The rider who reaches the Topah Topah crest on the Gridley trail now sees in the valley below only traces of what was so laboriously planned and perfectly maintained a few years ago. But even the ruins left on the Frenchman show the herculean labor undertaken by the man in setting up a comfortable and even an elaborate establishment in so inaccessible a spot. His defiance of all ordinary means of doing things was shown in his preference for bringing much of his building-material over the trail instead of around by the Smoky Creek road. A good part of the lumber that went into his house was packed over the Gridley trail. His piano was brought through the canyon on a wagon, but the mechanical player for the piano and his wagons themselves were packed over the trail on the backs of mules. A heavy steel range for the kitchen had been brought over the same way. For Sinclair no work was hard enough, none went fast enough, and revelry never rose high enough. During the time of his activity in the Frenchman Valley Sinclair had the best-appointed place between Williams Cache and the Crawling Stone, and in the Crawling Stone only the Dunning ranch would bear comparison with his own. On the Frenchman Sinclair kept an establishment the fame of which is still foremost in mountain story. Here his cows ranged the canyons and the hills for miles, and his horses were known from Medicine Bend to Fort Tracy. Here he rallied his men, laid snares for his enemies, dispensed a reckless hospitality, ruled his men with an oath and a blow, and carried a six-shooter to explain orders and answer questions with.
Over the Gridley trail from the Crawling Stone Marion and Dicksie Dunning rode early in the morning the day after McCloud and his men left the Stone Ranch with their work done. The trail is a good three hours long, and they reached Sinclair's place at about ten o'clock. He was waiting for Marion--she had sent word she should come--and he came out of the front door into the sunshine with a smile of welcome when he saw Dicksie with her. Dicksie, long an admirer of Sinclair's, as women usually were, had recast somewhat violently her opinions of him. She faced him now with a criminal consciousness that she knew too much. The weight of the dreadful secret weighed on her, and her responsibility in the issue of the day ahead did not help to make her greeting an easy one. One thing only was fixed in her mind and reflected in the tension of her lips and her eyes: the resolve to keep at every cost the promise she had given. For Dicksie had fallen under the spell of a man even more compelling than Sinclair, and felt strangely bounden to what she had said.