uld
have gone; there was nothing to draw him in her absence. He kept in
touch, none too close, with Ben Gaynor; telephoned him once from Coloma,
and once sent a note to him by a hunter he encountered on Five Lakes
Creek, above Hell Hole, the note to be mailed in Truckee some time
later, and to reach Gaynor the following day at his lumber-camp. These
were strenuous days during which King penetrated the most out-of-the-way
corners of the mountains. He constructed his theories and strove
doggedly to set them to the proof. He held that when Baldy Winch had
made him a cabin in so inaccessible and distant a spot as the crest of
Lookout Ridge, it had been because Winch, the sole survivor of those
hardy spirits who had been of Gus Ingle's party, was of a mind to make
sure, day after day, that no other men went where he had been. Perhaps
he knew that he alone remained alive; that the secret was his; that he
had but to wait the winter out, to sit through the spring thaw, and then
go back to claim his own. A man like Baldy Winch, as King envisioned
him, would do that. Hence, from Lookout Ridge one should be able to see
the very point, or a peak standing over the very point, where Gus
Ingle's men had gone. But always the one difficulty: that point might be
a mile away, or ten, twenty, thirty miles away. There was nothing to do
but seek--and he knew that always Swen Brodie, too, was seeking, Brodie
and the men of his own kind whom likeness drew to likeness. So King
spent day after day in the canons and on the ridges, and yet, through
Ben Gaynor, thought to keep an eye on old Loony Honeycutt.

But there were many hours, alone in the forests resting, sitting over a
bubbling coffee-pot, lying in his blankets under the stars, that King
thought very little of Brodie, Gus Ingle, or Honeycutt. There were times
when the solitudes were empty; when a new, strange feeling of loneliness
swept overpoweringly over him. At such moments he fancied that a girl
came stealing through the trees to him; that she slipped her hand into
his own; that she lifted to his her soft eyes; that something within the
soul of him spoke to her and that she answered. His pulses quickened; a
great yearning as of infinite hunger possessed him. He remembered how
they had stood together upon the ridge the last time; how his arms had
been opening for her; the look in her eyes. That had been a moment when
the world had lain at their feet; when they had been lifted up and up,