joice, also, in the cleverness of her plan. As well as
she might she had preserved the decencies. A week might ensue before
they missed her. Cooney, stripped of his trappings, would appear at the
lake cabin, to be laughed at and chided for his desertion of the Bar-B
ranch, a week before she was missed; and then she would never be found.
There was, indeed, small chance of their having the pain of that. She
would keep to the trail as long as the night hid her; then a climb up
some unpathed slope, over rocks that would show no trace of her passage;
then a tangled thicket, remote, secret, improbable--and the tale of a
lost woman, a woman who wandered confusingly far on a night of tempting
splendor. She thought of Virginia's pain with a feeble pity. It seemed
as if humanity was dead in her.

The narrow trail wound beckoningly before her, the land stretched off to
peaks of silver or barren gray slopes or shadowed promontories, glooming
above ravines where little rivers turned restlessly in their beds; and
over all hung the mystic shimmer of moon rays, softening all angles and
picking the fronds of trees with dancing lights as she passed.

An owl boomed from a dead pine, and a little off the trail she heard the
scream of a cougar, like the scream of a woman in some strange terror.
But all sounds were indifferently alike to her, the shrilling of the
beast, the sibilance of running water, the bellow of the owl, the
whistle of a deer, or the throaty mutterings of an awakened bird. She
heard them as receding echoes of a life already remote.

She kept Cooney moving as rapidly as the trail permitted, checking his
little snatches at the wayside herbage. He could fast with her for one
night, she told him. To-morrow he could feast his way home harassed by
no rider. He stopped at times to test some doubtful bit of trail with a
cautious forefoot; or slowed to feel a sure way down a gullyside of
loose stones; or lingered knee deep in a melody of swift water, to
drink, with swelling sides. She was glad to have this last night with
the little horse that had been Ewing's. Ewing--only not to think of
him--for one cannot ride with the heart all bled away.

The light faded from the lower ways after a while. The moon had
completed its short arc and fell below the mountain ahead of her;
defining sharp little notches in its rim.

The hills seemed to steal upon her in the darkness then, huddling close
about her, muffling her with their black pl