e forth after fuel. Trees stood all
about the little glade: he couldn't have gone far. The inference was
obvious: whatever disaster had befallen him must have occurred within a
few hundred yards of the cave.

Holding her torch high she went to the edge of the glade and again
called into the gloom. There was no repression in her voice now. She
called as loudly as she could. She started to push on into the fringe of
timber.

But at once she paused, holding hard on her self-control. It was folly
to make a blind search. To penetrate the dark mystery of the forest with
only this little light--already flickering out--would probably result in
becoming lost herself. Such a course would not help Ben's cause.
Evidently he was lying within a few hundred feet of her,
unconscious--perhaps dead--or he would have replied to her call.

Dead! The thought sped an icy current throughout the hydraulic system of
her veins.

She was a mountain girl, and she made no further false motions. She
turned at once to the cave, and piling up her kindling, built a fire
just at the mouth of the cave. It was protected here in some degree from
the rain, and the wind was right to carry the smoke away. This fire
would serve to keep her direction and lead her back to the cavern.

Once more she ventured into the storm, and gathering all the cut fuel
she could find, piled it on her fire. The two spruce chunks that Ben had
cut for their fireside seats were placed as back logs. Then she hunted
for pine knots taken from the scrub pines that grew in scattering clumps
among the spruce, and which were laden with pitch.

One of these knots she put in the iron pan they used for frying, then
lighted it. Then she pushed into the timber.

Holding her light high she began to encircle the glade clear to the
barrier of the cliffs. To the eyes of the wild creatures this might have
been a never-to-be-forgotten picture: the slight form of the girl, her
face blanched and her eyes wide and dark in the flaring light, her
grotesque torch and its weird shadows, and then rain sweeping down
between. She reached the cliff, then started back, making a wider
circle.

Adding fresh fuel to the torch, she peered into every covert and
examined with minute care any human-shaped shadow in that eerie world of
shadows; but the long half-circle brought her back to the cliff wall
without results. She was already wet to the skin, and her pine knots
were nearly spent. Ever the load of dr