ced fox comes to relish the chase more keenly than the pack
which courses him. Alexander went on with a smile in her eyes.

But when she had gone down into the cloistered shadows of the valley
her spirits descended too and when she slipped through the thickets and
reached a certain point, something like despair tightened about her
heart. Across the line of her march boiled a freshet which might as
well have been a river. To swim it with her impediments was impossible
and though it might carry her dangerously close to the road which she
sought to avoid, she had no choice. She must follow it until a
crossing developed.

As a woodsman, Alexander acknowledged few peers but this was to her,
unfamiliar country. She was moreover pitting her skill against one who
was her equal if not her superior, and who knew every trail and by-way
hereabouts. He was a youth with a vacuous, almost idiotic face, whom
she had that same day encountered. He had left her sight, but had
never been too remote to follow or gauge her course and what he learned
he relayed to others. In due time he had known without going further
just where she must bring up--for he knew the condition of that
stream--and its crossings.

The girl came, in due course, upon a broken litter of giant boulders,
each the size of a small house, which lay scattered where at last the
water grew shallow. She could even make out a point where one might
cross dryshod by leaping from rock to rock.

It was in a fashion a place of mystery and foreboding, for each of
those titanic rocks, with its age-long smoothness and greenness was a
screen whose other side might harbor things only to be guessed. There
one must risk an ambuscade, trusting to one's star, and Alexander
loosened her pistol and shifted her saddle-bags to her left shoulder
and her rifle to her left hand.

Then she started forward---and one by one left the boulders behind her
until she came to the last. As she rounded the final shoulder of
sandstone her hand was knocked up and her pistol fell clattering.

Her ambuscaders had known a thing which she had not--that for all the
roomy freedom of the woods she must come out at last through this one
passage--as wine must come out through the neck of the bottle.

About her closed a tightly grouped handful of men whose faces were
masked and whose bodies were covered by the uniformity of black rubber
coats.

Alexander did not surrender tamely. With the strength an