There was no trail for his feet now.  At times, he forced his way through and over bushes of buckthorn and manzanita that seemed, with their sharp thorns and tangled branches, to be stubbornly fighting him back.  At times, he made his way along some steep slope, from pine to pine, where the ground was slippery with the brown needles, and where to lose his footing meant a fall of a thousand feet.  Again, he scaled some rocky cliff, clinging with his fingers to jutting points of rock, finding niches and projections for his feet; or, with the help of vine and root and bush, found a way down some seemingly impossible precipice.  Now and then, from some higher point, he sighted Granite Peak.  Often, he saw, far below, on one hand the great canyon, and on the other the wide Galena Valley.  Always he pushed forward.  His face was scratched and stained; his clothing was torn by the bushes; his hands were bloody from the sharp rocks; his body reeked with sweat; his breath came in struggling gasps; but he would not stop.  He felt himself driven, as it were, by some inner power that made him insensible to hardship or death.  Far behind him, the sun dropped below the sky-line of the distant San Gabriels, but he did not notice.  Only when the dusk of the coming night was upon him, did he realize that the day was gone.

On a narrow shelf, in the lee of a great cliff, he hastily gathered material for a fire, and, with his back to the rock, ate a little of the food he carried.  Far up on that wind-swept, mountain ridge, the night was bitter cold.  Again and again he aroused himself from the weary stupor that numbed his senses, and replenished the fire, or forced himself to pace to and fro upon the ledge.  Overhead, he saw the stars glittering with a strange brilliancy.  In the canyon, far below, there were a few twinkling lights to mark the Carleton ranch, and the old home of Sibyl, where Conrad Lagrange and Myra Willard waited.  Miles away, the lights of the towns among the orange groves, twinkled like feeble stars in another feeble world.  The cold wind moaned and wailed in the dark pines and swirled about the cliff in sudden gusts.  A cougar screamed somewhere on the mountainside below.  An answering scream came from the ledge above his head.  The artist threw more fuel upon his fire, and grimly walked his beat.

In the cold, gray dawn of that Friday morning, he ate a few mouthfuls of his scanty store of food and, as soon as it was light,—­even while the canyon below was still in the gloom,—­started on his way.

It was eleven o’clock when, almost exhausted, he reached what he knew must be the peak that he had seen through his glass the day before.  There was little or no vegetation upon that high, wind-swept point.  The side toward the distant peak from which the artist had seen the signals, was an abrupt cliff—­hundreds of feet of sheer, granite rock.  From the rim of this precipice, the peak sloped gradually down and back to the edge of the pines that grew about its base.  The ground in the open space was bare and hard.