e signs--here--here--here."

He indicated the heights he had scanned. They stepped a bit nearer and
looked. Several pairs of Valley eyes saw what Dick Compos had seen, a
sign so fine that few would have called it that--merely a brushing, a
smoothing of the fine-sandstone surface where a man's shoulders, his
hips, his knees might have pressed had he stood waiting there.

A bit nearer the standing pinnacle of rock, they were evident again.

With one accord they turned and looked down the canyon to where that
thin line sprayed the face. A close shot, such as would be necessary
in the darkness of the cut. Albright and Compos both stepped to the
rock and stood looking with those narrowed, concentrated eyes.

Suddenly Albright, looking back across his shoulders, moved like a cat
and picked up something from ten feet away.

He held it on his palm--an empty shell, such as fitted a .44 Smith and
Wesson.

He scanned it minutely, turned it over this way and that, looked at it
fore and aft.

"Firin' pin's nicked," he said, "an' a leetle off centre."

For ten minutes the thing went from hand to hand.

Then Kenset gave it to the coroner.

"There's your clew, Mr. Banner," he said. "Now we can begin. Let us be
going back to Corvan."

And so it was that Old Pete, the snow-packer, went back in state to
the Golden Cloud, by relays on men's shoulders down the sounding
passes, through the dead cut, by pack-horse across the levels, lashed
stiffly to the saddle, a pitiful burden.

Tharon Last, riding close after the calm fashion of a strong man in
the face of tragedy, thought pensively of that night in spring when
this little old man had taken his life in his hands to save her own.

It was a gift he had given her, nothing less, and she made up her mind
that Old Pete should sleep in peace under the pointing pine at Last's
Holding--and that his cross should also stand beside those other two
in the carved granite.

Billy, watching, read her mind with the half-tragic eyes of love.

Kenset, seemingly unconscious, but keenly alive to everything, was at
great loss to do so.

He hoped, with a surging tenseness, that this fateful thing was
sliding over into his hands to work out, his and Banner's. He knew
full well that he and Banner both were like to be slated for an early
death, but he did not care. In Corvan, night had fallen when the
cavalcade passed through.

Bullard of the Golden Cloud had the grace to come out and look at t