p there on sunny days--Mike had seen them also. And there
was nothing in the nature of Taylor Rock itself to produce either
smoke or flashes of light. No one but a spy would stay in so bleak a
place. That was clear enough to Mike by this time; what he must find
out was why one spy followed another spy.

The very next day Marion left the cabin and set forth with a square
package under her arm. Mike, watching from where he was at work
getting out timbers for next year's assessment work on the claims,
waited until she had passed him at a short distance, going down the
trail toward Quincy. When she had reached the line of timber that
stood thick upon the slope opposite the basin, he saw Kate, bulky in
sweater and coat, come from the cabin and take the trail after Marion.
When she also had disappeared in the first wooded curve of the trail,
up the hill, Mike struck his axe bit-deep into the green log he was
clearing of branches, and shambled after her, going by a short cut
that brought him into the trail within calling distance of Kate.

For half a mile the road climbed through deep forest. Marion walked
steadily along, taking no pains to hide her tracks in the snow that
lay there white as the day on which it had fallen. Bluejays screamed
at her as she passed, but there was no other sound. Even the uneasy
wind was quiet that day, and the faint scrunching of Marion's feet in
the frozen snow when she doubled back on a curve in the trail, came to
Kate's ears quite plainly.

At the top of the hill where the wind had lifted the snow into drifts
that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head
turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her. She
thought she heard the scrunch of Kate's feet down there, but she was
not sure. She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right,
chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot
showed between two bushes. Her left foot scraped the snow in making
the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to
pass it over. She ducked behind a chunky young cedar, waited there for
a breath or two and then ran down the steep hillside, keeping always
on the bare ground as much as possible. Lower down, where the sun was
shut away and the wind was sent whistling overhead to the next
hilltop, the snow lay knee deep and even. But Kate would never come
this far off the trail, Marion was sure. She believed that Kate
suspected her of wal