en this and that standing spire and
pinnacle she went, with a strong certainty that presently stirred
Billy to speech.

"Tharon, dear," he said gently, "hadn't we better leave a mark or two
along this-a-way? Ain't you got no landmarks?"

"Can if you want," the girl said briefly, "I don't need landmarks."

"Then how you know the way? There ain't no one knows th' Canon
Country--but Courtrey."

"I don't know it," she said simply but with profound conviction. "I'm
_feelin'_ it, Billy. I know I'm goin' straight to th' Cup o' God. I'm
blind as a bat, it seems, yet goin' straight."

She lifted a hand and crossed herself.

"Goin' straight--Mary willin'--an' I'll come back straight. It lies up
there an' to th' left again." She made a wide gesture that swept up
and out, embracing the towering walls, the half-seen peaks against the
stars.

Billy shut his lips and said no more.

Up there lay False Ridge, the sinister, dropping spine that came down
from the uplands outside where the real great world began, and lured
those who traveled down it to crumbling precipice and yawning pit, to
sliding slope and slant that, once ridden down, could never be scaled
again, according to the weird stories that were told of it.

But if Tharon went to the Canons, there lay his trail, too. If she
went down False Ridge to death in the pits and waterless cuts, he
asked no better lot than to follow--the faithful dog at her foot, the
shadow at her shoulder.

And so it was that dawn crept up the blue-velvet of the night sky and
sent its steel-blue light deep in the painted splits, and they rode
unerringly forward up the sounding passes.

When the light increased enough to show the way they came abruptly to
the spot where it was necessary to leave the horses. The floor of the
canyon up which they were traveling lifted sharply in one huge step,
breast-high to a man.

Tharon in the lead halted and looked for a moment all up and down the
wondrous maze of pale, tall openings that encompassed them all round.

She turned in her saddle and looked back the way they had come. There
was darker shadow, going downward, but here and there those pale
mouths gaped, long ribbons of space dropping from the heights above
down to their level.

Up any one a man might turn and lose himself completely, for they in
turn were cut and ribboned with other mouths, leaving spires and walls
and faces a thousand-fold on every hand.

Tharon, even in the tensity and p