"Well, I've thought over it a heap," she said, when he commented on her clever ideas. "I saw that marked tree as we went down to the Ferry, and I remembered where it was; and the trail is not hard if you only get started on it right. It's getting started right that counts--ain't it, Dan?" There seemed fewer barriers between them in the free, out-of-door life, where no third person's views colored their own. They talked of Lyster, and missed him; yet Dan was conscious that if Lyster were with them, he would have come second instead of first in her confidences, and her friendly, appealing ways. Whether he trusted her or not, she did not know. He had not asked a question as to how that survey of the land came to her; but he watched Harris sometimes when the girl paid him any little attention, and he could read only absolute trust in the man's eyes. Overton was not given to keen analysis of people or motives; a healthy unconcern pervaded his mind as to the affairs of most people. But sometimes the girl's character, her peculiar knowledge, her mysterious past, touched him with a sense of strange confusion, yet in the midst of the confusion--the deepest of it--he had put all else aside when she appealed to him, and had followed her lead into the wilderness. And as she ran from him with the particles of gold, and carried them, as he bade her, to Harris, he followed her with his gaze until she disappeared through the green wall of the bushes. Once he started to follow her, and then stopped, suddenly muttered something about a "cursed fool," and flung himself face down in the tall grass. "It's got to end here," he said, aloud, as men grow used to thinking when they live alone in the woods much. Then he raised himself on his elbows and looked over the little grassy dip of the land to where the stream from the hills sparkled in the warm sun; and then away beyond to where the evergreens raised their dark heads along the heights, looking like somber guardians keeping ward over the sunny valley of the twin springs. Over them all his gaze wandered, and then up into the deep forest above him--a forest unbroken from there to the swift Columbia. The perfect harmony of it all must have oppressed him until he felt himself the one discordant note, for he closed his eyes with a sigh that was almost a groan.