CHAPTER 1Mountain scenery had surrounded Manning from boyhood and he had never outgrown his liking for it. If someone had told him that the tall pines in the midst of which he was driving were at sea level and pointed to a gleaming expanse of water to prove it much of his zest would have evaporated.
But there was no danger of anything like that. He knew that the expanse of water was a mountain lake, and that the air about him was mountain air—slightly thin, but clear and autumn-crisp, and tangy with rising woodsmoke.
The woodsmoke did not blur the sharp outlines of a single tree or cast a haze over the shining waters of the lake, for it had thinned out like the air as the road spiraled upward toward the mountain’s crest. It could be smelled but not seen, and that, too, was all to the goo
