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 had only once appeared near here and that once had tried to harm the girl.

“I wonder who that could have been,” said Moran. “Evidently some one killing meat. I hardly think Kinney could cross through Rampart Pass with horses for a few more days. Besides that was too far down the country for him. He’d have camped almost even with us. Harmon expected to come in from the other way. They have delegated him to pick the most feasible route for a Forest Service pack trail from the gap straight through to the lake and blaze a string of game trails that link up clear through. Sunlight Gap should be nearly free of snow by now; so perhaps he has come in. To-morrow I’ll go down that way and see.”

“You mustn’t go,” she said. “What do we care who it is?’ She had not told him of the men she had stumbled across that night, the men who would have taken her but for Flash. She had feared that if Moran knew of this he would insist on taking her out of these hills at once. She had thought of what awaited her back there—and decided to stay in the hills. She had thought that those men had gone, unable to find her hiding place, and that they were probably hundreds