“Jack,” said the Ranger, “Aaron has got hold of the right end of this, with his mirror flashes.  You’ve got to go up the canyon alone.  Get to Granite Peak as quick as God will let you, and pick up the trail of whoever signalled from there; keeping one eye open for Aaron.  I’m going to trail that automobile as far as it went, and follow whatever met or left it.  We’ll likely meet somewhere, over in the Cold Water country.”

A minute later the two men who had planned to ride together were going in opposite directions.

Following the Fairlands road until he came to where the Galena Valley road branches off from the Clear Creek way, three miles below the Power-House at the mouth of the canyon, Brian Oakley found the tracks of an automobile—­made without doubt, during the night just past.  The machine had gone up the Galena Valley road, and had returned.

A little before noon, the officer stood where the automobile had stopped and turned around for the return trip.  The place was well up toward the head of the valley, near the mouth of a canyon that leads upward toward Granite Peak.  An hour’s careful work, and the Ranger uncovered a small store of supplies; hidden a quarter of a mile up the canyon.  There were tracks leading away up the side of the mountain.  Turning his horse loose to find its way home; Brian Oakley, without stopping for lunch, set out on the trail.

* * * * *

High up on Granite Peak, Aaron King was bending over the print of a slender shoe, beside the track of a heavy hob-nailed boot.  Somewhere in Clear Creek canyon, Jack Carleton was riding to gain the point where the artist stood.  At the foot of the mountain, on the other side of the range, Brian Oakley was setting out to follow the faint trail that started at the supplies brought by the automobile, in the night, from Fairlands.

Chapter XXXV

A Hard Way

When Sibyl Andres left the studio, after meeting Mrs. Taine, her mind was dominated by one thought—­that she must get away from the world that saw only evil in her friendship with Aaron King—­a friendship that, to the mountain girl, was as pure as her relations to Myra Willard or Brian Oakley.

Under the watchful, experienced care of the woman with the disfigured face, only the worthy had been permitted to enter into the life of this child of the hills.  Sibyl’s character—­mind and heart and body and soul—­had been formed by the strength and purity of her mountain environment; by her association with her parents, with Myra Willard, and with her parents’ life-long friends; and by her mental comradeship with the greatest spirits that music and literature have given to the world.  As her physical strength and beauty was the gift of her free mountain life, the beauty and strength of her pure spirit was the gift of those kindred spirits that are as mountains in the mental and spiritual life of the race.