stood
at a quarter of four, started for the Upper End.

"That girl's got the savvy," was his one remark to himself.

X

UNDER FIRE

Blue Lake, while but three miles farther eastward, flashed its jewelled
waters into the sun from a plane fully five hundred feet higher than the
tall chimneys of the ranch-house. About it stood the most precipitous
granite cliffs to be found hereabouts. They rose, sheer and majestic,
still another five hundred feet, here and there eight hundred and a
thousand. The lake, half a mile in diameter, circular like some polished
mirror presented by an ancient giant to his lady-love, was shut in
everywhere by these crags and cliffs save at the west, where the
overflowing water, going to swell the turbulent river, poured like molten
crystal through a wide gorge. The farther cliffs marked the eastern
boundary-line of the ranch. Beyond them lay a small plateau rimmed about
on three sides by still other steep precipices.

Lee, coming to the water's edge sought to guess where the old Indian
Trail came down. And again, startling him for a second time, Judith rode
up.

She, too, had a fresh horse; she too now carried a rifle across her arm.
Bud Lee frowned.

"What makes you so certain, Bud Lee," was her abrupt word of greeting,
"that Bayne Trevors is back of this deal?"

"When did I say that?" he countered.

"Yesterday, when I told you Charlie Miller had been held up, you
intimated that a long-headed man had planned the whole thing. That means
Trevors, doesn't it?"

"One of us," said Lee calmly, ignoring her question and looking her
straight in the eyes, "is going back. Which one?"

"Neither!" she retorted promptly. She even smiled confidently at him.
"For I won't. And you won't."

"Do you need to be told," he asked her coolly, "that this is no sort of
job for a girl? You'd only be in the way."

"If you want glittering generalities," she jeered at him, "then listen to
this: A man's job, first, last, and all the time, is to be chivalrous to
a woman! And not a bumptious boor!"

With that she spurred by him, taking the trail which led off to the right
and so under the cliffs and to the mouth of a great, ragged chasm. In
spite of him, Bud Lee grinned after her. And, seeing that she was not to
be turned back, he followed.

They left their horses and followed the old footpath, made their way into
the chasm deeper and deeper and little by little climbed upward. The
climb