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 around mountains and into cañons, was finally leading him up into the high, glimmering twilight of a pine forest. Successive chambers of yellow light and bluish shadow opened before him. The dimensions of his surroundings were decreasing. Trees became smaller; distances briefer down forest aisles; the sky, with its diminished blue, seemed closer to his head, and the silence was the only thing that opened more profoundly around him.

His mind, like a ready general, scouted over the probabilities of who and what in the shape of "Rader's" might be awaiting him, perhaps around the next turn of the track—a woodcutter’s shack, or possibly a hunter’s encampment. In spite of his readiness for anything, Carron experienced a lively sense of astonishment when, after a half mile of unbroken tree and shadow, he saw in front of him two gaunt, white gate-posts. To say there was a gate there would have been inexact. Whatever had swung between them once, only the rusty hinges of it remained, and, at one side on the ground, half buried in pine-needles, lay an arch-shaped piece of wood. Traces of whitewash showed upon it, and traces of what once might have been black lettering. The thing had an air of decaying sophistication, grotesque, melancholy, absurd, cast away here in the flourishing forest. The idea occurred to him