hoever signalled from there; keeping one eye open for Aaron. I'm going to
trail that automobile as far as it went, and follow whatever met or left
it. We'll likely meet somewhere, over in the Cold Water country."
A minute later the two men who had planned to ride together were going in
opposite directions.
Following the Fairlands road until he came to where the Galena Valley road
branches off from the Clear Creek way, three miles below the Power-House
at the mouth of the canyon, Brian Oakley found the tracks of an
automobile--made without doubt, during the night just past. The machine
had gone up the Galena Valley road, and had returned.
A little before noon, the officer stood where the automobile had stopped
and turned around for the return trip. The place was well up toward the
head of the valley, near the mouth of a canyon that leads upward toward
Granite Peak. An hour's careful work, and the Ranger uncovered a small
store of supplies; hidden a quarter of a mile up the canyon. There were
tracks leading away up the side of the mountain. Turning his horse loose
to find its way home; Brian Oakley, without stopping for lunch, set out on
the trail.
* * * * *
High up on Granite Peak, Aaron King was bending over the print of a
slender shoe, beside the track of a heavy hob-nailed boot. Somewhere in
Clear Creek canyon, Jack Carleton was riding to gain the point where the
artist stood. At the foot of the mountain, on the other side of the range,
Brian Oakley was setting out to follow the faint trail that started at the
supplies brought by the automobile, in the night, from Fairlands.
Chapter XXXV
A Hard Way
When Sibyl Andres left the studio, after meeting Mrs. Taine, her mind was
dominated by one thought--that she must get away from the world that saw
only evil in her friendship with Aaron King--a friendship that, to the
mountain girl, was as pure as her relations to Myra Willard or Brian
Oakley.
Under the watchful, experienced care of the woman with the disfigured
face, only the worthy had been permitted to enter into the life of this
child of the hills. Sibyl's character--mind and heart and body and
soul--had been formed by the strength and purity of her mountain
environment; by her association with her parents, with Myra Willard, and
with her parents' life-long friends; and by her mental comradeship with
the greatest spirits that music and literature have given to
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