“I’ll bring a needle, then!”

“Even every needle is precious!”

“I’ll bring a dead one, then!”

There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way.  He was laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.

“No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!”

She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself, that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at her side, and found that she could.  She had mastered her weakness.  It was as if a new force had been born in her.  She felt its stiffening in every fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount them with an invulnerable guard.

How would he get past that steep shoulder?  The worst obstacle confronted him at the very beginning of the descent.  He was hugging a rock face, feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam between him and the darkness far below.  His foot slipped, his body turned half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when waiting for the sound of Leddy’s shot in Bill Lang’s store.  She saw his outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go.  But they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his way out on a shelf.

He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at him.  It was the old story of their relations.  Was this man ever to be subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account?  And there he was beaming up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her face return in a hot flood.  It brought with it anger in place of fear.

“I don’t want it!  I don’t want it!” she cried down.

“And I want to get it for you!  I want to get it for you—­for you!” His voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration.  So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc.  “There is nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!” he cried.  “I’d like to pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered!  I’d like to go on doing things for you forever!”

There was not even a movement of her lips in answer.  It seemed to her now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his, the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused, dazzling shower of wreckage.  He had found an opening.  He had broken through the barrier.

Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and, with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her wishes, broke off a tawny young branch.  He waved it to her—­this garland of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at her feet from the lists.