ments under the blowing trail of smoke. Sometimes
it swam high, rising on the night wind, and I had no more substantial
curtain than its moon-thrown shadow; sometimes again it crawled upon the
earth, and I would walk in it, no higher than to my shoulders, like some
mountain fog. But, one way or another, the smoke of that ill-omened
furnace protected the first steps of my escape, and led me unobserved to
the canon.

There, sure enough, I found a taciturn and sombre man beside a pair of
saddle-horses; and thenceforward, all night long, we wandered in silence
by the most occult and dangerous paths among the mountains. A little
before the dayspring we took refuge in a wet and gusty cavern at the
bottom of a gorge; lay there all day concealed; and the next night,
before the glow had faded out of the west, resumed our wanderings. About
noon we stopped again, in a lawn upon a little river, where was a screen
of bushes; and here my guide, handing me a bundle from his pack, bade me
change my dress once more. The bundle contained clothing of my own,
taken from our house, with such necessaries as a comb and soap. I made
my toilet by the mirror of a quiet pool; and as I was so doing and
smiling with some complacency to see myself restored to my own image,
the mountains rang with a scream of far more than human piercingness;
and where I still stood astonished, there sprang up and swiftly
increased a storm of the most awful and earth-rending sounds. Shall I
own to you that I fell upon my face and shrieked? And yet this was but
the overland train winding among the near mountains: the very means of
my salvation: the strong wings that were to carry me from Utah!

When I was dressed the guide gave me a bag, which contained, he said,
both money and papers; and, telling me that I was already over the
borders in the territory of Wyoming, bade me follow the stream until I
reached the railway station, half a mile below. "Here," he added, "is
your ticket as far as Council Bluffs. The East express will pass in a
few hours." With that, he took both horses and, without further words or
any salutation, rode off by the way that we had come.

Three hours afterwards, I was seated on the end platform of the train as
it swept eastward through the gorges and thundered in tunnels of the
mountains. The change of scene, the sense of escape, the still throbbing
terror of pursuit--above all the astounding magic of my new conveyance,
kept me from any logica