“All right; I’ll be at the train to see you off.” And as he shook hands at parting: “Don’t you know, Phil, there are times when I almost envy you your confounded old burn-yourself-at-the-stake Puritan conscience? There are, for a fact; and this is one of them. Good-by--till this evening.” XXVIII “I DON’T believe I can climb any higher, Harry; the air up here is so frightfully thin. You and Mysie go on if you want to. I’ll sit down and wait for you. I wouldn’t ask for any grander view than this is, right here from this rock.” Spring had come again for the altitudes, and though the higher peaks of the Continental Divide were still heavily blanketed with snow, the gulches were free and the mountain streams were running bank full. Bromley, with an ulterior motive that he was still carefully concealing, had won Mrs. Dabney’s consent to take Jean and Mysie on a flying trip to the summit of the Great Divide, saying it was a shame that, after a residence of two years in Denver, the girls had not yet seen any more of the mountain grandeurs than could be glimpsed from a car window on a Sunday excursion up one of the canyons. Making Leadville only a halting point, they had come on up the railroad to a flag-station hamlet high in the backbone range. By making a few judicious inquiries in the hamlet, Bromley had learned what he wanted to know, and which trail to take. In one of the gulches far above the railroad, the gray, beard-like dump of a mine or prospect tunnel could be seen, with the help of the field-glasses, and it was on the steep trail toward this that he was leading his breathless charges. “Well wait until you get your breath,” he offered, in answer to Jean’s protest. “There is no hurry. It will be hours before we can get the return train.” As he spoke, he was sweeping the upper reaches of the trail with the glass. On one of the nearer loopings a man was descending. Bromley readjusted the focus of the binocular and fixed the descending mountaineer fairly in its field. What he saw made him stultify himself immediately and shamelessly. “If you really don’t care to go any farther, Jean,” he said hastily, “Mysie and I will climb up to that monument rock over there on the other spur. You won’t mind? We’ll be in plain sight nearly all the way.” “Of course I won’t mind. I could sit here and enjoy this magnificent view all day. Run along.” Philip Trask, no longer crippled in body, mind or vision, saw the three human dots on the trail below him; saw two of them separate from the third and move away to the left toward a hunched shoulder of the mountain with a curiously shaped pinnacle rock at its summit. “Tenderfoots,” he said to himself, “and one of them is already out of breath.” He looked again, squinting his eyes against the hard light of the forenoon sun. “Humph!--skirts. I wonder who was fool enough to drag a couple of women eleven thousand feet up in the air? No wonder one of them has pegged out.”