ome milk in it, and set it at her elbow. "Better drink it," he said
coldly. And Gloria gathered her strength and sat up and drank.
Thereafter she ate some bread and potted ham. Fragments of bread, the
crust, and half of the ham she threw away. King opened his mouth to
protest; then shrugged and remained silent. His back to a tree, he sat
and smoked until the hour had passed.

Precisely at one o'clock they were on their way. Gloria caught her own
horse, coiled the rope, and mounted. As King rode across the meadow and
to the wooded slope beyond she followed. It seemed to her that this was
all a dream; she was almost light-headed; the sternest of realities
began to seem impalpable and distant and of scant moment. She knew that
she was going forward because she must; that otherwise she would lie
here in the lonely wilderness and die. In her exhaustion she noted, as
one does note his own soul-play when overwrought, that the prospect of
death seemed less terrible than that of utter desertion. The mountains
were so big they stifled her. With every tortuous step forward this
formidable land all about her had grown more severe, more lonely, more
to her like the kingdom of desolation than she had ever dreamed existed.
There were slope fields strewn with black lava rock where never a
solitary blade of grass upthrust a thin spear; there were broken
expanses across which the eye might travel wearily for what appeared
endless miles. One could call out here with never a faint hope of being
heard; one left alone here could die miserably, taunted only by the
echoes of her own choking voice. This devil's land took on a vindictive
personality; it was a hideous colossus, stooping over her, inspired with
but one cruel desire, to crush her soft white body, to stamp out her
life, to annihilate her and gloat over her shrieking despair. She felt
like some hapless little princess in a fairy-tale who had wandered into
a monstrous land of black sorcery.

By four o'clock, when it seemed to Gloria that she had reached and was
passing the limits of her endurance, came two momentous occurrences.
King, riding ahead as usual, was not quite so far in advance, and did
not have his back turned square upon her. For the first time he had
briefly mistaken the trail; they were on the steep flank of the
mountain; he turned and rode back in her general direction but some
hundred yards lower on the slope.

"The trail's down here," he announced shortly. He did n