of him, cut across the road and detoured
into the scraggly hills on the other side, without noticing the
approaching Houston in the shadows. But Barry had been more fortunate.
The moonlight had shown full on the man's lean face and gangling form;
it was undoubtedly Fred Thayer. He was still in the neighborhood, then.

Had he been the man in the woods,--the one who had stood silhouetted on
the hill top? Barry could only guess. Again he chided himself for his
inquisitiveness and walked on. Almost to Ba'tiste's cabin he went; at
last to turn from the road at the sound of hoofbeats, then to stare as
Medaine Robinette, on horseback, passed him at a trot, headed toward
her home, the shadowy Lost Wing, on his calico pony, straggling along
in the rear. The next morning he went to Denver, still wondering, as
he sought to make himself comfortable on the old red plush seats,
wondering whether the girl he had seen in the forest with the man he
now felt sure was Fred Thayer had been Agnes Jierdon or Medaine
Robinette, whom, in spite of her coldness to him, in spite of her
evident distaste and revulsion that was so apparent in their meetings,
had awakened within him a thing he had believed, in the drabness of his
gray, harassed life, could never exist,--the thrill and the yearnings
of love.

It was a question which haunted him during the days in which he cut
into his bank account with the purchase of the bare necessities of a
sawmill. It was a question which followed him back to Tabernacle,
thence across country to camp. But it was one that was not to be
answered. Things had happened again.

Ba'tiste was not at the mill, where new foundations had appeared in
Houston's absence. A workman pointed vaguely upward, and Barry hurried
on toward the lake, clambering up the hill nearest the clearing, that
he might take the higher and shorter road.

He found no Ba'tiste but there was something else which held Houston's
interest for a moment and which stopped him, staring wonderingly into
the distance. A new skidway had made its appearance on the side of the
jutting mountain nearest the dam. Logs were tumbling downward in slow,
but steady succession, to disappear, then to show themselves, bobbing
jerkily outward toward the center of the lake. That skidway had not
been there before. Certainly, work at the mill had not progressed to
such an extent that Ba'tiste could afford to start cutting timber
already. Houston turned back