tread. But while the man's steps led into the cabin, they did not lead
away from it. We tracked his course just as we had seen it through the
glasses: up the hill from the brush to the window, and then to the door.
But he had never walked out again. Yet in the cabin he was not; we tore
up the half-floor that it had. There was no use to dig in the earth. And
all the while that we were at this search the parrot remained crouched
in the bottom of his cage, his black eye fixed upon our movements.

"She has carried him," said the Virginian. "We must follow up
Willomene."

The latest heavy set of footprints led us from the door along the ditch,
where they sank deep in the softer soil; then they turned off sharply
into the mountains.

"This is the cut-off trail," said McLean to me. "The same he brought her
in by."

The tracks were very clear, and evidently had been made by a person
moving slowly. Whatever theories our various minds were now shaping, no
one spoke a word to his neighbor, but we went along with a hush over us.

After some walking, Wiggin suddenly stopped and pointed.

We had come to the edge of the timber, where a narrow black canyon
began, and ahead of us the trail drew near a slanting ledge, where the
footing was of small loose stones. I recognized the odor, the volcanic
whiff, that so often prowls and meets one in the lonely woods of that
region, but at first I failed to make out what had set us all running.

"Is he looking down into the hole himself?" some one asked; and then
I did see a figure, the figure I had looked at through the glasses,
leaning strangely over the edge of Pitchstone Canyon, as if indeed he
was peering to watch what might be in the bottom.

We came near. But those eyes were sightless, and in the skull the story
of the axe was carved. By a piece of his clothing he was hooked in the
twisted roots of a dead tree, and hung there at the extreme verge. I
went to look over, and Lin McLean caught me as I staggered at the sight
I saw. He would have lost his own foothold in saving me had not one of
the others held him from above.

She was there below; Hank's woman, brought from Austria to the New
World. The vision of that brown bundle lying in the water will never
leave me, I think. She had carried the body to this point; but had she
intended this end? Or was some part of it an accident? Had she meant to
take him with her? Had she meant to stay behind herself? No word came
from these dea