“But you are risking your own life if you go up?”

“So does the fellow who has slipped on a banana peel,” said Wayland.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN ON THE JOB

The two men proceeded along the precipice trail of the Pass.  The shouting river below boisterous from the full flood of noon-day thaw began to hush.  By the shadows, the Ranger knew that the afternoon was waning.  The echoes from the shot still rocked in sharp crepitating knocks as of stone against stone, fainter and fading.  Then a quiver of wind met their faces.  The chasm opened to the fore like a gate, or a notch in the serrated ridge of the sky-line; and the precipice trail dropped over the edge of the crag to the scooped hollow of a slope where rock slide or avalanche had plowed a groove in the bevelled masonry of the precipice.

“This is the place,” indicated Wayland.

From the shoulder of the higher slope came a little narrow indurated trail scarcely a hand’s width, marked by the cleft foot-prints of a mountain goat.  Where the path came down to the main trail of the Pass, jutted a huge rock left high and dry on its slide to the bottom of the gorge.

“Keep behind the other side of that, sir!  They can’t possibly see you.”

“How do you know that trail comes from the Ridge gully?  Looks to me like a goat track.”

“Because I built it!  You can see the N. F. trail sign—­one notch and one blaze on that scrub juniper.  Up on the Mesas, we were off the Forests.  Here, we are back on them.  You may not know it, sir; but this canyon is part of the region Moyese wants withdrawn for homesteads.  You could homestead a reservoir for Smelter City here—­pay a German or a Swede three-hundred to sit on this site—­then sell for a couple of million to the Smelter City gang.  They would get the suckers in the East to buy the bonds to pay for it.  A fellow in the Sierras located a hundred water power sites that way.”

The old Britisher was not following the Ranger’s reasoning in the least.

“Then, if we are really on the National Forests, that is your territory, and we have the legal right to make an arrest?”

Wayland laughed outright.  If you don’t see why, then you do not know the stickling of a Briton’s sense of law and a Scotchman’s conscience.  Matthews took up his station behind the rock that abutted on the trail.

He saw the Ranger hasten back along the face of the precipice, stop where the rock offered foothold and begin slowly climbing almost vertically.  At first, it was going up the tiers of a broken stone stair.  Then, the weathered ledge gave place to slant shale.  He saw Wayland dig his heels for grip, grasp a sharp edge overhead, and hoist himself to the overhanging branch of a recumbent pine; then, scramble along the fallen trunk to a ledge barely wide enough for footing.  Along this, he cautiously worked, face in, hand over hand from rock block to rock block, sticking fingers among the mossed crevices, fumbling the pebbles from the slate edges, and so round out of sight behind a flying buttress of masonry and back in view again a tier higher.