_Chapter III_


To have followed the pace which he set that day would have broken the
heart of any but a seasoned mountaineer. No man in these mountains could
have so much as kept him in sight, saving alone Swen Brodie, and he was
left far back yonder, miles on the other, lower, side of the ridge. By
mid-forenoon King had outstripped the springtime and was among snow
patches which grew in frequency and extent; at noon he built his little
fire on a snow crust. He crossed a raging tributary of the American,
travelling upward along the rock-bound, spray-wet gorge a full mile
before he came to the possible precarious ford. At six o'clock he made a
second fire in a bleak windy pass, surrounded by a glimmering ghostly
waste. Trees were stiff with frost; the wind whistled and jeered through
them and about sharp crags, filling the crisp air with eerie,
shuddersome music. He set his coffee to boil while meditating that down
in the Sacramento Valley, which one could glimpse from here by day, it
was stifling hot, like midsummer. He rested by his fire with his canvas
drawn up about his shoulders, smoked his pipe, remade his pack, and went
on. He counted on the moon presently and a bed at a slightly lower
altitude among the trees; to-night Andy Parker was sleeping in his army
blanket.

He crunched along over the snow crust which rarely failed him, and
though the daylight passed swiftly, the dead-white surface seemed to
hold an absorbed radiance and shed it softly. By the time he got down to
the timber-line again the moon was up. He left the country of Five Lakes