But it was a long time to remember a picture seen only by the flicker of a camp-fire and starshine, and the woman of Tisdale's imagination clouded out the face he tried to recall. "Still Weatherbee was so sensitive, so fine," he argued with himself. "A woman must have possessed more than a beautiful body to have become the center of his life. She must, at the start, have possessed some capacity of feeling." He put his thumb on the spring to open the lower case, but the image so clearly fixed in his mind stayed the impulse. "What is the use?" he exclaimed, and thrusting the watch back into the bag, quickly tied the string. "I don't want to see you. I don't want to know you," and he added, pushing the poke into its place and closing the box; "The facts are all against you." CHAPTER IV SNOQUALMIE PASS AND A BROKEN AXLE Tisdale leaned forward in his seat in the observation car. His rugged features worked a little, and his eyes had their far-sighted gaze. Scarred buttes crowded the track; great firs, clinging with exposed roots to the bluffs, leaned in menace, and above the timber belt granite pyramids and fingers shone amethyst against the sky; then a giant door closed on this vestibule of the Pass, and he was in an amphitheatre of lofty peaks. The eastbound began to wind and lift like a leviathan seeking a way through. It crept along a tilting shelf, rounded a sheer spur, and ran shrieking over a succession of trestles, while the noise of the exhausts rang a continuous challenge from shoulder and crag. Then suddenly a mighty summit built like a pulpit of the gods closed behind, and a company of still higher mountains encircled the gorge. Everywhere above the wooded slopes towered castellated heights and spires.