d pointing. He heard her little
gasp; he looked upward; an astonished ejaculation broke from his own
lips. A breathless moment and already the thing, appearing from the
black nothingness, silhouetted but a moment against the sky, was gone
and he vaguely saw Terry's face turned toward him while they sought to
find each other's eyes and know if each had seen what the other had
glimpsed.

"It's impossible!" he muttered. "We are imagining things."

"Wait!" said Terry. "Maybe after all----"

They waited impatiently, their blood atingle. And in a very few
moments there was, seeming absurd and impossible, a repetition of the
vision which had so startled them: a black form at the head of the
cliffs, the field of star-strewn sky back of it limning it into vivid
distinctness--the ebon bulk of a steer moving straight out from the top
of the precipice, straight out a half-dozen feet into nothingness of
empty space, then slowly descending through the air, gone silently in
the deeper shadows of the canon below!

"Block and tackle!" muttered Steve abruptly. "A small steel cable.
Two or three men up there; a man on horseback down below. And while
Barbee and the boys guard the other end----"

"Blenham puts one across on us down here!" Terry finished it for him.

"Only here's where we put one over on Blenham," rejoined Steve hotly.
He threw a cartridge into his rifle-barrel and spurred ahead of her.
"You stay here, Terry. I----"

"Will I?" Terry retorted with animation. "Not on your life, Steve
Packard! If this is the beginning of Blenham's finish-- Well, I'm in
on it."

CHAPTER XXV

THE STAMPEDE

Terry had sensed something of the truth. In its way here was the
beginning of the end of many things. Before she and Steve Packard,
making what haste was possible in the thick dark and with what silence
was allowed them, had gone a score of paces deeper into the canon, the
crack of a rifle shouted its reverberating message of menace back and
forth in the rocky ravine, a spurt of flame showed where the rifleman
stood upon a pinnacle of rock almost directly above their heads and
there came the further sounds of men's startled voices and the
scampering of horses' hoofs, fleeing southward through the pass.

"They had lookouts all along!" cried Steve over his shoulder,
discarding caution and secrecy and throwing his rifle to his shoulder.
"Better hold back, Terry!"

He fired, accepted the precarious chances offered