This command he issued to himself in an angry mutter and at once scrambled up in his bunk wider awake than ever. His mental horizon unexpectedly cleared. "Of course he's the one they meant and not me!" he exclaimed aloud. "Vat's dat you say?" asked Weimer sleepily. "Hein?" "A waking nightmare," returned Ross and lay down again. Of course it was Leslie. "'He's to be here only a few weeks,'" Waymart had said. "'Let well enough alone.'" He, Ross, expected to winter in the valley, and the McKenzies knew it. Yes, they were referring to Leslie. That calmed Ross, but deepened the mystery. The following morning he thought over the situation while he was at work. It was a blind enough situation, but he felt that he ought to repeat to Leslie the scraps of conversation that he had overheard. They might mean much to the boy, and in spite of his reserve and his overbearing manners Ross liked Leslie. At noon he ate dinner hastily, and telling Weimer that he would be back in an hour, set out for the upper claims. Snow had fallen the night before and the trail had filled, making walking tiresome, for Ross had not yet accustomed himself to the use of snow-shoes. With his hands in his pockets and his cap drawn down over his eyes he plunged through the drifts in the teeth of a sharp east wind. Up the side of the mountains he struggled, through the pass between two peaks where Meadow Creek had cut a channel and into a hollow sheltered from the wind and exposed to the sun. "Hello, Grant!" A voice greeted him from the upper side of the trail. Ross pushed his cap back and looked up. In the sunshine, his back against a warm rock, his feet buried in the dry loam and pine needles, sat Leslie Jones. He had eaten his dinner and wandered along the trail until he had found a warm spot in which to spend the noon hour. Ross promptly climbed the steep mountainside and dropped down beside him. "The McKenzies say," began Leslie curiously, "that you don't stop work long enough to eat and sleep. Yet here you are two miles from home in the middle of the day." "It's because of what the McKenzies have said that I'm here now," Ross returned swiftly. "It may not be worth a picayune to you, and then again, maybe, it will be," and he related the events of the previous evening. Leslie bent a troubled face over a stick that he was idly whittling. "Are you sure, Grant, that they meant me? I haven't an idea who they are nor who could be so afraid of me that he wouldn't come up here with me here. I don't know of a soul that's afraid of me, but," with a short, mirthless laugh, "I do know of some one that I'm afraid of. It's not the McKenzies, although they might--if they know me----" Suddenly he flung the stick from him and faced Ross impulsively. "Grant, did you ever do something that you'd give anything you possessed to undo--and that you'd just _got_ to undo?"