Aldous had guessed correctly what the effect of associating Quade’s name with the affair would be.  Keller was one of Quade’s deadliest enemies.  He sat down close to Aldous again.  His eyes burned deep back.  It was not Keller’s physique, but his brain, and the fearlessness of his spirit, that made him dangerous.

“I guess you’re right, Aldous,” he said.  “Some day—­I’ll even up on Quade.”

“And so shall I, Peter.”

The engineer stared into the other’s eyes.

“You——­”

Aldous nodded.

“Quade left for Tete Jaune to-night, on a hand-car.  I follow him to-morrow, on the train.  I can’t tell you what’s up, Peter, but I don’t think it will stop this side of death for Quade and Culver Rann—­or me.  I mean that quite literally.  I don’t see how more than one side can come out alive.  I want to ask you a few questions before I go on to Tete Jaune.  You know every mountain and trail about the place, don’t you?”

“I’ve tramped them all, afoot and horseback.”

“Then perhaps you can direct me to what I must find—­a man’s grave.”

Peter Keller paused in the act of relighting his pipe.  For a moment he stared in amazement.

“There are a great many graves up at Tete Jaune,” he said, at last.  “A great many graves—­and many of them unmarked.  If it’s a Quade grave you’re looking for, Aldous, it will be unmarked.”

“I am quite sure that it is marked—­or was at one time,” said Aldous.  “It’s the grave of a man who had quite an unusual name, Peter, and you might remember it—­Mortimer FitzHugh.”

“FitzHugh—­FitzHugh,” repeated Keller, puffing out fresh volumes of smoke.  “Mortimer FitzHugh——­”

“He died, I believe, before there was a Tete Jaune, or at least before the steel reached there,” added Aldous.  “He was on a hunting trip, and I have reason to think that his death was a violent one.”

Keller rose and fell into his old habit of pacing back and forth across the room, a habit that had worn a path in the bare pine boards of the floor.

“There’s graves an’ graves up there, but not so many that were there before Tete Jaune came,” he began, between puffs.  “Up on the side of White Knob Mountain there’s the grave of a man who was torn to bits by a grizzly.  But his name was Humphrey.  Old Yellowhead John—­Tete Jaune, they called him—­died years before that, and no one knows where his grave is.  We had five men die before the steel came, but there wasn’t a FitzHugh among ’em.  Crabby—­old Crabby Tompkins, a trapper, is buried in the sand on the Frazer.  The last flood swept his slab away.  There’s two unmarked graves in Glacier Canyon, but I guess they’re ten years old if a day.  Burns was shot.  I knew him.  Plenty died after the steel came, but before that——­”

Suddenly he stopped.  He faced Aldous.  His breath came in quick jerks.