ll. "I'll do my
best."

"The minute you see Poggin tell him. A job on hand steadies him. And I
say again--look to it that nothing happens. Either you or Poggin carry
the job through. But I want both of you in it. Break for the hills, and
when you get up in the rocks where you can hide your tracks head for
Mount Ord. When all's quiet again I'll join you here. That's all. Call
in the boys."

Like a swift shadow and as noiseless Duane stole across the level toward
the dark wall of rock. Every nerve was a strung wire. For a little while
his mind was cluttered and clogged with whirling thoughts, from which,
like a flashing scroll, unrolled the long, baffling order of action. The
game was now in his hands. He must cross Mount Ord at night. The feat
was improbable, but it might be done. He must ride into Bradford, forty
miles from the foothills before eight o'clock next morning. He must
telegraph MacNelly to be in Val Verde on the twenty-fifth. He must ride
back to Ord, to intercept Knell, face him be denounced, kill him, and
while the iron was hot strike hard to win Poggin's half-won interest as
he had wholly won Fletcher's. Failing that last, he must let the outlaws
alone to bide their time in Ord, to be free to ride on to their new job
in Val Verde. In the mean time he must plan to arrest Longstreth. It
was a magnificent outline, incredible, alluring, unfathomable in
its nameless certainty. He felt like fate. He seemed to be the iron
consequences falling upon these doomed outlaws.

Under the wall the shadows were black, only the tips of trees and crags
showing, yet he went straight to the trail. It was merely a grayness
between borders of black. He climbed and never stopped. It did not
seem steep. His feet might have had eyes. He surmounted the wall, and,
looking down into the ebony gulf pierced by one point of light, he
lifted a menacing arm and shook it. Then he strode on and did not falter
till he reached the huge shelving cliffs. Here he lost the trail; there
was none; but he remembered the shapes, the points, the notches of rock
above. Before he reached the ruins of splintered ramparts and jumbles of
broken walls the moon topped the eastern slope of the mountain, and the
mystifying blackness he had dreaded changed to magic silver light.
It seemed as light as day, only soft, mellow, and the air held a
transparent sheen. He ran up the bare ridges and down the smooth slopes,
and, like a goat, jumped from rock to rock.