circles to find the tracks, and this cost time when minutes might mean
life. But as long as he could he clung to the struggle to track her
exactly. He saw almost where the storm had struck the two wayfarers.
Neither, he knew, was insensible to its dangers. What amazed him was
that a man like Duke Morgan should be out in it. He found a spot where
they had halted and, with a start that checked the beating of his
heart, his eyes fell on her footprint not yet obliterated, beside the
wagon track.

The sight of it was an electric shock. Throwing himself from his
horse, he knelt over it in the storm, oblivious for an instant of
everything but that this tracery meant her presence, where he now
bent, hardly half an hour before. He swung, after a moment's keen
scrutiny, into his saddle, with fresh resolve. Pressed by the rising
fury of the wind, the wayfarers had become from this point, de Spain
saw too plainly, hardly more than fugitives. Good ground to the left,
where their hope of safety lay, had been overlooked. Their tracks
wandered on the open desert like those who, losing courage, lose their
course in the confusion and fear of the impending peril.

And with this increasing uncertainty in their direction vanished de
Spain's last hopes of tracking them. The wind swept the desert now as
a hurricane sweeps the open sea, snatching the fallen snow from the
face of the earth as the sea-gale, flattening the face of the waters,
rips the foam from the frantic waves to drive it in wild, scudding
fragments across them.

De Spain, urging his horse forward, unbuckled his rifle holster, threw
away the scabbard, and holding the weapon up in one hand, fired shot
after shot at measured intervals to attract the attention of the two
he sought. He exhausted his rifle ammunition without eliciting any
answer. The wind drove with a roar against which even a rifle report
could hardly carry, and the snow swept down the Sinks in a mad blast.
Flakes torn by the fury of the gale were stiffened by the bitter wind
into powdered ice that stung horse and rider. Casting away the
useless carbine, and pressing his horse to the limit of her strength
and endurance, the unyielding pursuer rode in great coiling circles
into the storm, to cut in, if possible, ahead of its victims, firing
shot upon shot from his revolver, and putting his ear intently against
the wind for the faint hope of an answer.

Suddenly the Lady stumbled and, as he cruelly reined her, s