Then he ran from them a few steps and rapped his skinny knuckles on a scar breast high on a tree. "Your trail!" he cried. "It's here! It's blazed clear to the bald head of old Jerusalem. Get up there on the granite. Then sit down and talk it over! Coals of fire!" They heard him shrieking it back at them as he fled up the Notch. And the two men took the trail, strangling, gasping, feeling their direction from blaze to blaze on the trees, fighting their way up from the Gehenna of Pogey. CHAPTER XV BETWEEN TWO ON JERUSALEM "So he didn't have no doctor but a bowl o' ginger tea, And it didn't seem to help him, not so far as we could see." --Gettin' Larry Home. When they came out upon the bare granite, long after mid-day, they fell upon their faces, and lay there without speaking or the desire to speak. They did not open their smarting eyes. Over and over again Wade heard a dull rumble which his stricken senses failed to understand. But when a hollow boom reverberated among the hills and jarred the granite under his face he sat up. He saw the purple flash shiver across the swaying smoke, heard the splitting crack of the bolt, and felt a raindrop on his face. "Thank God, Mr. Barrett, it has come at last! The rain!" he shouted. And the timber baron staggered to his feet, and turned a bloodshot gaze on the panorama of blazing forest and sheeting heavens. Then he looked at Wade, blinking stupidly and searching his soul for words. "I haven't got the language, Mr. Wade--" he began. But the young man broke upon his stammering speech. "There's no need of saying anything," he said, looking away. "I don't want to hear any thanks." "I was left there to die--tied up there and left to die by a crazy fool that tried to blackmail me--that's it, tried to blackmail me. And I'll put him where he belongs. It was the most infernal plot ever put up on a man. Blackmail and murder!" He gabbled his charges hysterically. The shock of his experience had unmanned him. "You can't blackmail a man like me without suffering for it. I'll put him into the deepest hole in the insane asylum--with a gag in his mouth." He was going on to relate his experience, but Wade again interrupted him. "I won't bother you to tell it, Mr. Barrett," he said, coldly. "I know how it happened. Mr. Withee told me this morning." "It's all lies and blackmail!" screamed Barrett, his fury rising at thought of this gossip. "Withee is against me, too. I told him I'd take his stumpage contract away, and this is how he is getting back. I'll have him and his whole crew in jail for blackmail if he doesn't shut his yawp." A roar of thunder drowned his voice, and he stood, with the rain pelting on him, shaking his fists above his head. But by the twist of his mouth Wade saw that he was still cursing "blackmail."