day across the heights where King stood, it would be an hour and longer
before the sun got down into the cañons and meadows. He saw the flare of
a camp-fire shining bright through the dark of a low-lying flat two
miles or more from his vantage-point. Brodie would be cooking his
breakfast now.

After that King did not again climb up where his body would stand out
against the sky which was filling so brightly with the new morning. He
moved along the ridge steadily and swiftly like a man with a definite
objective who did not care to be spied on. In twenty minutes, after many
a hazardous passage along a steep bare surface, he came to a spot where
the knife edge of the ridge was broken down and blunted into a fairly
level space a hundred yards across. Here was an accumulation of soil
worn down from the granite above, and here, an odd, isolated tuft of
scrawny verdure, grew a small grove of trees, stunted pine and
scraggling brush.

Toward the far end of this upland flat was the disintegrating ruin of a
cabin. The walls had disappeared long ago, save for two or three rotting
logs, but a small rectangle of slightly raised ground indicated how they
had extended. Even the rock chimney had fallen away, but something of
the fireplace, black with burning, stood where labouring hands had
placed it more than half a century before.

Here he made his own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack,
dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his
presence. For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something
less than human not to turn his chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the
spot where he had abandoned his fallen companion.