should not have married her; he should not have brought her with him; it was even sheer idiocy to come after this blind fashion into the mountains in the late fall.  Though the season was early the hour was ominous.  The storm might pass before dawn.  There remained the equal likelihood that it would not.  Were he alone, or had he a man, or, yes, by heaven! a real woman with him, things would not be so bad.  The wind jeered at him through the trees; the storm drenched his fire; he cursed back at both.

“One thing,” he thought when his pipe brought him a solitary instant of peace, “I won’t be worried with Gratton and Brodie and his double-dealing crowd.  If they ever started they would have sense enough to turn back long ago.”

After the cold, wet night came a sodden morning.  King stood up and looked about him curiously; his first thought was to make sure that they had really camped upon the edge of that particular upland valley which he had striven for.  And a glint of satisfaction came into his eyes; it is something to have followed such a trail aright upon such a night.  Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which many miles further on flowed into the American.  Rising abrupt beyond it were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the mountain tributaries of the American.  The rocks, like the river, were black, and looked far colder than the white world which extended in all directions.

If, in truth, there existed heaps of raw red gold somewhere in a cave in these mountains, and there had been any exactness in the description in Gus Ingle’s Bible, then the spot was not more than three or four miles away.  That was one consideration.  It was still snowing.  Here was a second consideration.  King turned moody eyes to Gloria’s canvas-and-fir shelter in the lee of a little bit of cliff.  There lay the third.  He prepared breakfast without delay but without enthusiasm.  He felt a tired man with shackled limbs dragging a dead weight.

When he went to wake Gloria he first stood over her, looking queerly down upon her sleep.  She showed less trace of the hard day and wild night than he had expected to see; his preparations for her comfort, instinctive and thorough, had been made with the cunning skill of a man familiar with situations like the present.  She had rested; she lay curled up, snug and warm, under the covers, upon which a thin layer of fluffy snow had gathered.  Her face was against a curved arm, and the sweetness of it in its tranquil repose was a bitter sweet to him.  Her lashes against her cheek stirred and flew apart under his steady gaze.  He looked into Gloria’s eyes, sweet and soft, heavy with sleep.

“Time to be up,” he said.  He turned on his heel and went back in haste to his fire.

Gloria, awake, was ravenously hungry.  She came sooner than he had expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order.  Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him.  She shrugged her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands to the small, wind-blown blaze.