“Are we going back?” she asked colourlessly.

“No,” he returned as indifferently.  “It’s about four miles to the caves.  We’ll be there in a couple of hours.  Then we’ll see what we see.”

Gloria sent a long, searching, and awe-struck look across the broken country.  Yonder, then, she realized dismally, lay their destination; bleak, black, rocky heights, at so great an altitude and in a region so barren that but few wind-broken trees grew, and the brutal face of the world was unmasked.  She saw bare peaks, steep slopes, a tremendous gorge like an ugly gash; on the far side of the gorge sheer cliffs.  Toward them King looked.  Was it there that Gus Ingle’s caves awaited them?  Was that journey’s end?  She shivered and drew closer to the fire, closer to her companion, shrinking from the menace of the mountains.

“Is it going to keep on snowing?” she asked.

This time he shrugged.  That was his only answer.  She stared at him, a slow flush came into her cheeks, her eyes hardened.

“Oh, very well,” she said coldly.

That was the whole of their conversation save for one curt remark and an impudent laugh in answer at the end of the scanty meal.  Gloria tossed a piece of bacon into the fire.  King looked at her sternly and said: 

“Young lady, we may be up against the real thing right now.  Nobody but a fool will do a trick like that.”

The laugh was Gloria’s.

* * * * *

Once on their way they climbed almost steadily.  The air grew rarer and colder.  The snowflakes became smaller, at last a fine sifting like sand particles that cut at hands and face viciously.  No longer were there groves to shelter them; on all sides bare, hostile rocks, and only occasionally a sparse growth of sprawling, earth-hugging dwarf pine and cedar, over which King strode as over so much low, tangled brush.  Then came a long ridge, a spine from which the world dropped almost sheer on both sides, with the wind raging so that it seemed Buck must be blown off his feet, or the girl torn from the saddle and borne far out like a thistledown.  With frightened eyes, which she strove vainly to keep closed, she saw long, broken slopes; occasionally when the air cleared, a frothing torrent; and once, at the end of a couple of hours, far down in a distant level land, a growth of giant timber.  She thought that King was making his way down there.  But his purpose soon became plain even to her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the ravine which lower down cut like a knife across the timbered tract, headed for what he took to be Gus Ingle’s cave.  A mile away she saw it; a great, ragged, black hole in a high mass of rock, close to the crest of the next ridge.

She was wrapped warmly and yet here the icy breath of the wind pierced the fabric of her wrappings and hurt her to the bone.  She watched King wonderingly as he hastened on; did the man have no sense of bodily discomfort?  Certainly he gave no sign.  He was like an animal; she found room for a flash of scorn in the thought.  For so she was pleased to consider him lower in the scale than herself.