a fire, and, with his back to the rock, ate a little of the
food he carried. Far up on that wind-swept, mountain ridge, the night was
bitter cold. Again and again he aroused himself from the weary stupor that
numbed his senses, and replenished the fire, or forced himself to pace to
and fro upon the ledge. Overhead, he saw the stars glittering with a
strange brilliancy. In the canyon, far below, there were a few twinkling
lights to mark the Carleton ranch, and the old home of Sibyl, where Conrad
Lagrange and Myra Willard waited. Miles away, the lights of the towns
among the orange groves, twinkled like feeble stars in another feeble
world. The cold wind moaned and wailed in the dark pines and swirled about
the cliff in sudden gusts. A cougar screamed somewhere on the
mountainside below. An answering scream came from the ledge above his
head. The artist threw more fuel upon his fire, and grimly walked his
beat.

In the cold, gray dawn of that Friday morning, he ate a few mouthfuls of
his scanty store of food and, as soon as it was light,--even while the
canyon below was still in the gloom,--started on his way.

It was eleven o'clock when, almost exhausted, he reached what he knew must
be the peak that he had seen through his glass the day before. There was
little or no vegetation upon that high, wind-swept point. The side toward
the distant peak from which the artist had seen the signals, was an abrupt
cliff--hundreds of feet of sheer, granite rock. From the rim of this
precipice, the peak sloped gradually down and back to the edge of the
pines that grew about its base. The ground in the open space was bare and
hard.

Carefully, Aaron King searched--as he had seen the Ranger do--for signs.
Beginning at a spot near the edge of the cliff, he worked gradually, back
and forth, in ever widening arcs, toward the pines below. He was almost
ready to give up in despair, cursing himself for being such a fool as to
think that he could pick up a trail, when, clearly marked in a bit of
softer soil, he saw the print of a hob-nailed boot.

Instantly the man's weariness was gone. The long, hard way he had come was
forgotten. Insensible, now, to hunger and fatigue, he moved eagerly in the
direction the boot-track pointed. He was rewarded by another track. Then,
as he moved nearer the softer ground, toward the trees, another and
another and then--

The man--worn by his physical exertion, and by his days of mental
anguish--for a momen