But a spy spying on a spy smacked of complications too deep for Mike, with all his knuckle-cracking.  He was lost in a maze of conflicting conjectures whenever he tried to figure the thing out.  And who was the other spy that stayed up on Taylor Rock?  There was smoke up there where should be no smoke.  Mike had seen it.  There were little flashes of light up there on sunny days—­Mike had seen them also.  And there was nothing in the nature of Taylor Rock itself to produce either smoke or flashes of light.  No one but a spy would stay in so bleak a place.  That was clear enough to Mike by this time; what he must find out was why one spy followed another spy.

The very next day Marion left the cabin and set forth with a square package under her arm.  Mike, watching from where he was at work getting out timbers for next year’s assessment work on the claims, waited until she had passed him at a short distance, going down the trail toward Quincy.  When she had reached the line of timber that stood thick upon the slope opposite the basin, he saw Kate, bulky in sweater and coat, come from the cabin and take the trail after Marion.  When she also had disappeared in the first wooded curve of the trail, up the hill, Mike struck his axe bit-deep into the green log he was clearing of branches, and shambled after her, going by a short cut that brought him into the trail within calling distance of Kate.

For half a mile the road climbed through deep forest.  Marion walked steadily along, taking no pains to hide her tracks in the snow that lay there white as the day on which it had fallen.  Bluejays screamed at her as she passed, but there was no other sound.  Even the uneasy wind was quiet that day, and the faint scrunching of Marion’s feet in the frozen snow when she doubled back on a curve in the trail, came to Kate’s ears quite plainly.

At the top of the hill where the wind had lifted the snow into drifts that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her.  She thought she heard the scrunch of Kate’s feet down there, but she was not sure.  She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right, chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot showed between two bushes.  Her left foot scraped the snow in making the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to pass it over.  She ducked behind a chunky young cedar, waited there for a breath or two and then ran down the steep hillside, keeping always on the bare ground as much as possible.  Lower down, where the sun was shut away and the wind was sent whistling overhead to the next hilltop, the snow lay knee deep and even.  But Kate would never come this far off the trail, Marion was sure.  She believed that Kate suspected her of walking down to the valley, perhaps even to town, though the distance was too great for a casual hike of three hours or so.  But there was the