His face was beaten until he was almost blind.  His shirt had been torn from his shoulders and his flesh was bleeding.  He advanced a few steps.  He raised one arm and then the other.  He limped.  One arm hurt him when he moved it, but the bone was sound.  He was terribly mauled, but he knew that no bones were broken, and a gasp of thankfulness fell from his lips.  All this time his mind had been suffering even more than his body.  Not for an instant, even as he fought for life between the chasm walls, and as he lay half unconscious on the rock, had he forgotten Joanne.  His one thought was of her now.  He had no weapon, but as he stumbled in the direction of the camp in the little plain he picked up a club that lay in his path.

That MacDonald was dead, Aldous was certain.  There would be four against him—­Quade and Mortimer FitzHugh and the two men who had gone to the mountain.  His brain cleared swiftly as a part of his strength returned, and it occurred to him that if he lost no time he might come upon Joanne and her captors before the two men came from killing old Donald.  He tried to run.  Not until then did he fully realize the condition he was in.  Twice in the first hundred yards his legs doubled under him and he fell down among the rocks.  He grew steadily stronger, though each time he tried to run or spring a distance of a few feet his legs doubled under him like that.  It took him twenty minutes to get back to the edge of the plain, and when he got there it was empty.  There was no sign of Quade or FitzHugh, or of Joanne and Marie; and there was no one coming from the direction of the mountain.

He tried to run again, and he found that over the level floor of the valley he could make faster time than among the rocks.  He went to where he had dropped his rifle.  It was gone.  He searched for his automatic.  That, too, was gone.  There was one weapon left—­a long skinning-knife in one of the panniers near the tepee.  As he went for this, he passed two of the men whom he had shot.  Quade and FitzHugh had taken their weapons, and had turned them over to see if they were alive or dead.  They were dead.  He secured the knife, and behind the tepee he passed the third body, its face as still and white as the others.  He shuddered as he recognized it.  It was Slim Barker.  His rifle was gone.

More swiftly now he made his way into the break out of which his assailants had come a short time before.  The thought came to him again that he had been right, and that Donald MacDonald, in spite of all his years in the mountains, had been fatally wrong.  Their enemies had come down from the north, and this break led to their hiding-place.  Through it Joanne must have been taken by her captors.  As he made his way over the rocks, gaining a little more of his strength with each step, his mind tried to picture the situation that had now arisen between Quade and Mortimer FitzHugh.  How would Quade, who was mad for possession of Joanne, accept FitzHugh’s claim of ownership?  Would he believe his partner?  Would he even believe Joanne if, to save herself from him, she told him FitzHugh was her husband?  Even if he believed them, would he give her up? Would Quade allow Mortimer FitzHugh to stand between him and the object for which he was willing to sacrifice everything?