nd half-dazed, but for a time we pushed on together.
Then one day I found myself in the thick timber alone. Verneille must
have kept the range, and I was in the valley. I was very sick when I
struck the prospector's camp, and when I came round I had only the
haziest memory of the journey."

"If we can find a spot where the valley dies out into the range, it
will probably be where you left him," said Weston. "It would give us a
point to work from. In the meanwhile we want a place to camp."

They went down to the first of the timber, and, spreading their
blankets in a cranny of the rocks, built a great fire soon after
darkness fell. Weston, who made the fire, filled the blackened kettle
with water from the creek, and Grenfell, who crouched beside the
snapping branches, also left him to prepare the supper. They had been
on their feet since sunrise, and it was evident that he was very
weary. He recovered a little when he had eaten, but he leaned back
against the wet rock with a furrowed face when Weston took out his
pipe.

"Abstinence has its drawbacks," he said, shivering in the bitter wind
which whirled the stinging smoke about them. "With a very small
measure of whisky one could be warm and content." He glanced back into
the darkness that hid the towering peaks. "Verneille's to be
envied--he's well out of it."

"You said that before," said Weston, in whose veins life ran hot and
strong.

"I did," his companion replied, with a little hollow laugh. "You'll
find out some day that I was right. He was dead when he fell to pieces
in the wind and weather."

"Of course!" said Weston with a trace of impatience, for Grenfell's
half-maudlin observations occasionally jarred on him; but the latter
still looked at him with a curious smile.

"Keep clear of drugs and whisky. It's good advice," he said. "You may
go a long way before you die."

"I'd feel a little more sure of it if we could find the mine. It would
give you a lift up, too."

Grenfell shook his head.

"It could never lift me back to where I was," he said. "Could it give
me the steady nerves and the brain I used to have? There was a time
when scarcely a big mine was started in the west before they sent
their specimens to me. What could success offer me now besides a few
more years of indulgence and an opportunity for drinking myself into
my grave in comfort and with comparative decency?"

Weston supposed that this was the effect of weariness; but his comrade