and
yet that was possible.

Her face whitened; she hesitated just a fraction of a second,
balancing. Now the men were following the wide crescent of the curve
which would lead them to the bridge. There was another course lying
straight between the two tips of that crescent, and a great gap filled
with the thunder of raging water against crags that were like the
horrible teeth of a monster, broke the short cut in two.

Again Hume had turned; she noted even across the distance the
contemptuous carriage of his big body and she knew that he was
laughing. And again, as though it were already just before her, she
fancied that she saw the chasm of the river.

"It is Wayne's ruin, it maybe Wayne's death, if they take him now!"

It seemed to her that it had not been her voice, that whispered the
words. It seemed that they had come to her from the air, that some one
else had spoken them. And as, hesitating no longer, she stooped
forward and sped down the long slope, she swerved still further from
the track the four men had made, heading straight to the river above
them, opposite the Bar L-M ranch house, straight toward the only way
that was left her.

She had made up her mind. She was resolute now and yet she was
frightened. In a little while the roar of the river smote her ears and
it seemed at once to call to her and jeer at her. She fancied that it
was like Hume's voice, mocking her. She remembered just how the banks
fell straight down to the whirlpools; she remembered again the splash
of the falling snow when she had come so close to her death. The very
feeling that had gripped her then, like ice against the beatings of her
heart, gripped her now. She was as one in a nightmare, drawn on,
rushing on to the peril from which she shrank.

She lost sight of Hume and the rest as she left the straight, cleared
roadway and the trees came between her and them.

"They're all the same," Sledge Hume was laughing as he turned and
waited a moment for MacKelvey to come up with him. "I never saw a
woman yet who wasn't willing to tackle the impossible in a flash and
then go to pieces with hysterics in the middle of the job."

On, gathering speed with the flinging of each yard behind her, her
polished skis singing as they leaped downward, hardly seeming to touch
the brittle crust of snow underfoot, standing erect that she might see
far ahead and turn in time for a mound that spoke of a boulder, Wanda
was rushing on t