“By Heaven, I do remember!” he cried.  “There’s a mountain in the Saw Tooth Range, twelve miles from Tete Jaune—­a mountain with the prettiest basin you ever saw at the foot of it, with a lake no bigger than this camp, and an old cabin which Yellowhead himself must have built fifty years ago.  There’s a blind canyon runs out of it, short an’ dark, on the right.  We found a grave there.  I don’t remember the first name on the slab.  Mebby it was washed out.  But, so ’elp me God, the last name was FitzHugh!”

With a sudden cry, Aldous jumped to his feet and caught Keller’s arm.

“You’re sure of it, Peter?”

“Positive!”

It was impossible for Aldous to repress his excitement.  The engineer stared at him even harder than before.

“What can that grave have to do with Quade?” he asked.  “The man died before Quade was known in these regions.”

“I can’t tell you now, Peter,” replied Aldous, pulling the engineer to the table.  “But I think you’ll know quite soon.  For the present, I want you to sketch out a map that will take me to the grave.  Will you?”

On the table were pencil and paper.  Keller seated himself and drew them toward him.

“I’m damned if I can see what that grave can have to do with Quade,” he said; “but I’ll tell you how to find it!”

For several minutes they bent low over the table, Peter Keller describing the trail to the Saw Tooth Mountain as he sketched it, step by step, on a sheet of office paper.  When it was done, Aldous folded it carefully and placed it in his wallet.

“I can’t go wrong, and—­thank you, Keller!”

After Aldous had gone, Peter Keller sat for some time in deep thought.

“Now I wonder what the devil there can be about a grave to make him so happy,” he grumbled, listening to the whistle that was growing fainter down the trail.

And Aldous, alone, with the moon straight above him as he went back to the Miette Plain, felt, in truth, this night had become brighter for him than any day he had ever known.  For he knew that Peter Keller was not a man to make a statement of which he was not sure.  Mortimer FitzHugh was dead.  His bones lay under the slab up in that little blind canyon in the shadow of the Saw Tooth Mountain.  To-morrow he would tell Joanne.  And, blindly, he told himself that she would be glad.

Still whistling, he passed the Chinese laundry shack on the creek, crossed the railroad tracks, and buried himself in the bush beyond.  A quarter of an hour later he stole quietly into Stevens’ camp and went to bed.

CHAPTER IX

Stevens, dreaming of twenty horses plunging to death among the rocks in the river, slept uneasily.  He awoke before it was dawn, but when he dragged himself from his tepee, moving quietly not to awaken his boy, he found John Aldous on his knees before a small fire, slicing thin rashers of bacon into a frying-pan.  The weight of his loss was in the tired packer’s eyes and face and the listless droop of his shoulders.  John Aldous, with three hours between the blankets to his credit, was as cheery as the crackling fire itself.  He had wanted to whistle for the last half-hour.  Seeing Stevens, he began now.