open, downward-rolling land disappeared, and he was hard put to it to
find the trail. He lost it repeatedly and made slow progress. Finally
he climbed into a region of all rock benches, rough here, smooth there,
with only an occasional scratch of iron horseshoe to guide him. Many
times he had to go ahead and then work to right or left till he found
his way again. It was slow work; it took all day; and night found him
half-way up the mountain. He halted at a little side-canon with grass
and water, and here he made camp. The night was clear and cool at that
height, with a dark-blue sky and a streak of stars blinking across. With
this day of action behind him he felt better satisfied than he had been
for some time. Here, on this venture, he was answering to a call that
had so often directed his movements, perhaps his life, and it was one
that logic or intelligence could take little stock of. And on this
night, lonely like the ones he used to spend in the Nueces gorge, and
memorable of them because of a likeness to that old hiding-place, he
felt the pressing return of old haunting things--the past so long ago,
wild flights, dead faces--and the places of these were taken by one
quiveringly alive, white, tragic, with its dark, intent, speaking
eyes--Ray Longstreth's.

That last memory he yielded to until he slept.

In the morning, satisfied that he had left still fewer tracks than
he had followed up this trail, he led his horse up to the head of the
canon, there a narrow crack in low cliffs, and with branches of cedar
fenced him in. Then he went back and took up the trail on foot.

Without the horse he made better time and climbed through deep clefts,
wide canons, over ridges, up shelving slopes, along precipices--a long,
hard climb--till he reached what he concluded was a divide. Going down
was easier, though the farther he followed this dim and winding trail
the wider the broken battlements of rock. Above him he saw the black
fringe of pinon and pine, and above that the bold peak, bare, yellow,
like a desert butte. Once, through a wide gateway between great
escarpments, he saw the lower country beyond the range, and beyond this,
vast and clear as it lay in his sight, was the great river that made the
Big Bend. He went down and down, wondering how a horse could follow that
broken trail, believing there must be another better one somewhere into
Cheseldine's hiding-place.

He rounded a jutting corner, where view had bee