e," said Withers. "Have you forgotten the Sago Lily?
She'll be put on trial.... That girl--that child!... Shefford, you know
she hasn't any friends. And now no Mormon man are protect her, for fear
of prosecution."

"I'll go," replied Shefford, shortly.

The Indian brought up the horses. Nack-yal was thin from his long
travel during the hot summer, but he was as hard as iron, and the way he
pointed his keen nose toward the Sagi showed how he wanted to make for
the upland country, with its clear springs and valleys of grass. Withers
mounted his bay and with a hurried farewell to his wife spurred the
mustang into the trail. Shefford took time to get his weapons and the
light pack he always carried, and then rode out after the trader.

The pace Withers set was the long, steady lope to which these Indian
mustangs had been trained all their lives. In an hour they reached the
mouth of the Sagi, and at sight of it it seemed to Shefford that the
hard half-year of suffering since he had been there had disappeared.
Withers, to Shefford's regret, did not enter the Sagi. He turned off to
the north and took a wild trail into a split of the red wall, and wound
in and out, and climbed a crack so narrow that the light was obscured
and the cliffs could be reached from both sides of a horse.

Once up on the wild plateau, Shefford felt again in a different world
from the barren desert he had lately known. The desert had crucified
him and had left him to die or survive, according to his spirit and his
strength. If he had loved the glare, the endless level, the deceiving
distance, the shifting sand, it had certainly not been as he loved this
softer, wilder, more intimate upland. With the red peaks shining up into
the blue, and the fragrance of cedar and pinyon, and the purple sage
and flowers and grass and splash of clear water over stones--with these
there came back to him something that he had lost and which had haunted
him.

It seemed he had returned to this wild upland of color and canyon and
lofty crags and green valleys and silent places with a spirit gained
from victory over himself in the harsher and sterner desert below. And,
strange to him, he found his old self, the dreamer, the artist, the
lover of beauty, the searcher for he knew not what, come to meet him on
the fragrant wind.

He felt this, saw the old wildness with glad eyes, yet the greater part
of his mind was given over to the thought of the unfortunate women he
exp