But though this seemed the one consideration of importance in all the world for her just now, in another instant it was swept from her mind, forgotten.  Far below her, down in the gorge, she saw something moving!  And that something, ploughing laboriously through depths and drifts of loose fluffy snow, was a man.  Now her thoughts raced again.  It was King.  He was coming back to her....  No; it was not King; it was Swen Brodie!  She began to tremble violently.  She had barely strength to draw back, to pull the canvas closer to the rocks, to strive to hide.  If Brodie came now, if Brodie found her here, alone——­That fear which is in all female hearts, that boundless terror of the one creature who is her greatest protector, her vilest enemy, more dreaded than a wild beast, gripped her and shook her and swiftly beat the strength out of her.  But, fascinated, she clung to the rocks and watched.

The man struggling weakly against the pitiless wilderness, wallowing in the snow, seemed to make his way along the gorge inch by inch.  He carried something on his back, something white under the falling snow which whitened his hat and labouring shoulders.  A sack with something in it, something to which he clung tenaciously.  How he floundered and battled against the high-heaped white stuff about him which held him back, which mounted about his legs, up to his waist; at times, when he floundered he was all but lost in it.  He lay still like a dead man; he struggled, and began crawling on again.  He stopped and looked about him —­how her heart pounded then!  He was looking for something, seeking something!  Her!

She was so certain it must be Brodie.  Yet she remained motionless, powerless to move though she remembered King’s word of the hiding-place where she would be safe; she peered out, fascinated.

In time the man came closer and the first suspicion entered her mind that, after all, it might not be Brodie.  He stopped; he was exhausted; he pulled off his hat and ran his hand across his face.  Then, still bareheaded, he looked up.  It was Gratton!

Gratton alone; Gratton looking back over his shoulder more often than he quested far ahead; Gratton in a mad attempt to make haste where haste was impossible.  Now his every gesture bespoke a frantic haste.  He was escaping from something.  Then, what?  He had left the other men; he was running away from them.  She knew it as well as if he had screamed it into her ears.  A sudden spurt of pity for him entered her heart; he seemed so beaten and bewildered and frantic and terrified; who, better than she, could sympathize with one in Gratton’s predicament?  She looked far down the gorge; she could see, like a bluish crooked shadow, the trail which he had made after him.  No one else in sight!  Then she forgot everything saving that she and Gratton were alone, that they had been friends, that they were bound in a common fate.  She leaned as far out as she could; he was just below now; she called to him.