Toward the far end of this upland flat was the disintegrating ruin of a cabin.  The walls had disappeared long ago, save for two or three rotting logs, but a small rectangle of slightly raised ground indicated how they had extended.  Even the rock chimney had fallen away, but something of the fireplace, black with burning, stood where labouring hands had placed it more than half a century before.

Here he made his own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack, dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his presence.  For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something less than human not to turn his chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the spot where he had abandoned his fallen companion.

King’s first interest was centred on the ground underfoot.  He went back and forth and about the ruin of the cabin several times seeking any sign that would tell him if Brodie and Andy Parker had been here before him.  But there were no tracks in the softer soil, no trodden-down grass.  It was very likely that no foot had come here since King’s own last October.  A look of satisfaction shone for an instant in his eyes.  Then, done with this keen examination, they went with curious eagerness to the more distant landscape.  He passed through the storm-broken trees and to the far rim of the flat, where he stood a long time staring frowningly at one after another of the spires and ridges lifted against the sky, probing into the mystery of the night still slumbering in the ravines.  Now his look had to do, in intent concentration, with a slope not five hundred yards off; now with a blue-and-white summit toward which a man might toil all day and all night before reaching.

He might have been the figure of the “Explorer,” grim and hard and determined; silent and solitary in a land of silence and solitude, brooding over a region where “the trails run out and stop.”  Something urged, something called, and his blood responded.  About him rose the voice of the endless leagues of pines in a hushed utterance which might have been the whisper: 

  “Something hidden.  Go and find it.  Go and look behind the Ranges—­
  Something lost behind the Ranges.  Lost and waiting for you.  Go!”

He made sure that he had left no sign of his visit here, not so much as a fallen crust of bread, caught up his pack and found the familiar way down the cliffs, striking off toward the higher mountains and the high pass through which he would travel to-night.

Chapter III

To have followed the pace which he set that day would have broken the heart of any but a seasoned mountaineer.  No man in these mountains could have so much as kept him in sight, saving alone Swen Brodie, and he was left far back yonder, miles on the other, lower, side of the ridge.  By mid-forenoon King had outstripped the springtime and was among snow patches which grew in frequency and extent; at noon he built his little