sh.
Dusk at this height--dusk with a keen smell of glaciers and wind-stung
pines--dusk with the world nine thousand feet below; and about her this
falling-away of mountain-side, where the trees seemed to slant and the
very flowers to be outrun by a mysterious sort of flight of rebel earth
toward space! The great and heady height was informed with a presence
which if not hostile was terrifyingly ignorant of man. There was some one
not far away, she felt, just above there behind the rocky ridge, just
back there in the confusion of purplish darkness streaked by pine-tree
columns, just below in the thicket of the stream--some one to meet whose
look meant death.

Her first instinct was to keep to the road. She walked on down toward
the valley very rapidly. But going down meant meeting darkness. She
began to be unreasonably afraid of the night. She was afflicted by an
old, old childish, immemorial dread of bears. In spite of the chill,
she was very warm, her tongue dry with rapid breathing of the thin air.
She was intolerably thirsty. The sound of water called to her in a
lisping, inhuman voice. She resisted till she was ashamed of her
cowardice, stepped furtively off the track, scrambled down a slope,
parted some branches, and found herself on a rock above a little
swirling pool. On the other side a man kneeling over the water lifted a
white and startled face.

Through the eerie green twilight up into which the pool threw a shifty
leaden brightness, the two stared at each other for a moment. Then the
man rose to his feet and smiled. Sheila noticed that he had been bathing
a bloody wrist round which he was now wrapping clumsily a handkerchief.

"Don't be frightened," he said in a rather uncertain voice; "I'm not near
so desperate as I look. Do you want a drink? Hand me down your cup if you
have one and I'll fill it for you."

"I'm not afraid now," Sheila quavered, and drew a big breath. "But I
was startled for a minute. I haven't any cup. I--I suppose, in a
way--I 'm lost."

He was peering at her now, and when she took off her hat and rubbed her
damp forehead with a weary, worried gesture, he gave a little
exclamation and swung himself across the stream by a branch, and up to
her side on the rock.

"The barmaid!" he said. "And I was coming to see you!"

Sheila laughed in the relieved surprise of recognition. "Why, you are the
cowboy--the one that fought so--so terribly. Have you been fighting
again? Your wrist is hur