fine," he argued with himself. "A woman must have possessed more than a
beautiful body to have become the center of his life. She must, at the
start, have possessed some capacity of feeling."

He put his thumb on the spring to open the lower case, but the image so
clearly fixed in his mind stayed the impulse. "What is the use?" he
exclaimed, and thrusting the watch back into the bag, quickly tied the
string. "I don't want to see you. I don't want to know you," and he added,
pushing the poke into its place and closing the box; "The facts are all
against you."

CHAPTER IV

SNOQUALMIE PASS AND A BROKEN AXLE

Tisdale leaned forward in his seat in the observation car. His rugged
features worked a little, and his eyes had their far-sighted gaze. Scarred
buttes crowded the track; great firs, clinging with exposed roots to the
bluffs, leaned in menace, and above the timber belt granite pyramids and
fingers shone amethyst against the sky; then a giant door closed on this
vestibule of the Pass, and he was in an amphitheatre of lofty peaks. The
eastbound began to wind and lift like a leviathan seeking a way through.
It crept along a tilting shelf, rounded a sheer spur, and ran shrieking
over a succession of trestles, while the noise of the exhausts rang a
continuous challenge from shoulder and crag. Then suddenly a mighty summit
built like a pulpit of the gods closed behind, and a company of still
higher mountains encircled the gorge. Everywhere above the wooded slopes
towered castellated heights and spires.

Presently a near cliff came between him and the higher view and, with a
lift and drop of his square shoulders, he settled back in his chair. He
drew his hand across his eyes, the humorous lines deepened and, like one
admitting a weakness, he shook his head. It was always so; the sight of
any mountains, a patch of snow on a far blue ridge, set his pulses
singing; wakened the wanderlust for the big spaces in God's out-of-doors.
And this canyon of the Snoqualmie was old, familiar ground. He had served
his surveyor's apprenticeship on these western slopes of the Cascades. He
had triangulated most of these peaks, named some of them, and he had
carried a transit to these headwaters, following his axman often over a
new trail. Now, far, far down between the columns of hemlock and fir, he
caught glimpses of the State road on the opposite bank of the stream that,
like a lost river, went forever seeking a way out, and final