Her sister leaned towards Kingsley. A sudden apprehension rose in her great, dark eyes, and her voice, in emotion, dropped to contralto notes. "I wish you would give up that idea of trying for the summit," she said. He laughed again, tossing his fine head. "Oh, don’t bother, Louise; I shall be safe enough with Stratton along. He never takes a risk." Stratton smiled and adjusted the rolled blankets to his back, leaning on them comfortably. "The Captain’s right," he said. "He knows me. I always ask myself first, ’Is it safe?’ And then, ’Is it worth while?’" The teacher looked at him a searching moment and arched her brows. Then she reached and lifted her sister’s guitar from the end of the log. Her fingers trailed briefly over the strings and settled in a thread of tune. She repeated the accompaniment, singing softly, inviting Kingsley’s tenor. "She shone in the light of declining day, Each sail was set, and each heart was gay." And presently the other man hummed an undernote, but Louise was silent. She had changed her position a little, clasping her hands loosely around her knee, with her face slightly lifted and turned to the darkening wood. It was the face of a dreamer, rapt, sensitive, who peopled the shadows, and to whom the many voices of the night tuned in unbroken symphony. In the interlude Kingsley turned to her. "Where is your voice, Louise? We need the contralto." She started and looked at him, smiling. It was then she resembled Alice. The expression was there and the charm; but softened, finer, as the painting of a master may be reproduced in pastel. Her voice was beautiful. She took up the song, subduing her notes to her sister’s lighter compass, but the music, that had been simply pleasing, assumed, suddenly, the touch and finish of grand opera. For the white squall rides on the surg-ing wave, And the bark is gulph’d in an o-cean’s grave, For the white squall rides on the surg-ing wave, And the bark is gulph’d in an o-cean’s grave, in an o-cean’s grave, in an o - - ocan’s grave. [Illustration: Music fragment] *CHAPTER VII* *THE INSTRUMENT OF TYEE SAHGALEE* The summer day breaks early in the Puget Sound country. It was not yet four by Stratton’s watch when he stepped from his tent and stood analyzing the weather, but all the sky overhead was changing to yellow, and directly, while he looked, to streaks of flame. The heights, towering a thousand feet on the opposite side of the gorge, were burnished copper, and Rainier, walling the top of the canyon, warmed to amethyst and rose. Its crest, at an altitude of nearly fifteen thousand feet, was hardly seven miles distant.