cket. Ring and Whitie
stood waiting for him. Taking to the open aisles and patches of the
sage, he walked guardedly, careful not to stumble or step in dust or
strike against spreading sage-branches.

If he were burdened he did not feel it. From time to time, when he
passed out of the black lines of shade into the wan starlight, he
glanced at the white face of the girl lying in his arms. She had not
awakened from her sleep or stupor. He did not rest until he cleared the
black gate of the canyon. Then he leaned against a stone breast-high to
him and gently released the girl from his hold. His brow and hair
and the palms of his hands were wet, and there was a kind of nervous
contraction of his muscles. They seemed to ripple and string tense. He
had a desire to hurry and no sense of fatigue. A wind blew the scent
of sage in his face. The first early blackness of night passed with the
brightening of the stars. Somewhere back on his trail a coyote yelped,
splitting the dead silence. Venters's faculties seemed singularly acute.

He lifted the girl again and pressed on. The valley better traveling
than the canyon. It was lighter, freer of sage, and there were no rocks.
Soon, out of the pale gloom shone a still paler thing, and that was the
low swell of slope. Venters mounted it and his dogs walked beside him.
Once upon the stone he slowed to snail pace, straining his sight to
avoid the pockets and holes. Foot by foot he went up. The weird cedars,
like great demons and witches chained to the rock and writhing in silent
anguish, loomed up with wide and twisting naked arms. Venters crossed
this belt of cedars, skirted the upper border, and recognized the tree
he had marked, even before he saw his waving scarf.

Here he knelt and deposited the girl gently, feet first and slowly laid
her out full length. What he feared was to reopen one of her wounds.
If he gave her a violent jar, or slipped and fell! But the supreme
confidence so strangely felt that night admitted no such blunders.

The slope before him seemed to swell into obscurity to lose its definite
outline in a misty, opaque cloud that shaded into the over-shadowing
wall. He scanned the rim where the serrated points speared the sky, and
he found the zigzag crack. It was dim, only a shade lighter than the
dark ramparts, but he distinguished it, and that served.

Lifting the girl, he stepped upward, closely attending to the nature of
the path under his feet. After a few ste