Courant straightened himself and sent a rapid glance about him. The bushes among which the body lay were close matted in a thick screen. Through their roots the small trickle of the spring percolated, stealing its way to the parched sands outside. It made a continuous murmuring, as if nature was lifting a voice of low, insistent protest against the desecration of her peace.

The man standing with stilled breath and rigid muscles listened for other sounds. Reassured that there were none, his look swept right and left for a spot wherein to hide the thing that lay at his feet. At its base the rock wall slanted outward leaving a hollow beneath its eave where the thin veneer of water gleamed from the shadows. He took the dead man under the arms and dragged him to it, careful of branches that might snap under his foot, pausing to let the echoes of rolling stones die away - a figure of fierce vitality with the long, limp body hanging from his hands. At the rock he crouched and thrust his burden under the wall's protecting cope, the trickle of the water dying into a sudden, scared silence. Stepping back he brushed the bushes into shape, hiding their breakage, and bent to gather the scattered leaves and crush them into crevices. When it was done the place showed no sign of the intruder, only the whispering of the streamlet told that its course was changed and it was feeling for a new channel.

Then he crept softly out to the plain's edge where the sunlight lay long and bright. It touched his face and showed it white, with lips close set and eyes gleaming like crystals. He skirted the rock, making a soft, quick way to where the camp lay. Here the animals stood, heads drooped as they cropped the herbage round the spring. Daddy John sat in the shade of the wagon, tranquilly cleaning a gun. The mountain man's passage was so soundless that he did not hear it. The animals raised slow eyes to the moving figure, then dropped them indifferently. He passed them, his step growing lighter, changing as he withdrew from the old man's line of vision, to a long, rapid glide. His blood-shot eyes nursed the extending buttresses, and as he came round them, with craned neck and body reaching forward, they sent a glance into each recess that leaped round it like a flame.

Susan had remained in the same place. She made no note of the passage of time, but the sky between the walls was growing deeper in color, the shadows lengthening along the ground. She was lying on her side looking out through the rift's opening when Courant stood there. He made an instant's pause, a moment when his breath caught deep, and, seeing him, she started to her knees with a blanching face. As he came upon her she held out her hands, crying in uprising notes of terror, "No! No! No!" But he gathered her in his arms, stilled her cries with his kisses, and bending low carried her back into the darkened cavern over which the rocks closed like hands uplifted in prayer.

CHAPTER VI

Till the afternoon of the next day they held the train for David. When evening fell and he did not come Daddy John climbed the plateau and kindled a beacon fire that threw its flames against the stars. Then he took his rifle and skirted the rock's looming bulk, shattering the stillness with reports that let loose a shivering flight of echoes. All night they sat by the fire listening and waiting. As the hours passed their alarm grew and their speculations became gloomier and more sinister. Courant was the only one who had a plausible theory. The moving sparks on the mountains showed that the Indians were still following them and it was his opinion that David had strayed afar and been caught by a foraging party. It was not a matter for desperate alarm as the Diggers were harmless and David would no doubt escape from them and join a later train. This view offered the only possible explanation. It was Courant's opinion and so it carried with the other two.