folk when the night
comes--a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and--" Dolly
whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed.
The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, as
deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing the
mountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more
intermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher and
higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the
tension of things loosen a little.

Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hard
winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian superstition that
was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the empty
eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her. She dared not
think of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of what
she might find at her journey's end, or--"Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl. Is it
my foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some one following?"

The mare had been trained to respond to the slightest touch on her mouth,
and stopped instantly. Judith swayed slightly in the saddle with the
heaving of the sweating horse. The blood beat at her temples, confusing
what she actually heard with what her imagination pictured. She was
half-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid from the
saddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian fashion. Above
the throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came to her murmurously,
like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell, she could hear the
regular beat of horse's hoofs following up the steep mountain grade. She
scrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a hunted thing, but when she
attempted to vault to the saddle her limbs failed and she sank clinging to
the pommel. Twice she tried and twice the trembling of her limbs held her
captive. With the loss of each moment the beat of the hoofs on the trail
below became more distinct. The very desperation of her plight kept her
clinging to the pommel, incapable of thought, so that when she finally
flung herself to the saddle she was surprised to find herself there. To
the left the trail dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the close
crowding of many scrub pines. To the right the snow-clad spires of the
Wind River kept their eternal vigil. If she should call aloud for help,
these white, still mountains would echo the anguish of