The rest of his party, he said, had gone on up the canyon.

They would stop at Burnt Pine on Laurel Creek, where he could easily join them before night.

He could not think, he declared, of passing so near without greeting his friends.
"You two certainly are expert when it comes to finding snug, out-of-the-way quarters," he commented, searching the camp and the immediate surroundings with a careful and, ostensibly, an appreciative eye.

"A thousand people might pass this old, deserted place without ever dreaming that you were so ideally hidden back here." As he finished speaking, his roving eye came to rest upon a pair of gloves that Sibyl--the last time she had called--had carelessly left lying upon a stump close by a giant sycamore where, in camp fashion, the rods and creels and guns were kept.

The artist had intended to return the gloves the day before, together with a book of trout-flies which the girl had also forgotten; but, in his eagerness for the day's outing, he had gone off without them.
The observing Conrad Lagrange did not fail to note that James Rutlidge had seen the telltale gloves.