quick breath like a runner, turned her
face to her lover and let him kiss her lips.

She looked back at the fire, quiet, unflurried, then slowly raised her
lids. Courant had moved his pipe and the obscuring film of smoke was
gone. Across the red patch of embers his eyes gazed steadily at her
with the familiar gleam of derision. Her tenderness died as a flame
under a souse of water, and an upwelling of feeling that was almost
hatred, rose in her against the strange man.

CHAPTER IV

The last fording of the river had been made, and from the summit of the
Red Buttes they looked down on the long level, specked with sage and
flecked with alkaline incrustings, that lay between them and the
Sweetwater. Across the horizon the Wind River mountains stretched a
chain of majestic, snowy shapes. Desolation ringed them round, the
swimming distances fusing with the pallor of ever-receding horizons,
the white road losing itself in the blotting of sage, red elevations
rising lonely in extending circles of stillness. The air was so clear
that a tiny noise broke it, crystal-sharp like the ring of a smitten
glass. And the sense of isolation was intensified as there was no
sound from anywhere, only a brooding, primordial silence that seemed to
have remained unbroken since the first floods drained away.

Below in the plain the white dots of an encampment showed like a growth
of mushrooms. Near this, as they crawled down upon it, the enormous
form of Independence Rock detached itself from the faded browns and
grays to develop into a sleeping leviathan, lost from its herd and
fallen exhausted in a sterile land.

Courant was curious about the encampment, and after the night halt rode
forward to inspect it. He returned in the small hours reporting it a
train of Mormons stopped for sickness. A boy of fifteen had broken his
leg ten days before and was now in a desperate condition. The train
had kept camp hoping for his recovery, or for the advent of help in one
of the caravans that overhauled them. Courant thought the boy beyond
hope, but in the gray of the dawn the doctor mounted, and with Susan,
David, and Courant, rode off with his case of instruments strapped to
his saddle.

The sun was well up when they reached the Mormon camp. Scattered about
a spring mouth in the litter of a three days' halt, its flocks and
herds spread wide around it, it was hushed in a sullen dejection. The
boy was a likely lad for the new Zion,