Aldous wanted to run, but he held himself down to MacDonald’s stride.  His heart trembled apprehensively as they hurriedly descended the mountain and cut across the plain.  He could not quite bring himself to MacDonald’s point of assurance regarding Quade and Mortimer FitzHugh.  The old mountaineer was positive that the other party was behind them.  Aldous asked himself if it were not possible that Quade and FitzHugh were ahead of them, and already waiting and watching for their opportunity.  He had suggested that they might have swung farther to the west, with the plan of descending upon the valley from the north, and MacDonald had pointed out how unlikely this was.  In spite of this, Aldous was not in a comfortable frame of mind as they hurried after Joanne.  She had half an hour’s start of them when they reached the mouth of the gorge, and not until they had travelled another half-hour up the rough bed of the break between the two mountains, and MacDonald pointed ahead, and said:  “There’s the cavern!” did he breathe easier.

They could see the mouth of the cavern when they were yet a couple of hundred yards from it.  It was a wide, low cleft in the north face of the chasm wall, and in front of it, spreading out like the flow of a stream, was a great spatter of white sand, like a huge rug that had been spread out in a space cleared of its chaotic litter of rock and broken slate.  At first glance Aldous guessed that the cavern had once been the exit of a subterranean stream.  The sand deadened the sound of their footsteps as they approached.  At the mouth of the cave they paused.  It was perhaps forty or fifty feet deep, and as high as a nine-foot room.  Inside it was quite light.  Halfway to the back of it, upon her knees, and with her face turned from them, was Joanne.

They were very close to her before she heard them.  With a startled cry she sprang to her feet, and Aldous and MacDonald saw what she had been doing.  Over a long mound in the white sand still rose the sapling stake which Donald had planted there forty years before; and about this, and scattered over the grave, were dozens of wild asters and purple hyacinths which Joanne had brought from the plain.  Aldous did not speak, but he took her hand, and looked down with her on the grave.  And then something caught his eyes among the flowers, and Joanne drew him a step nearer, her eyes shining like velvet stars, while his heart beat faster when he saw what the object was.  It was a book, open in the middle, and it lay face downward on the grave.  It was old, and looked as though it might have fallen into dust at the touch of his finger.  Joanne’s voice was low and filled with a whispering awe.

“It was her Bible, John!”

He turned a little, and noticed that Donald had gone to the mouth of the cavern, and was looking toward the mountain.

“It was her Bible,” he heard Joanne repeating; and then MacDonald turned toward them, and he saw in his face a look that seemed strange and out of place in this home of his dead.  He went to him, and Joanne followed.