Suddenly Rod stopped.  From ahead of him he was sure that he had heard a sound.  He scarcely breathed while he listened.  But there came no repetition of the noise.  Had some animal, a fox or a wolf, perhaps, set a stone rolling down one of the precipitous walls of the chasm?  He went on slowly, listening, watching.  A few paces more and he stopped again.  There was a faint, suspicious odor in the air; a turn around the end of a huge mass of rock and his nostrils were filled with it, the pungent odor of smoke mingled with the sweet scent of burning cedar!

There was a fire ahead of him.  More than that, it was not a gunshot away!

For a space of sixty seconds he stood still, nerving himself for the final step.  His resolution was made.  He would creep upon the outlaw and shoot him down.  There would be no warning, no quarter, no parley.  Foot by foot he advanced, as stealthily as a fox.  The odor of smoke came to him more plainly; over his head he saw thin films of it floating lazily up the chasm.  It came from beyond another of those walls of rock which seemed to bar his way, creeping up over it as though the fire were just on the other side.  With his rifle half to his shoulder Rod stole through the break in this wall.  At its farther end he peered out cautiously, exposing his face an inch at a time.  Wider and wider became his vision.  There was no trail ahead.  The outlaw and his captive were behind the rock!

With his rifle now full to his shoulder Rod stepped boldly forth and whirled to the left.  Twenty feet away, almost entirely concealed among the tumbled masses of boulders, was a small cabin.  About it there were no signs of life with the exception of a thin wreath of smoke rising like a ghostly spiral up the side of the chasm wall; from it there came no sound.  Rod’s index finger quivered on the trigger of his rifle.  Should he wait—­until the outlaw came forth?  Half a minute he stood there, a minute, two minutes, and still he heard nothing, saw nothing.  He advanced a step, then another, and still another, until he saw the open door of the cabin.  And as he stood there, his rifle leveled, there came to him a faint, sobbing cry, a cry that reached out and caught him like a strong hand and brought him in a single desperate leap to the door itself.

Inside the cabin was Minnetaki, alone!  She was crouched upon the floor, her beautiful hair tumbling in disheveled masses over her shoulders and into her lap, her face, as white as death, staring wildly at the youth who had appeared like an apparition before her.

In an instant Rod was at her side, upon his knees.  For that brief moment he had lost his caution, and only a terrible cry from the girl turned him back again, half upon his feet, to the door.  Standing there, about to spring upon him, was one of the most terrifying figures he had ever seen.  In a flash he saw the huge form of an Indian, a terrible face, the gleam of an uplifted knife.  In such a crisis