s face was beaten until he was almost blind. His shirt had been torn from
his shoulders and his flesh was bleeding. He advanced a few steps. He
raised one arm and then the other. He limped. One arm hurt him when he
moved it, but the bone was sound. He was terribly mauled, but he knew that
no bones were broken, and a gasp of thankfulness fell from his lips. All
this time his mind had been suffering even more than his body. Not for an
instant, even as he fought for life between the chasm walls, and as he lay
half unconscious on the rock, had he forgotten Joanne. His one thought was
of her now. He had no weapon, but as he stumbled in the direction of the
camp in the little plain he picked up a club that lay in his path.

That MacDonald was dead, Aldous was certain. There would be four against
him--Quade and Mortimer FitzHugh and the two men who had gone to the
mountain. His brain cleared swiftly as a part of his strength returned, and
it occurred to him that if he lost no time he might come upon Joanne and
her captors before the two men came from killing old Donald. He tried to
run. Not until then did he fully realize the condition he was in. Twice in
the first hundred yards his legs doubled under him and he fell down among
the rocks. He grew steadily stronger, though each time he tried to run or
spring a distance of a few feet his legs doubled under him like that. It
took him twenty minutes to get back to the edge of the plain, and when he
got there it was empty. There was no sign of Quade or FitzHugh, or of
Joanne and Marie; and there was no one coming from the direction of the
mountain.

He tried to run again, and he found that over the level floor of the valley
he could make faster time than among the rocks. He went to where he had
dropped his rifle. It was gone. He searched for his automatic. That, too,
was gone. There was one weapon left--a long skinning-knife in one of the
panniers near the tepee. As he went for this, he passed two of the men whom
he had shot. Quade and FitzHugh had taken their weapons, and had turned
them over to see if they were alive or dead. They were dead. He secured the
knife, and behind the tepee he passed the third body, its face as still and
white as the others. He shuddered as he recognized it. It was Slim Barker.
His rifle was gone.

More swiftly now he made his way into the break out of which his assailants
had come a short time before. The thought came to him again that he had
been rig