he dawn. In his roll, the handle slipped
out so that it might lie snug against the steel head, was a short
miner's pick. A little below where Parker lay in his last wide-eyed
vigil under the stars, King found a fairly level space free of rock and
carpeted in young grass. Here with a pine-tree to mark head and foot, he
worked at the shallow grave. He put his own blanket down, laid the quiet
figure gently upon it, bringing the ends over to cover him. He marked
the spot with a pile of rocks; he blazed the two trees. It was all that
he could do; far more than Andy Parker would have done for him or for
any other man.

The sun was rising when, he made his way to the top of the ridge and
came to stand where he had seen Parker and Swen Brodie side by side. He
clambered on until he came to the very crest over which Swen Brodie had
disappeared. Just where had Brodie gone? He wondered. The answer came
before the question could have been put into words. Though it was full
day across the heights where King stood, it would be an hour and longer
before the sun got down into the canons and meadows. He saw the flare of
a camp-fire shining bright through the dark of a low-lying flat two
miles or more from his vantage-point. Brodie would be cooking his
breakfast now.

After that King did not again climb up where his body would stand out
against the sky which was filling so brightly with the new morning. He
moved along the ridge steadily and swiftly like a man with a definite
objective who did not care to be spied on. In twenty minutes, after many
a hazardous passage along a steep bare surface, he came to a spot where
the knife edge of the ridge was broken down and blunted into a fairly
level space a hundred yards across. Here was an accumulation of soil
worn down from the granite above, and here, an odd, isolated tuft of
scrawny verdure, grew a small grove of trees, stunted pine and
scraggling brush.

Toward the far end of this upland flat was the disintegrating ruin of a
cabin. The walls had disappeared long ago, save for two or three rotting
logs, but a small rectangle of slightly raised ground indicated how they
had extended. Even the rock chimney had fallen away, but something of
the fireplace, black with burning, stood where labouring hands had
placed it more than half a century before.

Here he made his own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack,
dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his
pres