from voicing
the questions which none the less insisted upon presenting themselves
to her: What was the thing that had brought both Brocky Lane and Tom
Cutter to Mt. Temple? What had they been seeking there in a wilderness
of crag and cliff? Why was Roderick Norton so determined that Jim
Galloway should not so much as suspect that these men were watchful in
the mountains? What sinister chain of circumstance had impelled
Moraga, who Norton said was Galloway's man, to shoot down the cattle
foreman? And Galloway himself, what type of man must he be if all that
she had heard of him were true; what were his ambitions, his plans, his
power?

Before long Norton pointed out the shadowy form of Mt. Temple looming
ever vaster before them, its mass of rock, of wind-blown, wind-carved
peaks lifted in sombre defiance against the stars. It brooded darkly
over the lower slopes, like an incubus it dominated the other spines
and ridges, its gorges filled with shadow and mystery, its precipices
making the sense reel dizzily. And somewhere up there high against the
sky, alone, suffering, perhaps dying, a man had waited through the slow
hours, and still awaited their coming. How slowly she and Norton were
riding, how heartless of her to have felt the thrill of pleasure which
had possessed her so utterly an hour ago!

Or less than an hour. For now again, wandering out far across the open
lands, came the heavy mourning of the bell.

"How far can one hear it?" she asked, surprised that from so far its
ringing came so clearly.

"I don't know how many miles," he answered. "We'll hear it from the
mountain. I should have heard it to-day, long before I met you by the
arroyo, had I not been travelling through two big bands of Engle's
sheep."

Behind them San Juan drawn into the shadows of night but calling to
them in mellow-toned cadences of sorrow, before them the sombre canons
and iron flanks of Mt. Temple, and somewhere, still several hours away,
Brocky Lane lying helpless and perhaps hopeless; grim by day the earth
hereabouts was inscrutable by night, a mighty, primal sphinx,
lip-locked, spirit-crushing. The man and girl riding swiftly side by
side felt in their different ways according to their different
characters and previous experience the mute command laid upon them, and
for the most part their lips were hushed.

There came the first slopes, the talus of strewn, broken,
disintegrating rock, and then the first of the cli