Arlie, working her pony forward with voice and body and knees, so that from her seat in the saddle she seemed literally to lift him up, reached the summit and looked back.

“All right back there?” she asked quietly.

“All right,” came the cheerful answer.  “Teddy isn’t used to climbing up a wall, but he’ll make it or know why.”

A minute later, man and horse were beside her.

“Good for Teddy,” she said, fondling his nose.

“Look out!  He doesn’t like strangers to handle him.”

“We’re not strangers.  We’re tillicums.  Aren’t we, Teddy?”

Teddy said “Yes” after the manner of a horse, as plain as words could say it.

From their feet the trail dropped again to another gorge, beyond which the ranger could make out a stretch of valley through which ran the gleam of a silvery thread.

“We’re going down now into Mantrap Gulch.  The patch of green you see beyond is Lost Valley,” she told him,

“Lost Valley,” he repeated, in amazement.  “Are we going to Lost Valley?”

“You’ve named our destination.”

“But—­ you don’t live in Lost Valley.”

“Don’t I?”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she answered, amused at his consternation, if it were that.

“I wish I had known,” he said, as if to himself.

“You know now.  Isn’t that soon enough?  Are you afraid of the place, because people make a mystery of it?” she demanded impatiently.

“No.  It isn’t that.”  He looked across at the valley again, and asked abruptly:  “Is this the only way in?”

“No.  There is another, but this is the quickest.”

“Is the other as difficult as this?”

“In a way, yes.  It is very much more round-about.  It isn’t known much by the public.  Not many outsiders have business in the valley.”

She volunteered no explanation in detail, and the man beside her said, with a grim laugh: 

“There isn’t any general admission to the public this way, is there?”

“No.  Oh, folks can come if they want to.”

He looked full in her face, and said significantly:  “I thought the way to Lost Valley was a sort of a secret—­ one that those who know are not expected to tell.”

“Oh, that’s just talk.  Not many come in but our friends.  We’ve had to be careful lately.  But you can’t call a secret what a thousand folks know.”

It was like a blow in the face to him.  Not many but their friends!  And she was taking him in confidently because he was her friend.  What sort of a friend was he? he asked himself.  He could not perform the task to which he was pledged without striking home at her.  If he succeeded in ferreting out the Squaw Creek raiders he must send to the penitentiary, perhaps to death, her neighbors, and possibly her relatives.  She had told him her father was not implicated, but a daughter’s faith in her parent was not convincing proof of his innocence.  If not her father, a brother might be involved.  And she was innocently making it easy for him to meet on a friendly footing these hospitable, unsuspecting savages, who had shed human blood because of the unleashed passions in them!