She did not expect to meet Jack on the farther edge of the gulch, but she stood a minute beside the great pine, looking at the trampled snow and thinking of Hank Brown’s leering insinuations.  Whatever had started the fellow to suspecting such things?  Uneasily she followed Hank’s cunning reasoning:  Because Jack had never once gone in to Quincy, except to settle with the Forest Service for his summer’s work; because Jack had not filed upon any claim in the mountains, yet stayed there apart from his kind; because he avoided people—­such little things they were that made up the sum of Hank’s suspicions!  Well, she was to blame for this present emergency, at any rate.  If she had not told Kate something she had no right to tell, she would not have quite so much to worry about.

She turned and began to climb again, making her way through the thicket that fringed the long ridge beyond; like a great, swollen tongue reaching out toward the valley was this ridge, and she followed it in spite of the tangled masses of young trees and bushes which she must fight through to reach the more open timber.  At least the danger of falling trees and branches was not so great here, and the wind was not quite so keen.

Behind her Mike followed doggedly, trailing her like a hound.  Days spent in watching, nights spent crouched and waiting had brought him to the high pitch of desperation, that would stop at nothing which seemed to his crazed brain necessary to save his life and his freedom.  Even the disdainful Murphy would have known the man was insane; but Murphy was sitting warm and snug beside a small table with a glass ready to his right hand, and Murphy was not worrying about Mike’s sanity, but about the next card that would fall before him.  Murphy thought how lucky he was to be in Quincy during this storm, instead of cooped up in the little cabin with Mike, who would sit all day and mumble, and never say anything worth listening to.  So Mike kept to the hunt—­like a gentle-natured dog gone mad and dangerous and taking the man-trail unhindered and unsuspected.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

GOLD OF REPENTANCE, SUNLIGHT OF LOVE AND A MAN GONE MAD

Marion was up at the foot of the last grilling climb, the steep acclivity where manzanita shrubs locked arms and laughed at the climber.  Fearful of a sprained ankle like Kate’s, she had watched carefully where she set down her feet and had not considered that it would be wise to choose just as carefully the route she should follow to gain the top; so long as she was climbing in that general direction she felt no uneasiness, because Taylor Rock topped it all, and she was bound to come out somewhere close to the point at which she was aiming.

But the wall of manzanita stopped her before she had penetrated a rod into it.  One solid mass blanketed with snow it looked to be when she stepped carefully upon a rock and surveyed the slope.  She had borne too far to the right, away from the staggering rush of wind.  She hated to turn now and face the storm while she made her way around to the line of timber, but she had no choice.  So she retreated from the manzanita and fought her way around it—­finding it farther than she had dreamed; finding, too, that the storm was a desperate thing, if one had to face it for long in the open.