“You don’t know Jude!” contradicted Peter.  “Help me to lift John to the bunk.  He’s gat to be taken care of.”

Douglas turned on his heel, took a quilt from the bunk and laid it over old Johnny, gray and silent against the wall.  Then without a word, he lifted the door-latch.

“Don’t forget that this is your father after all.”

“But I have forgotten!” returned Douglas clearly.

“Stop that kind of talk,” said Peter sharply, “and help me get his boot off!”

Douglas gave Peter a long stare of resentment; then, without a word, he rushed out of the cabin.  He watered the horses, mounted Justus, and took the lead rope of his pack-animal, putting both horses to the gallop.  When he reached the point where Judith had left the main trail he turned and followed her tracks, which were rapidly drifting over with snow.

The whole world was white.  Lifting from the valley to the right, little hills rolled over into one another like foaming billows.  Beyond these were distant ranges blue, white, and gold.  Judith’s trail led along the base of the little hills into a grove of Lebanon cedars, gnarled and wind-distorted.  There was little snow among the trees and so for a while the trail was lost.  But when the cedars opened out on a circular mesa where the snow was taking on the saffron tints of the evening sky, he picked it up again.

The mesa ended abruptly in a drifted mountain, opalescent pink from its foot to its cone-shaped head.  The snow on the mesa was not deep, and Douglas realized that Judith had followed an old trapper’s trail that worked south toward Lost Chief Peak.

By the time Doug reached the foot of the mountain it was so dark that he barely could discern that Judith had circled to the right, around the base of the peak.  There would be a moon a little later.  Douglas dismounted in the shelter of a huge rock, cut down a small cedar, and made himself a fire and cooked some coffee.  And he fed the horses.

He sat for an hour over the fire, waiting for the moon.  He was not conscious of weariness.  He was not thinking.  It was as if there had been no burning of his ranch, no preacher, no old Johnny.  His whole mind was focussed on finding Judith.  On finding her and somehow ending the intolerable uncertainty and longing which he had endured for so many years.

The threatened snow thus far had held off.  If the clear weather would hold for another twelve hours, he was sure that he could overtake her.  He was impatient of delay and watched restlessly for the moon.  Shortly after seven o’clock it sailed over the mountain, flooding the world with a light so intense and pure that the unbelievable colors of the daytime returned like prismatic ghosts.