her shoulder. But even as she set out, she hesitated and turned
back; resolutely taking up her fishing-tackle again, as though, angry with
herself for her state of mind, she was determined to indulge no longer her
mood of indecision.

But the fishing did not go well. To properly cast a trout-fly, one's
thoughts must be upon the art. A preoccupied mind and wandering attention
tends to a tangled line, a snarled leader, and all sorts of aggravating
complications. Sibyl--usually so skillful at this most delicate of
sports--was as inaccurate and awkward, this day, as the merest tyro. The
many pools and falls and swirling eddies of Clear Creek held for her, now,
memories more attractive, by far, than the wary trout they sheltered. The
familiar spots she had known since childhood were haunted by a something
that made them seem new and strange.

At last,--thoroughly angry with her inability to control her mood, and
half ashamed of the thoughts that forced themselves so insistently upon
her; with her nerves and muscles craving the action that would bring the
relief of physical weariness,--she determined to leave the more familiar
ground, for the higher and less frequented waters of Fern Creek. Climbing
out of the canyon, by the steep, almost stair-like trail on the San
Bernardino side, she walked hard and fast to reach Lone Cabin by noon.
But, before she had finished her lunch, she decided not to fish there,
after all; but to go on, over the still harder trail to Burnt Pine on
Laurel Creek, and, returning to the lower canyon by the Laurel trail, to
work down Clear Creek on the way to her home, in the late afternoon and
twilight.

The trail up the almost precipitous wall of the gorge at Lone Cabin, and
over the mountain spur to Laurel Creek, is one that calls for a clear head
and a sure foot. It is not a path for the city bred to essay, save with
the ready arm of a guide. But the hill-trained muscles and nerves of Sibyl
Andres gloried in the task. The cool-headed, mountain girl enjoyed the
climb from which her city sisters would have drawn back in trembling fear.

Once, at a point perhaps two-thirds of the height to the top, she halted.
Her ear had caught a slight noise above her head, as a few pebbles rolled
down the almost perpendicular face of the wall and bounded from the trail
where she stood, into the depths below. For a few minutes, the girl, on
the little, shelf-like path that was scarcely wider than the span of her
t