Slowly the train creaked and circled up the heights, following the sharp turnings of the stream, passing small towns which were in effect summer camps of pleasure-seekers, on and upward into the moist heights where the grass was yet green and the slopes gay with flowers. A mood of exaltation came upon the doomed man as he rose. This was the place to die--up here where the affairs of men sank into insignificance like the sound of the mills and the rumble of trains. Here the centuries circled like swallows and the personal was lost in the ocean of silence. At one of these towns which stood almost at the summit of the pass the conductor brought a telegram, and Mart seized it with eager, trembling hands. It was (as he expected) a warning from Bertha. She implored him to let the mine go and to return by the next train. He was too nerveless of fingers to put the sheet back within its envelope, and so thrust it, a crumpled mass, into his pocket. It was as if her hand was at his shoulder, her voice in his ear, but he did not falter. To go back now would be but a renewal of his torture. There could not come a better time to go--to go and leave no suspicion of his purpose behind him. Just over the summit, at a bare little station, the train was held for orders, and Haney, who was again suffocating and almost blind, took another dose of the mysterious drug, and with its effect returned to a dim perception of his surroundings. He was able vaguely to recall that a trail which began just back of the depot mounted the hill towards his largest mine. A desire to see Williams, his faithful partner, his most loyal friend, came over him, and, rising to his feet, he painfully crept down the aisle to the rear of the car and dropped off unnoticed, just as the conductor's warning cry started a rush for the train. As the last coach disappeared round the turn the essential bleak loneliness of the place returned. The station seemed deserted by every human being, even the operator was lost to sight, and the gambler, utterly solitary, with clouded brain and laboring breath, turned towards the height, his left leg dragging like a shackle. For the first half-mile the way was easy, and by moving slowly he suffered less pain than he had expected. Around him the frost-smitten aspens were shivering in the wind, their sparse leaves dangling like coins of red-and-yellow gold, and all the billowing land below, to the west, was iridescent with green and flame-color and crimson. A voiceless regret, a dim, wide-reaching, wistful sadness came over him, but did not shake his resolution. He had but to look down at his crippled body to know that the beauty of the world was no longer his to enjoy. His days were now but days of pain.