umage. But she was glad of
this--surmounting the mere physical oppression of it--for she felt that
it doubled the secrecy of her going; and Cooney's eyes, with his skilled
feet, sufficed for the trail.

At times she shrank as under the touch of a palpable hand reached out to
her from the darkness, a thing that frantically protested, pleaded,
expostulated--but she knew it for the hand of mere brute life, a
cowardly, blind, soulless thing, that would subvert all fitness. She
shook it off, knowing herself its superior by right of mind, with power
to inflict justice upon it. And _he_ was dead, he, the young and
strong--alas, poor slayer, poor slain! How her heart bled away. To
expiate----

She clung to that: it was an obligation that lay on her, a secret
obligation, but the more imperative for that. She could not hold a
forfeited life. She must redeem herself. The hardest thing was demanded
of her. And then, one could not go on with this bleeding heart.

"The hardest thing--the hardest thing!" she murmured, shutting her lips
tightly on the words, with a sudden inexplicable fear of some flaw in
her logic. Again and again she forced the words from her lips with
stubborn, deaf insistence, to still some mental voice of inquiry, a
passionless, cold thing that lifted itself in her brain, but which she
could beat down with this bludgeon of her phrase. She was even bold
enough to cross-examine herself presently. The hardest thing was
demanded of her, and she was doing the hardest thing. Her hand fell on
the laden holster at her side with a panic impulse to rush the thing
through. But the touch reassured her and she laughed in the
consciousness of her security. She could not be thwarted now, and she
need not hurry. She could afford to the very end that deliberate
thoroughness with which she had begun. Her will for the thing had lost
none of its iron.

An hour or so after the darkness had crowded the hills in upon her she
rode into a dense mist, chilling to the bone after the dryness of the
early night. The range of her vision was again shortened, and even the
little horse halted more frequently to feel his way. Once he seemed to
have wandered, and stood a moment in uncertainty. She let him rest, then
flicked his shoulder with the bridle rein, and he struggled stanchly on
over the ridge of loose gravel where he had halted, feeling for the
trail with expert hoofs. He found it a moment later, and was moving
forward again. She patt