er the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal
peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow
sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks
above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the
tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled from below.

The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old
frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan. She
sprang from shelter and looked over the edge. Jumbled at the foot of
the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing mass, a weltering maimed
horror. On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed
backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of
the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the mass
by the double turn of his falling horse.

For a moment none of the three uttered a word. She was trembling so
that she could not speak. There were tears in the old man's eyes. To
Wayland's face had come a look. It was like the blue flash of a pistol
shot. The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire. He
moistened his lips.

"May Hell be both deep and hot!" he said.

It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools
that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all
the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices
innocence on the altar of guilt.

While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor
slackened pace. While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with
the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored;
and Who or What tallied? The men round the fire the night before in
the cow-camp, the men of "the bunco game" had stacked cards and played
trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter's
orders about the boy. The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after
a code not honored by the law of nations.

Also, they had gone into the fight together: the one who saw the right
but did not understand the fight; the one who understood the fight but
sometimes lost his vision of the right; and the one who saw in the
fight for right, not the quarrel of a Valley, or a Faction, or a Ring,
but the saving of the Nation, the repudiation of a world lie, the
welding of right and might into an eternal harmony.

CHAPTER VIII

A VICTIM OF LAW'S DELAY

For years, Eleanor could not let h