backward, and from the open mouth a cry
broke, a shrill and dreadful sound that struck sharp on the plain's
abstracted silence, spread and quivered across its surface like
widening rings on the waters of a pool. The mountain man threw himself
on the edge and looked down. The figure lay limp among the bushes
thirty feet below. He watched it, his body still as a panther's
crouched for a spring. He saw one of the hands twitch, a loosened
sliver of slate slide from the wall, and cannoning on projections, leap
down and bury itself in the outflung hair. The face looking up at him
with half-shut eyes that did not wink as the rock dust sifted into
them, was terrible, but he felt no sensation save a grim curiosity.

He stole down a narrow gulley and crept with stealthy feet and
steadying hands toward the still shape. The shadows were cool down
there, and as he touched the face its warmth shocked him. It should
have been cold to have matched its look and the hush of the place. He
thrust his hand inside the shirt and felt at the heart. No throb rose
under his palm, and he sent it sliding over the upper part of the body,
limp now, but which he knew would soon be stiffening. The man was dead.

Courant straightened himself and sent a rapid glance about him. The
bushes among which the body lay were close matted in a thick screen.
Through their roots the small trickle of the spring percolated,
stealing its way to the parched sands outside. It made a continuous
murmuring, as if nature was lifting a voice of low, insistent protest
against the desecration of her peace.

The man standing with stilled breath and rigid muscles listened for
other sounds. Reassured that there were none, his look swept right and
left for a spot wherein to hide the thing that lay at his feet. At its
base the rock wall slanted outward leaving a hollow beneath its eave
where the thin veneer of water gleamed from the shadows. He took the
dead man under the arms and dragged him to it, careful of branches that
might snap under his foot, pausing to let the echoes of rolling stones
die away--a figure of fierce vitality with the long, limp body hanging
from his hands. At the rock he crouched and thrust his burden under
the wall's protecting cope, the trickle of the water dying into a
sudden, scared silence. Stepping back he brushed the bushes into
shape, hiding their breakage, and bent to gather the scattered leaves
and crush them into crevices. When