l try him _first_."

And again the Ranger laughed.

"Don't laugh, man! D' y' know what it means when men are driven
outside the line of law?"

The horses waded in midstream and reached down drinking, champing on
their bits.

"Well--what does it mean?"

He saw the blue of the mountain stream swirl and whirl and eddy over
the sun-dyed pebbles, singing the law of the far mountain snows.

"God knows," answered the old man slowly. "It means disrupture. We
slew our kings in olden times; but ye are a many headed king in this
land! It means--perhaps, ye call it Anarchy to-day."

The yellow noon-day light sifted through the cottonwoods jewel-spangled
on the crystal blue River. The Ranger always knew the character of the
mountains from the River: silty and milky-blue from glaciers; crystal
and green-blue from the snow. And they rode away up the Valley from
the ranch houses towards the Pass, out beyond the bounds of the
National Forests with the trees marked two notches and one blaze;
gradually up the narrowing trail fringed by the shiny laurel bushes;
with the mountains closing closer and the spiced balsam odor raining on
the air a sifted gold dust of sunlight. At intervals, came the dull
rumble of the snow slide, the far reverberation, the echo of the law of
the snow flake rolling away the stone; the smash of the great law
drama, the titans behind the mountains.

It was one of those frequent mountain formations where a Valley seems
to terminate in a blank wall. You turn a buttress of rock, and you
find the sheer wall opening before you in a trail that climbs to a
notch on the sky line between forested flanks. The notch of blue is a
Pass.

"Anyway, Mr. Matthews, we are splitting the air, now! We are doing
more than sawing air."

They had put their horses to a sharp trot along the trail winding up
the River. The water was gurgling over the polished pebbles with
little leaps and glints of fire. Presently, the mountains had closed
behind them. The River was tumbling with noisy rush in a succession of
cascades, and the trail wound back from the rocky bank through circular
flats or what were locally known as "bottoms."

"Sheriff live this way?" shouted Matthews; for the roar of the little
stream filled the canyon.

"Has a ranch at the foot of the Pass."

"It won't be wasting time, anyway," said the old Britisher.

Again, Wayland smiled. If it would _not_ be wasting time; then, they
were already in