he stirring of her
blood, always susceptible to the spirit and motion of a ride, let alone
one of peril, now began to throb and burn away the worry, the dread, the
coldness that had weighted her down.

Before long Stewart wheeled at right angles off the trail and entered a
hollow between two low bluffs. Madeline saw tracks in the open patches
of ground. Here Stewart's horse took to a brisk walk. The hollow
deepened, narrowed, became rocky, full of logs and brush. Madeline
exerted all her keenness, and needed it, to keep close to Stewart. She
did not think of him, nor her own safety, but of keeping Majesty close
in the tracks of the black, of eluding the sharp spikes in the dead
brush, of avoiding the treacherous loose stones.

At last Madeline was brought to a dead halt by Stewart and his horse
blocking the trail. Looking up, she saw they were at the head of a
canyon that yawned beneath and widened its gray-walled, green-patched
slopes down to a black forest of fir. The drab monotony of the foothills
made contrast below the forest, and away in the distance, rosy and
smoky, lay the desert. Retracting her gaze, Madeline saw pack-horses
cross an open space a mile below, and she thought she saw the
stag-hounds. Stewart's dark eyes searched the slopes high up along the
craggy escarpments. Then he put the black to the descent.

If there had been a trail left by the leading cowboys, Stewart did
not follow it. He led off to the right, zigzagging an intricate course
through the roughest ground Madeline had ever ridden over. He crashed
through cedars, threaded a tortuous way among boulders, made his horse
slide down slanting banks of soft earth, picked a slow and cautious
progress across weathered slopes of loose rock. Madeline followed,
finding in this ride a tax on strength and judgment. On an ordinary
horse she never could have kept in Stewart's trail. It was dust and
heat, a parching throat, that caused Madeline to think of time; and she
was amazed to see the sun sloping to the west. Stewart never stopped;
he never looked back; he never spoke. He must have heard the horse close
behind him. Madeline remembered Monty's advice about drinking and eating
as she rode along. The worst of that rough travel came at the bottom of
the canyon. Dead cedars and brush and logs were easy to pass compared
with the miles, it seemed, of loose boulders. The horses slipped and
stumbled. Stewart proceeded here with exceeding care. At last, when