“Well, he looks it,” assented Jaralson.  “I’m bound to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw outside the ancient and honorable order of tramps.  But I’ve gone in for him, and can’t make up my mind to let go.  There’s glory in it for us, anyhow.  Not another soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the Moon.”

“All right,” Holker said; “we will go and view the ground,” and he added, in the words of a once favorite inscription for tombstones: “‘where you must shortly lie’ - I mean, if old Branscom ever gets tired of you and your impertinent intrusion.  By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Branscom’ was not his real name.”

“What is?”

“I can’t recall it.  I had lost all interest in the wretch, and it did not fix itself in my memory - something like Pardee.  The woman whose throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her.  She had come to California to look up some relatives - there are persons who will do that sometimes.  But you know all that.”

“Naturally.”

“But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did you find the right grave?  The man who told me what the name was said it had been cut on the headboard.”

“I don’t know the right grave.”  Jaralson was apparently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important a point of his plan.  “I have been watching about the place generally.  A part of our work this morning will be to identify that grave.  Here is the White Church.”

For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madroños, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog.  The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable.  For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned