everly's hard
fate. How small a thing can open the road to a big tragedy. I trusted
that whelp till that day at San Christobal."

"I hope we will finish this soon," I said. "I don't understand Beverly
at all and I marvel at Little Blue Flower's love for him. Don't you?"

Jondo looked up with a pathos in his dark-blue eyes.

"Don't hurry, Gail. The trails all end somewhere soon. Life is a
stranger thing from day to day, but the one thing that no man will ever
fully understand is a woman's love for man. There is only one thing
higher, and that is mother-love."

"The kind that you and Uncle Esmond have," I said.

"Oh, I am only a man, but Clarenden has a woman's heart, as you and
Beverly and my sister's child all know."

"Your sister's child?" I gasped.

"Yes. When her parents went with yellow fever, too, I could not adopt
Mat--you know why. Clarenden did it for me. She has always known that I
am her uncle, but Mat was always a self-contained child."

I loved Mat more than ever from that hour.

The next day our trail ran into pine forests, where tall, shapely trees
point skyward. Not a dense woodland, but a seemingly endless one. Snows
lay in the darker places, and here and there streams trickled out into
the sunlight, whose only sources were these melting snows. It was a
land of silence and loneliness--a land forgotten or unknown to record.
The Hopi trail was stronger here and we followed it eagerly, but night
overtook us early in the forest.

That evening we gathered about a huge fire of pine boughs beneath a low
stone ridge covered with evergreen trees that sheltered us warmly from
the sharp west winds. We heard the cries of night-roving beasts, and in
the darkness, now and then, a pair of gleaming eyes, seen for an
instant, and then the rush of feet, told us that some wild creature had
looked for the first time on fire.

"To-morrow night will see our journey's end," Jondo declared. "The Hopi
can't be far away, and I'm sure they are safe yet, and we shall reach
them before the Apache does."

The Indian runner's face did not change its blankness, but I felt that
he doubted Jondo's judgment. That night he slipped away and we never saw
him again.

We were all hopeful that night, and hopeful the next morning when we
broke camp early. A trail we had not seen the night before ran up the
low ridge to the west of us. Eloise and I followed it up a little way,
riding abreast. The ridge really was a narrow, rocky t