of the day. Adams made a verbal
report which led him by successive steps up to the twilight hour when
he had stood with Branagan on the brink of the placer drain, but,
strangely enough, there was no stirring of memory to recall the
incident of the upward-climbing miners.

When Winton rose he said something about mounting a night guard on the
engine, which was kept under steam at all hours; and shortly afterward
he left the dinkey ostensibly to do it, declining Adams' offer of
company. But once out-of-doors he climbed straight to the operator's
tent on the snow-covered slope. Carter had turned in, but he sat up in
his bunk at the noise of the intrusion.

"That you, Mr. Winton? Want to send something?" he asked.

"No, go to sleep. I'll write a wire and leave it for you to send in
the morning."

He sat down at the packing-case instrument table and wrote out a brief
report of the day's progress in track-laying for the general manager's
record. But when Carter's regular breathing told him he was alone he
pushed the pad aside, took down the sending-hook, and searched until
he had found the original copy of the message which had reached him at
the moment of cataclysms in the lobby of the Buckingham.

"Um," he said, and his heart grew warm within him. "It's just about as
I expected: Morty didn't have anything whatever to do with it--except
to sign and send it as she commanded him to." And the penciled sheet
was folded carefully and filed in permanence in the inner breast
pocket of his brown duck shooting-coat.

The moon was rising behind the eastern mountain when he extinguished
the candle and went out. Below lay the chaotic construction camp
buried in silence and in darkness save for the lighted windows of the
dinkey. He was not quite ready to go back to Adams, and after making a
round of the camp and bidding the engine watchman keep a sharp lookout
against a possible night surprise, he set out to walk over the
newly-laid track of the day.

Another half-hour had elapsed, and a waning moon was clearing the
topmost crags of Pacific Peak when he came out on the high embankment
opposite the Rosemary, having traversed the entire length of the
lateral loop and inspected the trestle at the gulch head by the light
of a blazing spruce-branch.

The station with its two one-car trains, and the shacks of the little
mining-camp beyond, lay shimmering ghost-like in the new-born light of
the moon. The engine of the sheriff's car w