She was
proceeding in the direction the broad cloven hoof marks indicated.
What--lay beyond?

Many minutes passed. Breathless minutes of pulsing excitement for the
woman who knew only monotony and the drudgery of an outland life. No
womanish fears could deter her. She believed and hoped she was on the
eve of a great discovery, and such was her reckless desire that nothing
could deter her.

The aspect of the scrub changed. It became dotted with taller trees.
The paler foliage of spruce reared itself, and, here and there,
isolated clumps of towering pines threw shadows across her path. Then
gaps broke up the continuity, but, even so, the view beyond to her left
was cut off by remoter growths. Once or twice she hazarded her way
into them in her search for information, but always she returned to the
broad track of the footprints of driven cattle.

The pathway rose at a steep incline. It bent away to the right, and,
in the distance, it seemed that it must converge upon the sharp cut
edge of the great pine woods she had so recently left. With this
conclusion came another. The track must terminate abruptly or it must
pass back into the great pine bluff.

The end, however, was neither of these things. And it was far nearer
than she had suspected. The path twisted back into the huge reverse of
an S, and finished abruptly at the sharp edge of a wide deep valley.

It came upon her almost with a shock. The tracks had abruptly swung
westward. She rounded the bend, and, in a moment, found herself gazing
out over a wide valley from a dizzy height.

Her first feeling was that the drop was sheer, precipitate. Then
realization superseded, and she flung herself full length upon the
ground and pressed her way into the shelter of an adjacent bush. The
path had not ended. It passed over the brink and continued its way
zigzagging down the terrific slope to the valley below. It was this,
and the sight of a distant spiral of smoke rising from below, which had
flung her into the shelter of the friendly bush. Her risk had only
been momentary, but even in that moment she had been silhouetted in
full view of any chance gaze below.

She drew herself toward the edge of the drop. Just where she had flung
herself it was clean and sheer, and the bush overhung. Thus she was
left with a full view of the depths below. Her dark eyes dwelt upon
the zigzagging path. She followed its downward course to the green
plain. She track