onder, outlined against the sky. If some devilish
instinct in the brute, or some agent of Destiny, or mere fling of
chance had held him on the plateau to tantalize and lead on his
pursuer--

"Dreaming again!" Haig muttered, with a wry smile, and yet with a
vague uneasiness that he could not put down.

But in another instant he had leaped to his horse, tested the cinches
with trembling fingers, climbed stiffly into the saddle, and dug the
spurs into Trixy's flanks. When he looked again toward the ridge, the
outlaw had disappeared; but there was no ignis-fatuus trick in that;
and the horse would be seen again when Haig too had topped the rise.
For the trail was now leading him in a relatively straight line toward
the exact spot where Sunnysides had vanished; and more assuring than
all else, a very material and comforting proof that this was a real
horse he followed, was the discovery he made halfway up the slope.
There, among the stones, lay the outlaw's saddle. Clearly the runaway
had only just now been able to shake it off, and its condition,
bruised and cut and dirty, showed that Sunnysides had been put to some
trouble to be rid of it, having doubtless rolled over and over on it
in his efforts to be free. And there, too, was a plausible explanation
of the fact that Sunnysides was not now far on the trail.

From the top of the ridge, Haig saw the outlaw picking his way through
a wilderness of rocks that had the grewsome aspect of a cemetery--the
graveyard of the gods. Following through this depressing scene, he
lost sight of Sunnysides, and on emerging upon another floor-like
expanse of solid stone he received a surprise that caused him to rein
up Trixy with a jerk. The quarry was nowhere in sight, though Haig's
position gave him a sweeping view of the flat ahead of him, even to
the edge of the summit, now scarcely three quarters of a mile away.
There was no possibility that the horse could have traversed that
distance in the time Haig was passing through the "cemetery;" neither
was there any place on that part of the plateau where it could be
concealed.

The trail itself solved the mystery. It did not lead straight on, as
Haig had imagined; and he experienced some difficulty in finding it on
the smooth floor, from which the elements had all but obliterated the
crosses made by the pioneers. Then his astonishment was great to find
that it turned at a sharp angle to the left, dropped sheer over the
edge of the flat r