on round-ups."

"Could an auto go ahead on it?"

"Yes, I guess so. By hard driving."

"Then he's up there."

Weir ran back to his car, jumped in.

"Let me go with you," Johnson shouted after him.

"No, I can handle the fellow," the engineer answered. And again his
machine started on. "How long ago was it that you heard him, Mary?"
was his parting question.

"'Bout fifteen minutes ago," she cried.

Fifteen minutes! But the girl's reckoning might be vague, and
"fifteen" minutes be half an hour. At any rate, with the road
ascending among the peaks Sorenson's speed would be greatly
diminished. The incline would be against him, the uneven twisting
rain-washed trail would require careful driving, the rain would hamper
his sight. Yet the fellow he pursued could not be more than three or
four miles ahead at most.

On and on Weir pressed. The mist thickened; black wet tree trunks
loomed before him like ghosts and sank out of view again; the road
wound along the stream among rocks and bushes and over hillocks with
all the difficult sinuosity of a serpent's track; in his ears
persisted the chuckling talk of the creek, flowing in darkness except
when lighted by his car's lamps as the machine plunged through a ford,
as became more and more frequent with the ascent and the narrowing of
the canyon.

Five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles he must have come since leaving
the ranch house. His car now was high in the mountain range, running
on low gear, the engine working hard in the thin air and against the
steep grade. He was not making more than five miles an hour, he
judged, at this moment. The radiator was boiling and steaming like a
cauldron. But he might be sure that if his travel was slow, Sorenson's
was no better; the road was the same for the pursued as for the
pursuer.

At the end of another half hour he came around a ledge of rock, where
the creek flowed some fifty feet below and the granite wall allowed
just room to pass in a hair-pin turn. There a light gleamed before him
like a beacon, a dim gleam of a window. It was perhaps a hundred yards
distant. It marked the end of the trail, the end of the search.

Here was Janet Hosmer!

And he had come in time. They could not have been here long, for
Sorenson's start had not been sufficient for that; the scoundrel had
not yet recovered his breath from his hard drive, so to speak. He
probably would imagine himself safe and so be in no haste to
consummate his vile pl