t night to ride like avalanches the headlong slopes, plunge over
dizzy cliffs and crash and sprawl in dying thunders from ledge to ledge
into the river below. All these noises, big and little, were familiar
to Laramie's ears. He could hear them in his sleep without losing the
thread of a dream; but the echo of a single footstep would bring him up
sitting.

The sound that now caught his attention had a still different effect.
Listening, he lay motionless in his blanket with every faculty keyed;
had a man at that moment stood before him reading his death warrant, he
could not have been more awake. The noise was slight; only a small
fragment of rock had fallen and the echoes of its journey were lost
almost at once; it was the beginning of the sound that he was thinking
of--the noise had not started right. He thought of the four-footed
prowlers of the night and as a cause eliminated them one after another.
He thought of his horse below--it was not where such a sound could
start. But always slow to imagine a mystery when a reason could be
assigned, Laramie, lying prone, was brought back every time to his
first instinctive inference. Numberless times when tramping the canyon
walls, his foot slipping before he recovered his balance had dislodged
a bit of loose rock. He knew that sound too well and it was such a
sound he had just heard. Behind the sound he suspected there was a man.

He tried long to reason himself out of the conviction. For an hour he
lay perfectly still, waiting for some further alarm. There was none
and the night was never stiller. Nor was there any haste, even if it
should prove the worst, about meeting the situation. He was caught not
like a rat in a trap but like a man in a blind canyon, with ample means
of defense and none of escape except through a gauntlet. No enemy
could molest him where he lay, but he could not lie there indefinitely.
And with little ammunition and scarcely any food or water, he had no
mind to stand a siege.

If his enemies had actually discovered his retreat and put a watch on
him, he must in any event wait for the first peep of daylight. The one
chance of escape lay down and not up, and the descent of the canyon was
not to be made in complete darkness. A moon would have been a godsend.
It would have made things easy, if such a word could be used of the
situation; but there was no moon. Acting on his premonition as if it
had been an assurance, Laramie, at the end o