feated;
and he had, moreover, narrowly escaped a worse thing than mere defeat;
for the wind had carried him off the trail, and almost to the brink of
the chasm that yawned some hundred yards away. Now, remembering that
experience, he spurred Trixy forward to take the aperture in the wall
before the wind should suddenly become insupportable; and this time he
was more fortunate. The pony leaped and clambered up the slippery
path, and at the exit was caught by a blast that hurled and pinned
her, as if she had been no heavier than a butterfly, against the base
of the righthand towering figure. For some seconds neither horse nor
man was able to move from that fixed position, where the wind
flattened them against the rock. Then it swerved sharply, flung them
against the other Sister with such force that Haig's leg was stunned
and bruised, and finally released them with a shriek that sounded like
a cry of disappointed rage. Trixy plunged forward with a snort, and
Haig saw that the trail was again plain across another field of
scattered stones.

Now, thrilled by this victory, he urged the pony onward at all
possible speed toward the worst of all the perils of the mountain. The
stone field was succeeded by a series of mounds and hollows, and this
by a second slippery floor; and then he mounted the ridge that
terminated in the Devil's Chair. Here was the highest point attained
by the trail: a flat rock measuring perhaps twenty yards one way, and
a little less the other, lifted high above the surrounding slopes, and
having (hence its name) a huge back formed by the abrupt termination
of the ridge. From the chair the rock dipped in a kind of hollow like
a chute, worn smooth by the winds and rains; and everything that ever
fell into that chute was swallowed by the chasm of unplumbed and
unestimated depth. Sometimes the wind blew up through the chute across
the Devil's Chair; sometimes it blew down through it into the chasm.
It was blowing out when Parker reached the chair, and he was hurled
back down, the slope three times before he acknowledged his defeat; it
was blowing in when the three members of the English party were sucked
down into the chasm.

Haig could have cried aloud the joy that ran through him, when, having
spurred Trixy up the steep ascent to a footing on the Devil's Chair,
he found that almost a perfect calm reigned there, due to some sudden
shift in the currents of the air.

"Quick, Trixy! On!" he cried.

The