imly meant Life, had come to her with the advent of Kenset in
Lost Valley. She wished passionately for a fleeting moment that he had
never come, that the old swinging, rushing life of the ranges had
never known his holding influence. Then she felt again the hammering
of his heart beneath her palms, and nothing mattered in all the world
beside.

It was a thing beyond her ken, something ordered by fate. She must go
on, blindly as running waters, regardless of all that drowned.

But she loosed her hand from Billy's, leaned to his shoulder, put her
arm about his neck and drew his face to hers. Softly, tenderly, she
kissed him upon the lips, and she did not know that that was the
cruelest thing she had ever done in all her kindly life, did not see
the deathly pallor that overspread his face.

"I'm goin' to th' Canon Country, Billy," she said simply, "to find th'
Cup o' God an' Kenset."

Then she straightened in her saddle and gave El Rey the rein.

* * * * *

It was two of the clock by the starry heavens when these two riders
entered the blind opening in the Rockface and disappeared. El Rey, the
mighty, tossed his great head and whistled, stamped his hoofs in the
dead sift of the silencing floor. He had never before lost sight of
the sky, never felt other breath in his nostrils than the keen plain's
wind.

Now he shook himself and halted, went on again, and again halted, to
be urged forward by Tharon's spurred heels in his flanks. Up through
the eerie pass they went without speech, for each heart was filled to
overflowing with thoughts and fears.

To Billy there was something fateful, bodeful in the dead darkness,
the stillness. It seemed to him as if he left forever behind him the
open life of the ranges, the gay and careless days of riding after
Tharon's cattle.

For five years he had lived at Last's, under master and mistress,
content, happy. The half-remembered world of below had never called
him. The light on the table under the swinging lamp with Tharon's face
therein, the murmur of the stream through her garden, the whisper of
the cottonwoods, these had been sufficient. He had, subconsciously,
thanked his Maker for these things, had served them with a whole
heart. They had been his all, his life. Now the cottonwoods seemed far
away, remote, the life of the deep ranch house a thing of long ago.
All these things had given way to something that sapped the sunlight
fro