Alton nodded. "Go back and make your traverse," he said. "Forty north with the gully over the fork of the river."

"Forty," said Seaforth, "and a half."

"Well," said Alton, "whatever you don't remember, hold tight on to that."

Seaforth felt the depression he had shaken off return to him. "There are," he said slowly, "few things that you forget."

Alton, glancing at him, understood, and then turned his eyes towards the snow of the wilderness. "It's the man that can't look forward who gets left," he said. "Now something might stop me coming back with you for that grub."

Seaforth said nothing, and he was a little graver than usual as they packed the tent and blankets on the remaining horse, and an extra load upon their own backs. A good many things might happen up there in the north, including snow-slides, floods and frost, or the downward rush of great trees in a _brulee_. That was possibly why he commenced a little jingling song of the music-halls when they took the trail again, but the white grandeur of the great peaks silenced him, or his breath gave out as they floundered into fern-choked forest which was further garnished with the horrible devil's club. Seaforth fell into a clump of it, and for several minutes his comments were venomous, for though he had been taught restraint in England and had further tuition in Canada of a grimmer description, little can be expected from the man who is gripped by that Satanic thorn.

It was half an hour before he went on again with his garments ensanguined as the result of Alton's treatment with the knife, and he gasped with relief when after a march of four miles, which occupied most of what was left of the day, they came out into the more open spaces of a big _brulee_. Some time in the hot autumn a fire had passed that way, and the great trees towered above them, stripped and blackened columns, that seemed to stretch between earth and sky. There was no limb left them, and they rose, majestic in their cylindrical symmetry, in apparently endless battalions, a vista of plutonic desolation. Underfoot there was charcoal, and feathery ashes that whirled aloft, and sprinkling the men with a fine grey powder slowly settled again.

Alton was white in ten minutes, a gritty mire defiled the horse's sides, and Seaforth floundered, coughing, ankle-deep at times, with livid circles where he had rubbed the grime away about his eyes. There was no sign of beast or bird, and the shuffle of weary feet and thud of hoofs rose muffled out of a great silence, until there was a stupendous crash somewhere in the distance. The charred trunks took up the sound, and while they flung it from one to another Alton sprang forward and smote the pack-horse with his fist.

"Jump!" he said hoarsely.

Next moment Seaforth felt himself hurled forward, and glancing over his shoulder when he found his footing again saw a big trunk tilt a little.

It seemed to hang quivering for a second or two, then toppled further, and with a great humming came rushing down. Then there was a stunning crash, and he stood gasping, deafened, and bereft of sight, amidst a stifling cloud of dust which swept into his mouth and nostrils and almost suffocated him. When he could see anything again the horse was quivering, and the dust still rising from a shapeless pile a few yards behind him. Alton, who was black and grey to the ankles, took his hat off, shook it, and put it on again in a curious unconcerned fashion which suggested that he did it unconsciously.

"Those six feet make a big difference," said he. As he spoke there was a crash a little farther behind them, another ahead, and they stood still; Alton gripping the horse's bridle, Seaforth staring about him and scarcely breathing, while concussion answered concussion, until there was a silence that was almost bewildering again.

"Now," said Alton quietly, "we'll get out of this, though I don't know that we need worry, because that should have cleared out the shaky ones. When one goes, more of them generally follow. It wouldn't have grieved Hallam of the Tyee very much if we had been a yard or two farther back."

Seaforth was possibly a little shaken, for he answered as he might not otherwise have done. "I wonder if it would have displeased anybody else," he said.

Alton jerked the horse to a standstill and looked at him. "I don't think you meant that, Charley."

Seaforth noticed the glint in his comrade's eyes, and departed a little from veracity. "No," he said. "There are times when a man is apt to talk a little at random."

Alton nodded. "You'll not forget again. The man is a kinsman of mine."

Seaforth smote the pack-horse, because he did not quite know what to answer. He had vague suspicions concerning Deringham, but was quite aware that it would be inappropriate for him to express them. Also, having seen a little of the smoother side of life in England, he knew a trifle more about young women of Miss Deringham's description than his comrade did. He admired the girl, as most men would have done, but the qualities Alton had evidently endowed her with were not especially apparent to him. He also fancied that Miss Deringham would have found some of them distinctly irksome now and then.

It was dark when they came out of the _brulee_ and pitched camp amidst the boulders beside a lonely lake. The mists crawled about the pines that shut it in, and its surface was seamed with white by a little bitter wind. Sombre clouds rolled lower down the surrounding hills, and Seaforth was glad to stretch his weary limbs under the lee of a big boulder while the fire snapped and crackled in front of him.

"I wonder when we shall see this lake again," he said.

Alton, who was busy with the frypan, turned and stirred the fire, and the sparks and smoke whirled about them before a stinging blast. "I don't know," he said, glancing at a smear of whiteness that swept athwart the lake. "It depends upon the weather, and I'm not pleased with that to-night. You see the Chinook winds would keep off the snow."

"Of course," said Seaforth, who knew that the warm breezes from the Pacific occasionally drive back the rigorous winter that turns the northern portion of the mountain province into a white desolation.

"They usually do, but we'll surmise that in place of them we get the back-draughts from the Pole?"

"Then," said Alton dryly, "it would be a good deal nicer down at Somasco. Are you sorry you didn't stop there, Charley?"

Seaforth threw an armful of fir wood upon the fire with somewhat unnecessary violence. "You are not so pleasant as you might be to-night," he said.

Alton rose and stretched himself. "I wouldn't worry about me. It seems to me we are both of us feeling lonely, and that's curious, because when we had him Okanagan wasn't any special kind of a companionable man. There was a time when you would have been driving to dinner with a diamond pin stuck in you and silk stockings on about this time, Charley?"

Seaforth laughed. "I scarcely think either of the things are in common masculine use," he said. "There, however, was a time when I walked into a British Columbian mining camp with my whole wardrobe on my back and, I think, fifty cents in my pocket. Still, what you ask me suggests a not quite unwarranted question. What are you going to do with Carnaby, Harry?"

"I don't know yet. I'm not sure it's mine, you see."

"Your grandfather left it you," said Seaforth; "and it was his."

"Yes," said Alton gravely. "He did, but he tacked a kind of condition on to it, and--well, that's about all I can tell you, Charley."

"Of course!" and Seaforth smiled curiously. "I would not have asked you, only I am your partner, and when you're Alton of Carnaby you will have no more use for me."

Alton seemed to sigh. "I am," he said simply, "Alton of Somasco, and I fancy now and then that was all I was meant to be. You are my partner, Charley, and it would take a good deal more than Carnaby to separate you and me."

Seaforth smiled again, though there was more than amusement in his face, while Alton, who stopped beside the fire and filled two cans from the kettle, shook his head reproachfully as he flung their contents into the bush.

"That's what comes of talking too much. You have forgotten to put in the tea," he said.

They lay down early, rolled in the blankets, with the tent across them, for the wind that lashed the lake rendered it advisable not to erect it, but it was some time before Seaforth went to sleep. He fancied he understood Alton's assertion that he was not sure Carnaby was his, for he knew his comrade was capable under certain conditions of almost reasonless generosity. Nor did he desire a better partner, but he was not sure that in the event of Alton transferring his activities to England their friendship would be approved of by a possible mistress of Carnaby. Women, Seaforth knew, regarded these things differently.

He slept at last, and awakening felt the tent heavy upon him. There was also a curious rawness in the atmosphere, and he glanced about him with a little gasp of consternation. The hillside gleamed coldly above him under the creeping light, and only the pines were sombre, for the earth was white with snow.

"Get up, Harry," he said, with something in his voice that roused his comrade suddenly.

Alton rose, and his face became a trifle grim. "This," he said quietly, "is going to mix up things. We'll have breakfast quick as you can get it."

They were on their way in half an hour, struggling up the hillside under the pines until at last the trees grew smaller towards the timber line. Then they floundered painfully over what had been bare slopes of rock and was now a waste of snow, with a dazzling field of whiteness.

between them and the blue. Up there the frost was biting, and the snow lay fine as flour, blowing in thin wisps from under the horse's hoofs, while the men's jean and deerhide were sprinkled with glittering particles. The wind dropped towards sundown, and when, climbing a great hill shoulder, they dipped again to the forest the snows flamed crimson, against a pitiless blueness, out of which there seemed to fall a devastating cold.

Diamonds glinted upon the shivering pines, sound seemed frozen, and there was a great impressive stillness across which the jingle of the bridle rang stridently when Alton pulled the horse up near the foremost of the trees.

"This," he said softly, "is where I found Jimmy. He was sitting there with his rifle on his knee, looking straight at me, as though there were lots of things he could tell me."

Seaforth shivered a little. "He had the specimens with him?"

Alton nodded. "Yes," he said. "He had his grip right on the deerhide bag, as though he didn't want to let me have them, and I had to think of Mrs. Jimmy while I took them from him. It didn't seem quite fair of Jimmy, because they haven't much use for silver in the country the long trail leads to."

Seaforth glanced down into the great hollow that fell away beneath them, and up at the glittering snow. "You were alone, I think?"

"I was," said Alton grimly. "And most half-frozen. It was that cold there was ice in the big rapid, and I hadn't had much to eat for several days."

Seaforth shivered again, as he pictured that strange encounter between the dead and the living. Jimmy the prospector, having taken his secret with him to a region where silver is valueless, had sat within a few paces from where he stood with his fingers clenched upon the bag, and an awful disregard of the rights of the woman he had left behind in his frozen face. Seaforth could also picture his comrade stooping over him with averted eyes, but swift, resolute movements, for when there was work to be done Alton of Somasco was not the man to turn aside.

"It must have been a trifle horrible," he said.

Alton's eyes closed a little. "It wasn't nice. Still, there was Mrs.

Jimmy working down at the store, and that secret belonged to her."

He stopped abruptly with a little gesture as of one shaking off a painful memory, and looked down across the climbing pines to the lake in the hollow behind them. It still shone steelily, and apparently not very far away, though it had cost the men strenuous toil all day to traverse the distance that divided them from it. Seaforth, who watched him, noticed something unusual in his attitude, for his comrade stood very still with eyes that never for a moment wavered from one point in the valley.

"Do you see anything down there?" he said.