"Be kind enough to sign it with your name," said the man pleasantly.
Eve signed.
Then the masked man took the letter, got up, removed his hat.
"I am Quintana," he said. "I keep my word. A thousand thanks and apologies, miss. I trust that your detention may be brief and not too disagreeable. I place at your feet my humble respects."
He bowed, put on his hat, and walked quickly away. And she saw him descend the rocks to the eastward, where the peak slopes.
When Quintana had disappeared behind the summit scrub and rocks, Eve slowly stood up and looked about her at the rocky pulpit so familiar.
There was only one way out. Quintana had gone that way. His men no doubt guarded it. Otherwise, sheet precipices confronted her.
She walked to the western edge where a sheet of slippery reindeer moss clothed the rock. Below the mountain fell away to the valley where she had been made prisoner.
She looked out over the vast panorama of wilderness and mountain, range on range stretching blue to the horizon. She looked down into the depths of the valley where deep under the flaming foliage of October, somewhere, a State Trooper was sitting, cheek on hand, beside a waterfall — or, perhaps riding slowly through a forest which she might never gaze upon again.
There was a noise on the rocks behind her. A masked man came out of the spruce scrub, laid a blanket on the rocks, placed a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a tin pail full of water upon it, motioned to her, and went away through the dwarf spruces.