“Yes,” he said, “and down there I will be what?”

“I don’t know,” she answered wistfully, “but sometimes I can see you going on and on and on toward fame and the rewards it will bring you and you seem to get farther and farther and farther away from—­from the mountains and our friendship; until you are so far away that I can’t see you any more at all.  I don’t like to lose my mountain friends, you know.”

He smiled.  “But no matter how famous I might become—­no matter what fame might bring me—­I could not forget you and your mountains.”

“I would not want you to remember me,” she answered “if you were famous.  That is—­I mean”—­she added hesitatingly—­“if you were famous just because you wanted to be.  But I know you could never forget the mountains.  And that would be the trouble; don’t you see?  If you could forget, it would not matter.  Ask Mr. Lagrange, he knows.”

For some time Aaron King sat, without speaking, looking about at the world that was so far from that other world—­the world he had always known.  The girl, too,—­seeming to understand the thoughts that he himself, perhaps, could not have expressed,—­was silent.

Then he said slowly, “I don’t think that I care for fame as I did before you taught me to know the mountains.  It doesn’t, somehow, now, seem to matter so much.  It’s the work that really matters—­after all—­isn’t it?”

And Sibyl Andres, smiling, answered, “Yes, it’s the work that really matters.  I’m sure that must be so.”

In the afternoon, they went on, still following the fire-break, down to where it is intersected by the pipe-line a mile from the reservoir on the hill above the power-house; then back to Oak Knoll, again on the pipe-line trail all the way—­a beautiful and never-to-be-forgotten walk.

The sun was just touching the tops of the western mountains when they started down Oak Knoll.  The canyon below, already, lay in the shadow.  When they reached the foot of the trail, it was twilight.  Across the road, by a small streamlet—­a tributary to Clear Creek—­a party of huntsmen were making ready to spend the night.  The voices of the men came clearly through the gathering gloom.  Under the trees, they could see the camp-fire’s ruddy gleam.  They did not notice the man who was standing, half hidden, in the bushes beside the road, near the spot where the trail opens into it.  Silently, the man watched them as they turned up the road which they would follow a little way before crossing the canyon to Sibyl’s home.  Fifty yards farther on, they met Brian Oakley.

“Howdy, you two,” called the Ranger, cheerily—­without stopping his horse.  “Rather late to-night, ain’t you?”

“We’ll be there by dark,” called the artist And the Ranger passed on.

At sound of the mountaineer’s voice, the man in the bushes drew quickly back.  The officer’s trained eyes caught the movement in the brush, and he leaned forward in the saddle.