Before he left town a half-dozen of the mountain men had asked him, with an obvious attempt to make the question casual, how he liked the Basin, how long he thought his work would keep him there. Each, as he turned away, followed him with that long, speculative, brooding look. Always, heretofore, his relations with these mountain people had been easy, sympathetic and cordial. Now all at once, without reason, they held him at arm's length and regarded him with suspicious if not hostile eyes. Puzzling over this he rode back up the road past the Power House. Thence issued Oldham to hail him. He pulled up. "I hear you're estimating the timber in the Basin," said the gray man, with more appearance of disturbance than Bob had ever seen him display. Bob acknowledged the accuracy of his statement. "Indeed!" said Oldham, pulling at his clipped moustache, and after a little, "Indeed!" he repeated. So the news had run ahead of him. Bob began to think the news important, but for some reason at which he could not as yet guess. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that from the two mountain cabins he passed on his way to the beginning of the trail, men lounged out to talk with him, and in each case the question, craftily rendered casual, was put to him as to his business in the Basin. Before one of these cabins stood a sweating horse. "Look here," he demanded of the Carrolls, "why all this interest about our being in the Basin? Every man-jack asks me. What's the point?" Old man Carroll stroked his long beard. "Do they so?" he drawled comfortably. "Well, I reckon little things make news, as they say, when you're in a wild country. They ain't been no work done in the Basin for so long that we're all just nat'rally interested; that's all." He looked Bob tranquilly in the eye with the limpid gaze of innocence before which Bob's scrutiny fell abashed. For a while his suspicions of anything unusual were almost lulled; the countryside _was_ proverbially curious of anything out of the course of events. Then, from a point midway up the steep trail, he just happened to look back, and just happened through an extraordinary combination of openings to catch a glimpse of a rider on the trail. The man was far below. Bob watched a long time, his eye fixed on another opening. Nothing appeared. From somewhere in the cañon a coyote shrilled. Another answered him from up the mountain. A moment later Bob again saw the rider through the same opening as before, but this time descending. "A signal!" he exclaimed, in reference to the coyote howls. On arriving at the bare rock, he dismounted and hastily looked it over on all sides. Near the stream it had been splashed. A tiny eddy out of reach of the current still held mud in suspension. X