nding of their horses, and of certain
natural laws, which the more artificial riders of civilization are apt
to overlook. Hence there was no hesitation or indecision communicated
to the nervous creatures they bestrode, who swept over crumbling stones
and slippery ledges with a momentum that took away half their weight,
and made a stumble or false step, or indeed anything but an actual
collision, almost impossible. Closing together they avoided the latter,
and holding each other well up, became one irresistible wedge-shaped
mass. At times they yelled, not from consciousness nor bravado, but
from the purely animal instinct of warning and to combat the
breathlessness of their descent, until, reaching the level, they
charged across the gravelly bed of a vanished river, and pulled up at
Collinson's Mill. The mill itself had long since vanished with the
river, but the building that had once stood for it was used as a rude
hostelry for travelers, which, however, bore no legend or invitatory
sign. Those who wanted it, knew it; those who passed it by, gave it no
offense.

Collinson himself stood by the door, smoking a contemplative pipe. As
they rode up, he disengaged himself from the doorpost listlessly,
walked slowly towards them, said reflectively to the leader, "I've been
thinking with you that a vote for Thompson is a vote thrown away," and
prepared to lead the horses towards the water tank. He had parted with
them over twelve hours before, but his air of simply renewing a
recently interrupted conversation was too common a circumstance to
attract their notice. They knew, and he knew, that no one else had
passed that way since he had last spoken; that the same sun had swung
silently above him and the unchanged landscape, and there had been no
interruption nor diversion to his monotonous thought. The wilderness
annihilates time and space with the grim pathos of patience.

Nevertheless he smiled. "Ye don't seem to have got through coming down
yet," he continued, as a few small boulders, loosened in their rapid
descent, came more deliberately rolling and plunging after the
travelers along the gravelly bottom. Then he turned away with the
horses, and, after they were watered, he reentered the house. His
guests had evidently not waited for his ministration. They had already
taken one or two bottles from the shelves behind a wide bar and helped
themselves, and, glasses in hand, were now satisfying the more imminent
crav