: the address was genuine, but the man was gone.
For days Frawley had the city scoured without gaining a clue. No steamer
had left the harbor, not even a tramp. If Greenfield was not in hiding,
he must have buried himself in the interior.

It was a week before Frawley found the track. Greenfield had walked
thirty miles into the country and taken the train for Rio Mendoza on the
route across the Andes to Valparaiso.

Frawley followed the same day, somewhat mystified at this sudden change
of base. In the train the thermometer stood at 116 deg.. The heat made of
everything a solitude. Frawley, lifeless, stifling, and numbed, glued
himself to the air-holes with eyes fastened on the horizon, while the
train sped across the naked, singeing back of the plains like the welt
that springs to meet the fall of the lash. For two nights he watched the
distended sun, exhausted by its own madness, drop back into the heated
void, and the tortured stars rise over the stricken desert. At the end
of thirty-six hours of agony he arrived at Rio Mendoza. Thence he
reached Punta de Vacas, procured mules and a guide, and prepared for
the ascent over the mountains.

At two o'clock the next morning he began to climb out of hell. The
tortured plains settled below him. A divine freshness breathed upon him
with a new hope of life. He left the burning conflict of summer and
passed into the aroma of spring.

Then the air grew intense, a new suffocation pressed about his
temples--the suffocation of too much life. In an hour he had run the
gamut of the seasons. The cold of everlasting winter descended and stung
his senses. Up and up and up they went--then suddenly down, with the
half-breed guide and the tireless mule always at the same distance
before him; and again began the insistent mechanical toiling upward. He
grew listless and indifferent, acquiescent in these steep efforts that
the next moment must throw away. The horror of immense distance rose
about him. From time to time a stone dislodged by their passage rushed
from under him, struck the brink, and spun into the void, to fall
endlessly. The face of the earth grew confused and dropped in a mist
from before his eyes.

Then as they toiled still upward, a gale as though sent in anger rushed
down upon them, sweeping up whirlwinds of snow, raging and shrieking,
dragging them to the brink, and threatening to blot them out.

Frawley clutched the saddle, then flung his arms about the neck of his