he had once or twice been even brazen enough to assert that he had lost
his way in the mountain fastnesses. But, for all his protestations, no
one when he left in June expected to see him again before September at
the earliest. In these solitary tours he was busy and happy, working
and playing. "Work," he would say, "is something you want to get done;
play is something you jest like to be doin'. Snoopin' up these gulches
is both of 'em to me."

And so he loitered through the mountains, resting here, climbing there,
making always a shrewd, close reading of the rocks.

It was thus Billy Brue found him at the end of his second day's search.
A little off the trail, at the entrance to a pocket of the canon, he
towered erect to peer down when he heard the noise of the messenger's
ascent. Standing beside a boulder of grey granite, before a background
of the gnarled dwarf-cedars, his hat off, his blue shirt open at the
neck, his bare forearms brown, hairy, and muscular, a hammer in his
right hand, his left resting lightly on his hip, he might have been the
Titan that had forged the boulder at his side, pausing now for breath
before another mighty task. Well over six feet tall, still straight as
any of the pines before him, his head and broad shoulders in the easy
poise of power, there was about him from a little distance no sign of
age. His lines were gracefully full, his bearing had still the
alertness of youth. One must have come as near as Billy Brue now came
to detect the marks of time in his face. Not of age--merely of time;
for here was no senility, no quavering or fretful lines. The grey eyes
shone bright and clear from far under the heavy, unbroken line of brow,
and the mouth was still straight and firmly held, a mouth under sure
control from corner to corner. A little had the years brought out the
rugged squareness of the chin and the deadly set of the jaws; a little