hour. An' she's going to the cavern, Johnny!"

He was telescoping his long glass as he spoke, and while Aldous was still
staring toward the gorge in wonderment and a little fear, he added:

"We'd better follow. Quade an' Rann can't get here inside o' two or three
hours, an' we'll be back before then." Again he rumbled with that curious
chuckling laugh. "She beat us, Johnny, she beat us fair! An' she's got
spirrit, a wunnerful spirrit, to go up there alone!"

Aldous wanted to run, but he held himself down to MacDonald's stride. His
heart trembled apprehensively as they hurriedly descended the mountain and
cut across the plain. He could not quite bring himself to MacDonald's point
of assurance regarding Quade and Mortimer FitzHugh. The old mountaineer was
positive that the other party was behind them. Aldous asked himself if it
were not possible that Quade and FitzHugh were _ahead_ of them, and already
waiting and watching for their opportunity. He had suggested that they
might have swung farther to the west, with the plan of descending upon the
valley from the north, and MacDonald had pointed out how unlikely this was.
In spite of this, Aldous was not in a comfortable frame of mind as they
hurried after Joanne. She had half an hour's start of them when they
reached the mouth of the gorge, and not until they had travelled another
half-hour up the rough bed of the break between the two mountains, and
MacDonald pointed ahead, and said: "There's the cavern!" did he breathe
easier.

They could see the mouth of the cavern when they were yet a couple of
hundred yards from it. It was a wide, low cleft in the north face of the
chasm wall, and in front of it, spreading out like the flow of a stream,
was a great spatter of white sand, like a huge rug that had been spread out
in a space cleared of its chaotic litter of rock and broken slate. At first
glance Aldous guessed that the cavern had once been the exit of a
subterranean stream. The sand deadened the sound of their footsteps as they
approached. At the mouth of the cave they paused. It was perhaps forty or
fifty feet deep, and as high as a nine-foot room. Inside it was quite
light. Halfway to the back of it, upon her knees, and with her face turned
from them, was Joanne.

They were very close to her before she heard them. With a startled cry she
sprang to her feet, and Aldous and MacDonald saw what she had been doing.
Over a long mound in the white sand still rose the sapli