ignition the glowing coal in the bowl of his pipe. Before the hearth he had managed to hang the heavy quilt from his bunk, so that the flicker of the flames should not be visible from the outside.

The little fire caught, blazed for a few moments, and fell to a steady glow. Bob fished out one of the chair rungs, jammed the cool end firmly in one of the open cracks between the timbers of the room, turned his back, and deliberately pressed the band around his elbows against the live coal.

A smell of burning cloth immediately filled the air. After a moment the coal went out. Bob replaced the charred rung in the fire, extracted another, and repeated the operation.

It was exceedingly difficult to gauge the matter accurately, as Bob soon found out to his cost. He managed to burn more holes in his garment and himself than in the bonds. However, he kept at it, and after a half hour's steady and patient effort he was able to snap asunder the last strands. He stretched his arms over his head in an ecstasy of physical freedom.

That was all very well, but what next? Bob was suddenly called to a decision which had up to that moment seemed inconceivably remote. Heretofore, an apparent impossibility had separated him from it. Now that impossibility was achieved.

A moment's thought convinced him of the senseless hazard of attempting to slip out through any of the doors or windows. The moon was bright, and Saleratus Bill would have taken his precautions. Bob attacked the floor. Several boards proved to be loose. He pried them up cautiously, and so was enabled to drop through into the open space beneath the house. Thence it was easy to crawl away. Saleratus Bill's precautions were most likely taken, Bob argued to himself, with a view toward a man bound at the elbows, not to a man with two hands. In this he was evidently correct, for after a painful effort, he found himself among the high grasses of the meadow.

There were now, as he recognized, two courses open to him: he could either try to discover Saleratus Bill's sleeping place and by surprise overpower that worthy as he slept; or he could make the best of the interim before his absence was discovered to get as far away as possible. Both courses had obvious disadvantages. The most immediate to the first alternative was the difficulty, failing some clue, of finding Saleratus Bill's sleeping place without too positive a risk of discovery; the most immediate to the second was the difficulty of getting to the other side of the river. As Saleratus Bill might be at any one of a thousand places, in or out of doors; whereas the river could be crossed only by the bridge. Bob, without hesitation, chose the latter.

Therefore he made his way cautiously to that structure. It proved to be lying in broad moonlight. As it constituted the only link with the outside world to the south, Bob could not doubt that his captor had arranged to keep it in sight.

The bridge was, as has been said, suspended across a strait between two rocks by means of heavy wire cables. Slipping beneath these rocks and into the shadow, Bob was rejoiced to find that between the stringers and the shore, smaller cables had been bent to act as guy lines. If he could walk "hand over hand," the distance comprised by the width of the stream he could pass the river below the level of the bridge floor. He measured the distance with his eye. It did not look farther than the length of the gymnasium at college. He seized the cable and swung himself out over the waters.

Immediately the swift and boiling current, though twenty feet below, seemed to suck at his feet. The swirling and flashing of the water dizzied his brain with the impression of falling upstream. He had to fix his eyes on the black flooring above his head. The steel cable, too, was old and rusted and harsh. Bob's hands had not for many years grasped a rope strongly, and in that respect he found them soft. His muscles, cramped more than he had realized by the bonds of his captivity, soon began to drag and stretch. When halfway

across, suspended above a ravening torrent; confronted, tired, by an effort he had needed all his fresh energies to put forth, Bob would have given a good deal to have been able to clamber aboard the bridge, risk or no risk. It was, however, a clear case of needs must. He finished the span on sheer nerve and will power; and fell thankfully on the rocks below the farther abutment. For a half minute he lay there, stretching slowly his muscles and straightening his hands, which had become cramped like claws. Then he crept, always in the shadow, to the level of the meadow.

Bob was learning to be a mountaineer. Therefore, on the way down, he had subconsciously noted that from the head of the meadow a steep dry wash climbed straight up to intersect the road. The recollection came to the surface of his mind now. If he could make his way up this wash, he would gain three advantages: he would materially shorten his journey by cutting off a mile or so of the road-grade's twists and doublings; he would avoid the necessity of showing himself so near the Cove in the bright moonlight; and he would leave no tracks where the road touched the valley. Accordingly he turned sharp to the left and began to pick his way upstream, keeping in close to the river and treading as much as possible on the water-worn rocks. The willows and elders protected him somewhat. In this manner he proceeded until he had come to the smooth rock aprons near the gorge from which the river flowed. Here, in accordance with his intention of keeping close in the shadow of the mountain, he was to turn to the right until he should have arrived at the steep "chimney" of the wash. He was about to leave the shelter of the last willows when he looked back. As his eyes turned, a flash of moonlight struck them full, like the heliographing of a mirror. He fixed his gaze on the bushes from which the flicker had come. In a moment it was repeated. Then, stooping low, a human figure hurried across a tiny opening, and once again the moonlight reflected from the worn and shining revolver in its hand.

I

XXVIII

N SOME manner Saleratus Bill had discovered the young man's escape, and had already eliminated the other possibilities of his direction of flight. Bob shuddered at this evidence of the rapidity with which the expert trailer had arrived at the correct conclusion. He could not now skirt the mountain, as he had intended, for that would at once expose him in full view; he could not return by the way he had come, for that would bring him face to face with his enemy. It would avail him little to surrender, for the gunman would undoubtedly make good his threats; fidelity to such pledges is one of the few things sacred to the race. With some vague and desperate idea of defence, Bob picked up a heavy branch of driftwood. Then, as the man drew nearer, Bob scrambled hastily over the smooth apron to the tiny beach that the eddies had washed out below the precipice. Here for the moment he was hidden, but he did not flatter himself he would long remain so. He cast his eyes about him for a way of escape. To the one side was the river, in front of him was the rock apron with his enemy, to the other side and back of him was a sheer precipice. In his perplexity he looked down. A gleam of metal caught his eye. He stooped and picked up the half of a worn horseshoe. Even in his haste of mind, he cast a passing wonderment on how it had come there.

If Bob had not been trained by his river work in the ways of currents, he might sooner have thought of the stream. But well he knew that Saleratus Bill had spoken right when he had said that there were "no swimming holes" here. The strongest swimmer could not have taken two strokes in

that cauldron of seething white water. But now, as Bob looked, he saw that a little back eddy along the perpendicularity of the cliff slowed the current close to the sheer rock. It might be just possible, with luck, to win far enough along this cliff to lie concealed behind some outjutting boulder until Saleratus Bill had examined the beach and gone his way. Bob was too much in haste to consider the unexplained tracks he must leave on the sand.

He thrust the branch he carried into the still black water. To his surprise it hit bottom at a foot's depth. Promptly he waded in. Sounding ahead, he walked on. The underwater ledge continued. The water never came above his knees. Out of curiosity he tapped with his branch until he had reached the edge of the submerged shelf. It proved to be some four feet wide. Beyond it the water dropped off sheer, and the current nearly wrenched the staff from Bob's hand.

In this manner he proceeded cautiously for perhaps a hundred feet. Then he waded out on another beach.

He found himself in a pocket of the cliffs, where the precipice so far drew back as to leave a clear space of four or five acres in the river bottom. Such pockets, or "coves," are by no means unusual in the inaccessible depths of the great box cañons of the Sierras. Often the traveller can look down on them from above, lying like green gems in their settings of granite, but rarely can he descend to examine them. Thankfully Bob darted to one side. Here for a moment he might be safe, for surely no one not driven by such desperation as his own would dream of setting foot in the river.

A loud snort almost at his elbow, and a rush of scurrying shapes, startled him almost into crying aloud. Then out into the moonlight from the shadow of the cliffs rushed two horses. And Bob, seeing what they were, sprang from his fancied security into instant action, for in a flash he saw the significance of the broken horseshoe on the beach, the sunken ledge, and the secret of the horses' pasture. By sheer