A week passed and Gloria went back to San Francisco.  These had been seven days and nights of uncertainty for her, and had brought hours of confusion that mounted into bewilderment.  She had sung and danced and flirted as even Gloria Gaynor had never done before; she had made Gratton sure of her and his eyes had smouldered and his chalky pale face had flushed; she had sent him off, gnawing at his nails; she had made other young laughter rise like echoes of her own; she had sighed and sat long hours at her window, wondering, wondering, wondering.  In the end she had gone, leaving her little note for Mark King.

King did not return to the log house.  He knew that long ago Gloria would have gone; there was nothing to draw him in her absence.  He kept in touch, none too close, with Ben Gaynor; telephoned him once from Coloma, and once sent a note to him by a hunter he encountered on Five Lakes Creek, above Hell Hole, the note to be mailed in Truckee some time later, and to reach Gaynor the following day at his lumber-camp.  These were strenuous days during which King penetrated the most out-of-the-way corners of the mountains.  He constructed his theories and strove doggedly to set them to the proof.  He held that when Baldy Winch had made him a cabin in so inaccessible and distant a spot as the crest of Lookout Ridge, it had been because Winch, the sole survivor of those hardy spirits who had been of Gus Ingle’s party, was of a mind to make sure, day after day, that no other men went where he had been.  Perhaps he knew that he alone remained alive; that the secret was his; that he had but to wait the winter out, to sit through the spring thaw, and then go back to claim his own.  A man like Baldy Winch, as King envisioned him, would do that.  Hence, from Lookout Ridge one should be able to see the very point, or a peak standing over the very point, where Gus Ingle’s men had gone.  But always the one difficulty:  that point might be a mile away, or ten, twenty, thirty miles away.  There was nothing to do but seek—­and he knew that always Swen Brodie, too, was seeking, Brodie and the men of his own kind whom likeness drew to likeness.  So King spent day after day in the canons and on the ridges, and yet, through Ben Gaynor, thought to keep an eye on old Loony Honeycutt.

But there were many hours, alone in the forests resting, sitting over a bubbling coffee-pot, lying in his blankets under the stars, that King thought very little of Brodie, Gus Ingle, or Honeycutt.  There were times when the solitudes were empty; when a new, strange feeling of loneliness swept overpoweringly over him.  At such moments he fancied that a girl came stealing through the trees to him; that she slipped her hand into his own; that she lifted to his her soft eyes; that something within the soul of him spoke to her and that she answered.  His pulses quickened; a great yearning as of infinite hunger possessed him.  He remembered how they had stood together upon the ridge the last time; how his arms had been opening for her; the look in her eyes.  That had been a moment when the world had lain at their feet; when they had been lifted up and up, close to the gates of paradise.