lain before. He turned away, took up his pack and gun, set his back square upon her, and trudged off toward the only shelter that was theirs. Along the ridge, buffeted by the wind, half blind with the flurries of stinging hail with which that wind lashed him as with countless bits of broken glass, he did not turn to look behind him; not until he had gone fully half of the way to the cave. Then he did turn. He could not see her following as he had pictured her. He dropped his burden and went back to her. She lay as he had left her, her face whiter than he had ever seen it, her eyes shut, certain small blue veins making a delicate tracery across the lids.

He had meant to storm at her, to stir her into activity by the lashings of his rage. But instead he stooped and gathered her up into his arms and carried her through the storm, shielding her body all that he could. And as he stooped and as he moved off he was growling deep down in his throat like a disgruntled old bear. When it came to clambering down and then up the cliffs Gloria obeyed his commands listlessly and as in a dream, lending the certain small aid that was necessary. Even so, the climb was hard and slow, and more than ever before filled with danger. But in the end it was done; again they were in Gus Ingle's cave. King built a fire, left Gloria lying by it, and went back for his pack. When he returned she had not moved. He made a bed for her, placed her on it so that her feet were toward the fire, and covered her with his own blanket. Then he boiled some coffee and made her drink it. She obeyed again, neither thanked him nor upbraided him, and drooped back upon her hard bed and shut her eyes. Here was a new Gloria, a Gloria who did not care whether she lived or died. With a quickening alarm in his eyes he stood by the smoky fire, staring at her. Uninured to hardship, her delicate body was already beaten; with still further hardship to come might she not—die? And what would Mark King say to Ben Gaynor, even if he brought back much raw red gold, if it had cost the life of Ben Gaynor's daughter?

She did not stir when he came to her and knelt and put his hand against her cheek. He was shocked to learn how cold she was. Lightly he set his fingers against her softly pulsing throat; it was cold, like ice. Plainly she was chilled through. As he began unlacing her boots a curiously bitter thought came to him. She was his; the marriage service had given her to him with her own willingness; his wife. And now he was doing for her the first intimate little thing. He drew off her boots and stockings and found that her feet were terribly cold. He wrapped them in a hot blanket and hastened to set a pot of water on the coals. While the water warmed he knelt and chafed her feet between his palms, afraid for a moment that they were frozen. Finally, while he bathed them in steaming water, the dead white began to give place to a faint pinkness, like a blush, and again he put the blanket about them.

She had not moved. When a second time he laid his hand against her throat the cold of it alarmed him. He hesitated a moment; then, the urgent need being more than evident, he began swiftly to undo her outer garments. The boyish shirt he unbuttoned and managed to remove; it was wet through, and stiff with frost. He noted her under-garments, silken and foolish little things, with amazement; she had known no better than to wear such nonsensical affairs on a trip like this! Good God, what did she know? But he did not pause in his labours until he had slipped off the wet clothing. Then he wrapped her in another warm blanket and placed her on her bed, her feet still to the blaze. All of the time she had seemed, and probably was, hardly conscious. Now only she opened her eyes.

"I can't have you playing the fool and getting pneumonia," he growled at her. "We've got our hands full as it is. Don't you know enough to …"

But she was not listening. She stirred slightly, eased herself into a new position, cuddled her face against a bare arm, sighed, and went to sleep.

Chapter XXIII

All night King kept his fire blazing. With several long sticks and a piece of the canvas, drawing deeply upon his ingenuity and almost to the dregs of his patience, he contrived a rude barrier to the cold across the mouth of the cave. Countless times he rolled out of his own bunk, heavy-eyed and stiff, to readjust the screen when it had blown down, to put more wood on his fire, to make sure that Gloria was covered and warm, sleeping heavily, and not dead. His nerves were frayed. In the long night his fears grew, misshapen and grotesque. Within his soul he prayed mutely that when morning came Gloria would be alive. When with the first sickly streaks of dawn he went to put fresh fuel upon the dying embers he found that there was but a handful of wood left. He came to stoop over the girl and listen to her breathing. Then he descended the cliffs for more wood.

During the night winter had set the white seal of his sovereignty upon the world. The snarling wind had died in its own fierceness, giving over to a still, calm air, through which steadily the big flakes fell. Now they clung to bush and tree everywhere; the limbs had grown thick and heavy, drooping like countless plumes. Fat mats of snow lay on the level spaces, upon flat rocks, curling over and down at the edges. Where he stood King sank ankle-deep in the fluffy stuff. As he moved along the cliffs and down the slope toward a dead tree he stepped now and then into drifts where the snow was gathering swiftly. As he looked up, seeking to penetrate the skies above him and judge their import, he saw only myriads of grey particles high up, swirling but slightly in some softly stirring air-current, for the most part dropping, floating, falling almost vertically. Nowhere was there a hint or hope of cessation. The winter, a full four weeks early, had come.

In the noose of his rope he dragged up the cliff much dead wood, riven from a fallen pine. Throughout the noise of his comings and goings the girl slept heavily. He got a big fire blazing without waking her and set about getting breakfast. While he waited for the coffee to boil he took careful stock of provisions. For two people there was enough for some twenty meals, food for about a week. Time to conserve the grease from the frying-pan; to hoard the smallest bit of bacon rind. He even counted his rounds of ammunition; here alone he was affluent. He had in the neighbourhood of a hundred cartridges for the rifle. While he was setting the gun aside he felt Gloria's eyes upon him.

During the night and now, during this inventory, he had been granted both ample time and cause for his decision. He addressed her with prompt frankness.

"Inside fifteen minutes we've got to be on our way out. As we go we'll look for the horse. But, find it or not, we're going."

She lay looking up at him thoughtfully. She had rested; she resented his coolly assumed mastery; she had not forgotten that there were other men near by. But she merely said, by way of beginning:

"The storm is over, then?"

"No. But we are not going to wait. We have food for only six or seven days, at the most."

She let her eyes droop to the fire so that the lids hid them from him. It was not yet full day; it was still snowing. Gratton and the men with him would, of course, have ample supplies. She yearned feverishly to be rid of King and his intolerable domineering. She estimated swiftly that, paradoxically, her only power over him was that of powerlessness; while she lay here hers was, in a way, the advantage. On her feet, following him, he would be again to her the brute he had been coming in.

"I am tired out," she said faintly, still not looking up. "I am sick. I have a pain here." She moved her hand to her side where, in reality, she was conscious of a troublesome soreness. "I can't go on."

He stared at her. She was pale. Now that she lifted her eyes for a brief reading of his look, he remarked that they appeared unusually large and luminous. There was a flush on her cheeks. His old fear surged back on him: Gloria was going to die! So he did what Gloria had counted on having him do: put milk and sugar in her coffee and brought the cup to her; he hastened to serve her a piping-hot breakfast of crisp bacon, hot cakes and jam. He urged her to eat, and made his own meal of unsweetened black coffee and cakes without jam. Triumphantly and covertly Gloria observed all of this. Hers was the victory. Mark King was again waiting on her, hand and foot, sacrificing for her.

He allowed himself half a pipe of tobacco—tobacco, like food, was going to run out soon—and smoked sombrely. Here already was the thing to be dreaded more than aught else: Gloria threatened with illness. As Ben Gaynor's daughter, never as his own beloved wife, she had become his responsibility. She was a parcel marked "Fragile—Handle with Care," which he had undertaken to deliver safely to a friend.

"I am going to look for the horse," he told her. He got to his feet and took up his rifle. "But don't count too much on my success. All the chances are that Buck is a long way on the trail back to his stable. Blackie has probably limped back home by now. Another thing: if I don't get Buck to-day he'll be of no use to us; that is, if the snow keeps on. But I'll do what I can."

But, before leaving, he did what he could to make for her comfort during his absence. He brought up fir-boughs, making them into a bed for her. He readjusted his canvas screen, securing it more carefully, thereby making the cave somewhat more snug. And at the last he dropped a little, much-worn book at her side; she did not know he had it with him. She did not appear to note it until he had gone. Then she took it up curiously. A volume of Kipling's poems, compact and companionable, on India paper between worn covers. With a little sniff she put the book down; just the sort of thing for Mark King to read, she thought with fine scorn, and utterly stupid to Gloria. What had she to do with The Explorer and Snarleyow and Boots and The Feet of the Young Men? Less than nothing, in sheer, regrettable fact. She knew he had one other book with him, Gus Ingle's Bible! The profaned volume of a murderous, long-dead scoundrel. What a library for a dainty lady! Gloria suddenly found that she could have screamed.

She scrambled up and went to peer out around the canvas screen. No sound out there, for the wind was dead and the snow dropped noiselessly; the creek in the gorge, because what little draught there was in the air bore down the canon, sent no sound to her ears. The wilderness of crag and peak and distant forest was hostile, pitiless. She sought eagerly for some sign of Gratton. There was none; no smoke this morning denoted his camp, no longed-for figure toiled upward toward her. But he would come soon; he must. King had found the gold here; Gratton would know and come. She would wait, hoping for Gratton's coming before King's return.

Meanwhile King, making his way down the mountain slope, found that his estimate of the storm was cheerlessly correct; the fluffy stuff underfoot was in places already knee-deep and mounting steadily higher. He shook himself and growled in his throat and ploughed through it vigorously.

"A pair of webs would look like wings before long," he muttered. "Well, we'll make 'em, since we can't buy 'em."

Making his way back to the point where Buck had broken his tether, King overlooked no precaution; since he did not care to have his and Gloria's hiding-place known unnecessarily to Gratton and his following, he forsook the natural pathway and made slower, hard progress along the gorge where others would be less likely to chance upon his tracks and where the tracks themselves would soonest fill with drifting snow. Passing about many a stunted grove he came at last to the place whence Buck had fled. He knew that in the general direction indicated by the line of flight, beyond two ridges, was the valley of the giant sequoias. There a horse would find water, shelter, and grass. If he failed to find the animal there—well, then, Buck was well on the trail or lost to King in any one of a hundred places.

And always as he went, panting up and ploughing down, the steep slopes, his eyes were keen for meat, be it Douglas squirrel or bear. But the woods seemed deserted and empty; only those cheerful, impudent little bundles of feathers, the snowbirds, and an occasional, darting water-ouzel along the creeks. These he let alone, but with the mental reservation that the time might well be at hand when even such as they must be called on to keep life in him and Gloria.

He had taken on a man's-sized contract for his morning's work and drove his big body at it relentlessly. And he took his own sort of joy from it, the joy of a fight against odds, the joy of action in the open. His body was wet with sweat, but neither his ardour nor optimism were dampened; his foot came perilously near frost-bite after he slipped into the hidden water of a small stream, but he considered the accident but a part of the day's work. So, prepared by common sense for disappointment, he looked hopefully to finding the horse. And as he pushed on he pondered other likely spots to seek this afternoon or to-morrow if he did not find the animal in the sequoias.

When at last he came to the grove of big trees he was among old friends. But he knew almost as soon as he reached them that they had no word for him to-day. On his wedding morning he had planned how he would bring Gloria here, taking it for granted, in his blind infatuation, that they would mean to her what they had meant to him. Now he passed swiftly like a noiseless shadow between the gigantic boles; he did not lift his head to look at old Vulcan's lightning-blasted crest, two hundred feet in air, all but lost up there in the falling snow; he gave no thought to the thousands of years which were Majesty's and Thor's. He went with his eyes on the ground, seeking tracks of a horse. And as he had more than half expected, he found nothing. The magnificent vistas, carpeted in snow, gave him no view of anything but snow.

Later he must cudgel his brains and seek elsewhere. Now, with other work to be done, he should go back the shortest, quickest way. So he set his feet into the trail which they had made, and turned his back upon the grove. Where he crossed streams he took stock of pools; there were trout there if a man could take them. This was another matter to see about. Oh, he would be busy enough. And yet he did not loiter, and stopped only briefly and infrequently to rest.

Before returning to Gloria, King meant to look in on Brodie's camp, if only from a distance. As matters stood now there was no telling what bearing Gratton's and Brodie's actions might have later upon his own affairs. It would be well to note if the men were preparing to fight the storm out or to pack up and leave rather than take prolonged chances with the season. So, a mile below his own camp, he slipped into a grove of firs and made his unseen way toward the fringe whence he counted upon seeing what they were about. He was still moving on slowly and had had no glimpse of the men when he heard them. He stopped abruptly and listened.

They were down there, against the cañon wall. Words came to him indistinctly, muffled by the thick air. The tones of the voices were unmistakable. Three voices there were, each with its own peculiarity, none of them Gratton's. First a big, booming voice; then a sharp, staccato-quick voice; thereafter a high-pitched, querulous utterance, nervous and irritable. Disagreement, if not out-and-out quarrel, had already come to camp. King moved a few paces nearer, pushed aside a low branch from which the snow dropped with little thuds, and saw the men.

There were four of them in an excited group, and slightly drawn apart, one hand at his mouth, was Gratton. The four paid no attention to him, but formed a group exclusively self-centred. Of these four one now held his own counsel, his attitude alert, his hands in his pockets, his head turning swiftly, so that his eyes were now on one speaker, now on another. Across the brief distance King could see the puffs of smoke from the pipe in his teeth. The man wore a red handkerchief knotted about his throat; its colour was as bright as fresh-spilled blood. Swen Brodie.

Now and then as a voice was lifted King caught a word; repeated several times he heard the word "bacon." Here, doubtless, was the matter under discussion. One man, he of the thin, querulous voice swung his nervous arm widely and fairly shrieked his message; it came in little puffs and was lost between. King heard him shout "bacon" and "snow" and "hell." The three expressions, so oddly connected and yet disjointed, were significant.

Gratton stood apart and gnawed at his hand; though he could not see the prominent eyes, King could imagine the look in them. Swen Brodie puffed regularly at his pipe and watched and listened intently.

Abruptly the wrangling knot of men resolved itself into two definite factions. His fellows had turned upon the shrill-voiced man, plainly in some sort of denunciation or accusation. He was the smallest of the lot, and drew back hastily, step after step, offering the knife-edge of his curses as the others clubbed their fists.

"… a lie!" he shrieked. "Fools…."

Gratton gnawed at his knuckles, Brodie puffed steadily, and the two aggressors accepted windy denial as sign of guilt. One of them sprang forward and struck; the little man whipped out a revolver and fired. The shot sounded dull and muffled; a puff of smoke hung for a moment like the smoke from the pipe, appearing methodically between the passive onlooker's teeth; the man who had struck stopped dead in his tracks. There came a second shot; then in sharp staccato succession four others, followed by the ugly little metallic click announcing that the gun had emptied itself. Before the last explosion the balancing body sagged limply and sprawled in the snow.

King's first natural impulse was to break through the brush and run forward. But his caution of the day commanded by circumstance, though never a part of the man's headlong nature, remained with him, counselling cool thought instead of hot haste. The man down was dead or as good as dead; him King could not help. So he held back and watched.

There fell a brief silence while the man who had done the shooting and the men about him, no less than the figure lying in the snow, were as motionless as so many carven statues. At last Brodie spoke heavily.

"Benny's right. Bates had it coming to him. Times like this stealing a side of bacon is worse'n murder. Bates stole it; he was going to try to double-cross us and beat it out of here. Now he's dead, and good riddance." He spat into the snow when he had done.

Benny, chattering wildly to himself now, began a hasty reloading of his revolver. The man whom he had shot, whom Brodie named Bates, lay not five steps from Benny's feet, his blood already congealing where it flushed the snow. Oddly enough, King knew personally or by repute each of the men before him with the single exception of the man who had paid in full for his own—or some one else's—crime of stealing food at a time when food meant a chance for life. To begin with, there was Swen Brodie and there was Gratton. There was Benny, who had done the killing, a degenerate, a morphine addict, and a thorough-going scoundrel. Beyond him stood the burly ruffian of the big, awkward, bony frame, who had brought the "judge" to the log house the other night at Gratton's bidding, Steve Jarrold. Through the trees, coming up now, were two more of the ill-featured party, a swart, squat Italian, and just at his heels a ragged scarecrow of a man named Brail. It was Brail who came close enough to stoop over the fallen man.

"Dead, ain't he?" queried Benny, half-coughing over his words.

His fellows had drawn closer so that they stood in a ring about the body. One man alone held apart. Gratton's eyes were wild, void of purpose; the dead, chalky-white of his face turned a sickly greenish tinge. After a little, while no one paid any attention to him, he began a slow withdrawal, moving jerkily step by step, his dragging heels making long furrows in the snow. Then King, too, began to draw back, slipping quietly and swiftly through the screen of tree and bush, stepping in the tracks he had made coming hither, praying suddenly for further fast-falling snow to hide or obliterate the trail he had made. And for the moment he was not thinking of the gold which they, too, sought, and which he had meant to snatch away from under their noses. He thought only of Gloria. If that crowd, in its present temper, found the way to his camp—if, in one way or another, Gloria fell into their hands—then could she thank God for a clean bullet and a swift end of things.

Chapter XXIV

The mere fact of being absolutely alone from midday to dark would have been for Gloria an experience at any time and in any environment. Of her friends in the city there were many who had never in a lifetime known what it was to spend half a dozen consecutive daytime, waking hours in perfect solitude, catching not so much as a fleeting glimpse of a servant, a policeman, a nurse, or a street-car conductor in the echoing street. Solitude rendered rippleless by an absence of any familiar sound; neither the whisk of a maid's broom, the clang of a telephone bell, the buzz of motors, or the slamming of doors. At those intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness.

She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone. Five minutes later she began to stir restlessly; another five minutes and already she was listening for his return. Never once during the day was there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude door through which she thought to see him returning.

Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet. She drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire between it and herself. When she peered out across the desolate world she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal, insensate wilderness. And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the expressions of his own brutality.

After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped so readily. She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and forced herself to read. Pages eluded her, but here and there single lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks the garments of one going blindly through it. So she was arrested by the line: "In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth." And this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and walked back and forth impatiently. It was almost as though King had left the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told herself angrily that he was not like that, had never been like that. He was a mere brute of a man, not "such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world." He was, rather, unthinkably crude and boorish and detestable.

But, rebelling at utter loneliness, she was forced again and again to the only companion at hand. She read The Explorer, fascinated in a shivery, uncanny way by the first line, as though a ghostly voice were whispering to her from the black corners of the cave: "There's no sense in going further—it's the edge of cultivation." And later: "I faced the sheer main-ranges, whipping up and leading down." Others than she had gone into the last solitudes. Others who had joyed in it and sung of it! It was as though the dead shades of those others squatted at the edges of her fire and mocked at her. Then she could fancy that it was King himself jeering, and that he cried: "Then He chose me for His Whisper, and I've found it, and it's yours!"

She snapped the book shut. Later she opened it to the tale of Tomlinson. She did not entirely grasp it, but she could not entirely miss what it said. She hurried on; she wondered vaguely at the call of the Red Gods; here again, seeking distraction, she was whipped back to reality. There were the lines, staring at her, as though King had rewritten Kipling:

"Who hath smelt wood-smoke at twilight? Who hath heard the birch log burning? Who is quick to read the noises of the night?"

And the answer was: "Mark King." Even now it was a torturous twilight in the cave, even now she smelled wood-smoke; even now she was like one starting at the noises of the night….

"Man-stuff," she thought contemptuously. She had heard such an expression used in connection with the verses of this uncouth scribe. It did not strike her that man-stuff might well enough be woman-stuff also, being one or the other, or both, for the sheer reason that it was human. She chose to consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers, unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like the explorer; the impact of a storm's buffeting and the low appreciation of a full stomach drew limits marking his possibilities of expansion. He was a beast, and she hated the whole sex sweepingly and superbly. In great surges of genuine sympathy her heart went out to herself.

But, after all, the moments in which her thoughts were snared away from her fears and the oppression of loneliness were few and short. From wondering what kept King she passed to bitter anger that he should desert her so; she concluded that he was doing it with malicious intent.

Repeatedly she was tempted to go forth and seek Gratton: to hunt up and down until at last she came to him. Again and again she went to the mouth of the cave and looked forth. But each time she drew back, terrified at the thought of making her way unaided down the sheer cliff wall. She sought to tell herself that she was not afraid of the snow, of being lost, of being unable to find Gratton. But she could not climb down the cliff; she knew that she would fall. Dizzy and sick, shivering with dread and cold, she turned back always.

She let her fire die down, not noticing it. Then the cold reminded her, and she worked long building another. She knew where a block of matches was; she had seen King set it carefully away. In her excitement she struck dozens of matches, dropping the burnt ends about her.

At last her fire blazed up and she warmed herself. Then she was conscious of a strange faintness and realized that she was hungry. She went to their food cache and ransacked it hastily. She opened a tin of sardines and came back to the fire with it in her hands. She had no clear conception of the deed when, half of the fish consumed, the smelly stuff revolted her and she hurled the remaining part into the bed of coals.

* * * * *

King stamped the loose snow from his boots and came in. Gloria stood confronting him, tense, rigid, white-faced, her hands stiff at her sides. She wanted to cry out, to upbraid him, all of her fear of the day turned into molten anger, but at the moment her strength failed strangely, her heart seemed to be stopping, she choked up. The surge of her relief, like a suddenly released current, impacting with that other current of her unleashed anger, made of her consciousness a sort of wild, fuming whirlpool. Nothing was clear to her just then save that Mark King had come back and that, no doubt, his heart was filled with jeers; she could not read the expression of his shadowed face, but fancied it one of mockery.

King was tired throughout every muscle of his body. He set down his rifle, tossed his hat aside, and slumped down by the fire. Coming in from the storm-cleansed open he sniffed at the closeness of the cave. It was not alone the smell of smoke; his first thought was that Gloria had been cooking something. Then he noted the sardine-can. With a stick he raked it out of the coals. And now Gloria could read his expression well enough as he jerked his head up.

"In God's name," he demanded, "what do you mean by a thing like that? Are you stark, raving mad?"

For a moment she was at a loss to understand what had enraged him. The act of tossing the distasteful food into the fire had been purely involuntary; her conscious mind had hardly taken cognizance of the fact. When it dawned upon her what he meant, her own anger was still greater than her sense of her act's folly. But she found no ready answer to his accusation. She was not without reason; in their present predicament she was a fool to have done a thing like that; she could hardly believe that she had done it. And so she stared impudently at him and held her silence, and finally, with an elaborate shrug of disdainful shoulders, she turned her back on him.

But King flung to his feet and set his hands on her two shoulders and swung her about. Her eyes opened widely.

"Listen to me," he said angrily. "I am going to talk plain to you. You are a fool, a downright, empty-headed silly fool. What you have destroyed in wanton carelessness would have kept the life in a man a whole day. Haven't you sense enough to see it's going to be nip and tuck if we ever get out of this? You've shown yourself, from start to finish, a miserable cheat; there's no trust to be put in either your judgment or your intentions. Be still," he commanded, as she sought to wriggle out of his grasp, to avoid the direct blaze of his eyes. "I am going to do what I can for you; to see you safe through this, if I can. Not because you are anything to me, but just because you are Ben Gaynor's, and he is my friend. Understand?"

"You are hurting me," she said in defiance. "Take your dirty hands off."

"When I am done," he returned curtly. "I am going to stick to you and see you through, I tell you. But I am not going to have you throw all of our chances away by dumping grub into the fire. If you do one other brainless thing like that, and I catch you at it, I am going to tie you up, hand and foot, and keep you out of mischief."

"You wouldn't dare——"

But she knew better; he would dare anything. He was of the type that fought and sailed and ruled. Now, when having spoken his mind he turned away from her, she stared after him and watched him as he dropped back by the fire. Then she went slowly to her bed to hide her trembling, and lay down.

Presently she heard him stirring. She did not turn her head to look at him. But she knew that he was busied with supper. She smelt coffee, heard the clash of tin cup and plate, and realized that he was eating. She wondered if he had forgotten her. After a while she moved just a trifle and furtively; he had put away his dishes and was filling his pipe. And he knew that she was watching him.

"No," he said to her unspoken question. "I am not going to cook for you any more. I have had a hard day of it, doing the man's work. Had you done the woman's you would have had supper ready for me."

He lighted his pipe with a splinter of burning pine. Then for the first time he saw the waste of scattered matches on the floor. From them he looked to her in an amazement so sheer that it left him no word of expostulation. The suspicion actually came to him that the girl was mad. It was scarcely conceivable that a perfectly sane individual could do the things which she had done.

She saw him get up and begin gathering up all of the foodstuff. He carried it to the back of the cave, where he passed out of her sight in the dark. He was gone ten minutes and came back empty-handed. He made the second trip, after which there was left on a shelf of rock only half a dozen matches and enough food for one scanty meal. This Gloria ignored.

"Do you think," she said contemptuously, "that what you have hidden back there I couldn't find?"

"You could find it but you won't," he returned with quiet assurance that jerked the question from her:

"Why?"

"Because," he grunted contemptuously, "you are too much of a coward to go back there to look for it."

And in her heart she knew that here was but the mere truth. For, why was she not already in Gratton's camp? Her opportunity had come and gone—because she had been afraid.

Chapter XXV

King awoke filled with resolve and definite purpose. It was pitch dark, but he sensed the coming of wintry dawn. He drew on his boots and went to look out. It was still snowing, heavily, steadily, implacably. He kicked the loose fluffy stuff underfoot.

"The biggest storm in twenty years," he told himself. "And if any one of us in these mountains come out of them alive he'll have something to talk about. It's the real thing."

He went grimly about his fire-making, fixed purpose crystallizing to the smallest detail. Again he must seek immediately to locate his horse; one could eat horseflesh if driven to it. He must try to get game of some sort. And every lost hour meant lessened chances of his killing forest meat; deer and bear and the smaller folk, if they had been caught napping, would be scurrying out of the mountains long before now; soon the solitudes would be utterly barren and empty. He went to Gloria's bed.

"You'd better get up," he said briefly. "Time to start the day. While we eat I want to talk with you."

She awoke slowly, blinked at him, and only drew her blanket higher about her chin.

"I am tired," she answered petulantly. "Don't you realize that a girl…"

"I realize," he cut into her sleepy expostulation, "that you are weak and frightened and useless. And that those are three of the many things you've got to get over the shortest way if you don't want to die here."

"I don't know that I care to live," she began, turning with her old instinct toward an attitude which before now had robbed him of his harshness. But his plan was set in cold determination, and he cut her short again.

"If you don't care, I do. And I am going to pull you through with me, if for no other reason simply because I have set out to do it, and am not going to lie down on the job. What's more, you've got to do your share. I have built the fire; will you get up?"

"No," she flashed out at him, thoroughly awake now. "I won't!"

He stooped, caught the corner of her blankets, and whipped them off. Instinctively, she sought to draw the under-bedding over her, forgetting that she had not undressed.

"You brute!" she screamed at him.

"Get up," he told her sternly, "or, by heaven, I'll make you!"

She saw his face plainly now as his crackling fire burned higher. It was hard, his eyes were ominous. She hesitated and saw in his eyes and in a stir of his body that he was going to jerk her to her feet. She flung out of bed at that and upon the far side from him.

"Get your boots on," he ordered. "I don't want you catching cold from idiotic carelessness, and I won't have you going sick on my hands. For the first and last time I'll admit that I don't enjoy driving you like a cursed galley-slave. But I'll do it, and do a thorough job of it, if you force me to it."

She drew on her boots hastily and came to the fire and laced them. He was a new man this morning and relentless. She was afraid of him after a new, bewildered fashion.

"I never saw a storm worse than this," he told her. He had cooked the breakfast because he was in a hurry, and did not care to trust her wasteful fingers with their already precious food. "There must be two or three feet on the level places by now; ploughing through snow like that is killing work for a man, and you wouldn't last at it ten minutes." He had no intention of speaking contemptuously; she knew that his thought was not trifling with such matters as her feelings. He was merely indulging in plain talk. "We have enough food for a few days. After that, if we stuck on here and did not find more somehow, we'd die like dogs. Therefore we are going to get ready to beat it out the first chance we get."

"But if I wouldn't last ten minutes, as you so elegantly put it?"

"Not as you are; not as the snow is. But I'm hoping that before it's too late we'll get clear weather, a sun, a thaw, and freezing nights. Then we could tackle it on the crust. And your job now is to get yourself ready for that one chance."

Her anger at the indignity already done her whipped out the sarcasm:

"By getting ready, I suppose you mean for me to pack my trunk and order the expressman at the door?"

He looked at her with a long, impersonal stare which bewildered her; she was at utter loss to read its meaning until he spoke:

"You are to pack what endurance you've got into your muscles. You are to make up your mind to call up all of the grit that's in you. You'll need both. And you are to quit lying around and getting weaker every day; you've got little enough time to harden yourself, so you are going to take on the job right now."

She gasped, incredulous. He nodded sternly.

"Gloria," he said tersely, "I am going to do all that I can for both of us. You are going to do all that you can. That is final."

She bit her lips and gave him her scornful silence. The blood was red and hot in her cheeks.

She ignored him when he called crisply that breakfast was ready. There were limits to her obedience, she thought rebelliously. To be told do this, do that, to arise when this man's body was rested, to eat when his stomach was empty, was intolerable. King looked at her and had the understanding to grasp something of her thought. So he explained:

"I want you to come outside with me. You'll find it hard work. It would be a first-rate idea if you'd fortify your strength by the little bit of nourishment which we can afford to take. No? Well, I'm sorry.—Here." He offered her the pieces of a sack he had cut in two for her. "Tie those about your feet to keep them from freezing."

"When I want your advice, I'll ask for it," she retorted icily.

"Very well," he answered. "And I can't make you eat if you don't want to. After all, perhaps you are not hungry." He set aside her portion. "You'll have the appetite for that when we get back."

She had the appetite now. But she would prefer to starve, she honestly thought at the moment, than eat when he told her to eat. Now he finished in silence. She saw him glance at his watch. Her heart seemed scarcely to stir in her breast; then slowly it began to beat, swifter and swifter, hammering wildly. He had said that she was going out with him; what he promised to do, she realized again, he would do, if it were humanly possible. She wanted to run, run anywhere, just to be lost to him. And yet she stood stock-still and rigid, while her heart hastened and leaped and her mind sought to grasp the thing to do. She must go with him, do what he told her like a slave, as he had said, or he would make her. Her reason said directly: "You will go without a word." And yet, when he arose to his feet and knocked his pipe out and looked at her, her reason fled before the flood of the passionate wilfulness of the old Gloria, and she cried shrilly: