te. Suppression of the feeling that had always and irresistibly
drawn him toward her, had only intensified this worry. His pride had
suffered at her hands; yet he made excuses for her--he had no high
opinion of himself, of his general reputation--and had built dreams on
the fanciful imagining that she should, despite everything, some day
like him. He wearied his brain in recalling a chance expression of her
eyes that could not have been unfriendly; an inflection of her voice
that might have carried a hope, if only their paths had been less
crossed: and his pride, despite rebuffs, sought her as a moth seeks a
flame. It drew him to her and kept him from her, for he lacked for the
first time in his life the boldness to stake everything on the turn of
a card, and ask Kate to marry him.

Simeral had told him that John Frying Pan saw the cabin burning, and
Laramie rode up to his place on the Reservation to talk with him.
Failing to find him at home, Laramie left word with his wife and turned
south. It was then late. The trail had taken him high up in the
mountains and he made up his mind to ride over to the old bridge, stay
for the night, pick up the few things he had left there and take them
over to Simeral's in the morning.

Night had fallen when riding in easy fashion he reached the rim of the
canyon and made his way from foothold to foothold until he came to an
open ledge with grass and water for his horse, near the abutment.
Leaving him in this spot, Laramie, carrying his rifle, climbed by a
zig-zag footpath up a hundred feet to the shelter and rolled himself in
a blanket for the night.

He woke at what he believed to be near midnight. The night was cold
and he began to think about something to eat. With the aid of a candle
he found bacon cached under a crevice in a baking-powder can near his
bunk, and found some splinters of wood. These he laid for an early
breakfast fire and wrapped himself again in his blanket. He had closed
his eyes for another nap when a sound arrested his attention; it was
the rumbling of a small piece of rock tumbling into the canyon.

Nothing was more common than for fragments, great and small, of the
splintered canyon walls to loosen and start in the silence of the
night. As mountain trees withstand the winter winds only to fall in
summer calms, so it seemed as if the masses of rock that hung poised on
the canyon rim through countless storms, chose the stillest hour of the
stilles