any way of the game.
If he had left that woman down below where she belonged, we wouldn't be
in this fix. I tell you them ranchers'll be out in a pack after us,
and the only thing we can do is to pull our freight good and plenty
right now."

The whir of the engine drowned conversation. An instant later the two
carloads of banditti were passing down around curve after curve of the
sandy road. Mary Warren, still dazed, and dull where she lay, heard
them go by. Yonder then, lay the trail--but could she know which way?
If she turned her head she would lose the direction. She kept her eyes
fixed upon the last point of the compass from which she had heard the
car distinctly, and taking the muzzle of the revolver in her hand,
endeavored to scratch a mark in the sand to give her the direction
later by the sense of touch. She laid the pistol itself at the upper
end of the little furrow, pointing toward the road which she had left.
Sinking down, she resigned herself to what she felt must soon be the
end.

The chill of the mountain night was coming on. The whispering in the
pines grew less. Vaguely she sensed that the sun was low, that soon
twilight would come. She had no means of making a fire, had no
covering, no food. Simply a lost unit of one of the many species
inhabiting the earth, surviving each as it may, she cowered alone and
helpless in the wilderness.

The hush of the evening came. The pines were silent. There was only
one little faint sound above her--in some tree, she thought. It was
made by a worm boring under the bark, seeking place for the larvae
which presently it would leave, in order that its species might endure.
A small sound, of no great carrying power.

CHAPTER XVI

THE REBIRTH OF SIM GAGE

Neither Sim Gage nor his neighbor slept to any worth that night. At
times one would speak, but they held no discussion. Wid Gardner, in an
iron wrath, was thinking much.

Sim Gage lay with his eyes opened toward the rude ceiling. In his
heart was something new. Hitherto in all his life he had never
quarreled with fate, but smiled at it as something beyond his making or
his mending. He was one of the world's lost sheep, one of the army of
the unhoping. The mountains, the valleys, the trees, had been enough
for him, the glint of the sun on the silver gray of the sage yonder on
the plains. He had been content to spend his life here where chance
had thrown him. But now--and Sim Gage himsel