bysses spiked with pines.
Storms overtook them, and forced them to remain many hours in such
shelter as they could find. Sometimes they slept under overhanging
rocks with a fire blazing at their feet, but more often the night was
spent in burrows dug in the snow. Their supply of venison ran out, and
a day was lost while Pete hunted and killed a deer, and cooked strips
of its flesh, to be seasoned with the very last of their salt and
pepper, and kept in his knapsack. But even Marion did not lose courage
or once falter, though many times her heart was in her mouth and a
cold sweat on her forehead as they passed some formidable and
terrifying obstacle.

At length, on a bright and glittering day, when it seemed the storms
had finally abandoned their enmity, they climbed slowly up the long
slopes to Simpson's Pass, and stood at noon high above a wide and
wonderful world of snow, with white mountains succeeding one another,
range on range, as far as their eyes could reach before them and
behind. And that afternoon, as they toiled around the shoulder of Big
Bear Mountain, they stopped and gazed,--Marion with tears streaming
down her cheeks, and Haig with his hands clenched tightly at his
sides. For there, still far away below them, but _there_ beyond all
mistake, lay Paradise Park, very white and still and glittering in the
sun; and off at the right was Thunder Mountain, squatting among the
silver peaks, its sullen head half hidden by gray-black clouds.

CHAPTER XXIX

GHOSTS

The lamp had not been lighted in the sitting-room at Huntington's, but
the pitch log blazing in the great fireplace reddened the farthest
corners of the room, and flushed the somber faces of Seth and Claire.
Their habit, in these days of grief, was to sit the winter evenings
through almost in silence, their self-reproaches long since spent,
their hopes turned to ashes, which Claire alone tried sometimes to fan
into a glow. They had eaten their supper before twilight, without
speech, and then, as always, waited wearily for sleep.

"It will be three months and two weeks to-morrow," she said, without
looking away from the fire.

"Yes," answered Huntington.

"Isn't it possible she may have reached--"

"It's no use, Claire, thinking such things."

"But Pete! He hasn't come back, and maybe that means--"

She did not even finish the sentence, which simply faded away on her
lips, a useless and foolish conjecture.

Another long silence follo