lifting him high. The inarticulate mob cry swelled and deepened and
rose to a different sound--a shout that gathered volume and roared out
across the spaces where Courtrey rode with a menace, a portent.

With one accord the mob started on a journey around Corvan.

White as Ellen, Cleve Whitmore rode that triumphant journey, his eyes
still blazing, his lips tight. The town went wild. Public feeling came
out on every hand. Daring took the weak, hope took the oppressed, and
they called Courtrey's reign right there. For three uproarious hours
the bar-tenders could not wipe off their bars.

A new regime was ushered in--and she who had been its sponsor was not
there to see it.

* * * * *

When the hour of Change was striking for Corvan and all Lost Valley,
Tharon Last, who had set it to strike, was scaling False Ridge in the
Canon Country. Grim, ash-pale with effort, her blue eyes shining, she
climbed the Secret Way that few had ever found.

How she had come to it through the tortuous cuts and passes was a
marvel of homing instinct--the heart that homed to its object. It had
seemed to her all along this strange, tense journey, that she had had
no will of her own, that she had held her breath and shut her eyes, as
it were, and gone forward in obedience to some strange thing within
that said, "turn here," "go thus." Billy following behind, watched her
with tight lips and a secret wonder. As she had told him she would
"go straight, Mary willing," so she had gone straight--and it seemed,
truly, as if it were right that she should, no matter how his heart
ached to see this thing.

Verily there was something supernatural about it all, something
uncanny.

If it had been he, Billy, whom Tharon loved, and had he lain, wounded
in the Cup o' God, would the girl have been given this blind instinct
for direction? Would she have gone as unerringly to the Secret Way?

Nay--there must be something in the old saying that, for every heart
in the world there was its true mate.

Tharon had found hers in Kenset.

But where would he ever find his? The boy shook his fair head
hopelessly at the sliding floors. For all perfection there must be
sacrifice. He was the sacrifice for Tharon's perfection--a willing
one, so help him!

That they had found the Secret Way across False Ridge was perfectly
plain, for here in the living rock before them were marks, the first
marks they had found in the Cano