n yellow. This Nation has been
cowering behind the line of law, while the looters and skinners have
disarmed our very firing line. It's time somebody risked his neck to
reverse the order--"

"Git epp," said the old man roughly to his broncho.

The little pack mule took to the trail ears back at an easy lope; and
the riders set off up the Pass at the rocking-chair trot of the
plains-horseman. Gradually, the mountains crowded closer, in
weather-stained rock walls, with a far whish as of wind or waters
coming up from the canyon bottom; the sky overhead narrowing to a cleft
of blue with the frayed pines and hemlocks hanging from the granite
blocks, fragile as ferns against the sky. You looked back; the rocks
had closed to a solid wall; you looked down; the river filling the
canyon with a hollow hush had dwarfed to a glistening silver thread
with the forest dwarfed banks of moss. It was a sombre world, all the
more shadowy from that cleft of blue over head where an eagle circled
with lonely cry.

The Pass was like the passage of birth and death from life to larger
life. On the other side of the mountain lay the sun-bathed Valley and
the Ridge with its silver cataracts and the opal peak with the
glistening snow cross. This side, the Mountain in the Valley of the
Shadow became giant beveled masonry, tier on tier, criss-crossed and
scarred by the iced cataracts of a billion years--no sound but the
raucous scream of the lone eagle, the hollow hush of the far River, the
tinkling of the water-drip freezing as it fell. Then, where the cleft
of blue smote the rocks with sunlight, the doors of the mountains would
open again to larger life in another Valley.

The horses were no longer trotting. They were climbing and blowing and
pausing where the trail of the Pass took sharp turns, back and forward,
up and up, till the eagle was circling below. Both men had dismounted
and were walking Indian file to the rear, Wayland carrying his own
cased rifle. The trail was now running along the edge of an escarpment
no wider than a saddle, sheer drop below, sheer wall above.

"How would they come out from the gully on this trail, Wayland? I have
been watching for the tracks. They're not ahead of us."

"Gully ends in a blind wall above. As I make it, they'd push their
nags up and come down on the Pass trail somewhere below the precipice
ahead. We can take our time; I have been watching. There are no
tracks ahead. The trail a