lf, is doubtful.

Presently they picked up the line of telegraph poles, well beyond the
station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the
troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of
assured direction. A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness
began to be felt. The clouds were thinning. Something ahead of them
hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance. Banneker threw up a
shadowy arm. They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now
become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into its
flanks.

Io gazed intently at the flood which was to deliver her out of the hands
of the Philistine. How far away the other bank of the newborn stream
might be, she could only guess from the vague rush in her ears. The
arroyo's water slipped ceaselessly, objectlessly away from beneath her
strained vision, smooth, suave, even, effortless, like the process of
some unhurried and mighty mechanism. Now and again a desert plant,
uprooted from its arid home, eddied joyously past her, satiated for once
of its lifelong thirst; and farther out she thought to have a glimpse of
some dead and whitish animal. But these were minor blemishes on a great,
lustrous ribbon of silken black, unrolled and re-rolled from darkness
into darkness.

"It's beckoning us," said Io, leaning to Banneker, her hand on his
shoulder.

"We must wait for more light," he answered.

"Will you trust yourself to _that_?" asked Camilla Van Arsdale, with a
gesture of fear and repulsion toward the torrent.

"Anywhere!" returned Io. There was exaltation in her voice.

"I can't understand it," cried the older woman. "How do you know what
may lie before you?"

"That is the thrill of it."

"There may be death around the first curve. It's so unknown; so secret
and lawless."

"Ah, and I'm lawless!" cried Io. "I could defy the gods on a night like
this!"

She flung her arms aloft, in a movement of sweet, wild abandon, and, as
if in response to an incantation, the sky was reft asunder and the moon
rushed forth, free for the moment of the clutching clouds, fugitive,
headlong, a shining Maenad of the heavens, surrounded by the rush and
whirl that had whelmed earth and its waters and was hurrying them to an
unknown, mad destiny.

"Now we can see our way," said Banneker, the practical.

He studied the few rods of sleek, foamless water between him and the
farther bank, and, going to the steel bo