t on the side opposite her. The trees were all sharp,
spear pointed. Patches of light green aspens showed strikingly against
the dense black. The great slope beneath Ellen was serrated with
narrow, deep gorges, almost canyons in themselves. Shadows alternated
with clear bright spaces. The mile-wide mouth of the canyon opened
upon the Basin, down into a world of wild timbered ranges and ravines,
valleys and hills, that rolled and tumbled in dark-green waves to the
Sierra Anchas.

But for once Ellen seemed singularly unresponsive to this panorama of
wildness and grandeur. Her ears were like those of a listening deer,
and her eyes continually reverted to the open places along the Rim. At
first, in her excitement, time flew by. Gradually, however, as the sun
moved westward, she began to be restless. The soft thud of dropping
pine cones, the rustling of squirrels up and down the shaggy-barked
spruces, the cracking of weathered bits of rock, these caught her keen
ears many times and brought her up erect and thrilling. Finally she
heard a sound which resembled that of an unshod hoof on stone.
Stealthily then she took her rifle and slipped back through the pine
thicket to the spot she had chosen. The little pines were so close
together that she had to crawl between their trunks. The ground was
covered with a soft bed of pine needles, brown and fragrant. In her
hurry she pricked her ungloved hand on a sharp pine cone and drew the
blood. She sucked the tiny wound. "Shore I'm wonderin' if that's a
bad omen," she muttered, darkly thoughtful. Then she resumed her
sinuous approach to the edge of the thicket, and presently reached it.

Ellen lay flat a moment to recover her breath, then raised herself on
her elbows. Through an opening in the fringe of buck brush she could
plainly see the promontory where she had stood with Jean Isbel, and
also the approaches by which he might come. Rather nervously she
realized that her covert was hardly more than a hundred feet from the
promontory. It was imperative that she be absolutely silent. Her eyes
searched the openings along the Rim. The gray form of a deer crossed
one of these, and she concluded it had made the sound she had heard.
Then she lay down more comfortably and waited. Resolutely she held, as
much as possible, to her sensorial perceptions. The meaning of Ellen
Jorth lying in ambush just to see an Isbel was a conundrum she refused
to ponder in the present. She was d