“We tried to, though we couldn’t help loving.”

“She would have married Snap but for you.”

“Yes.  But I couldn’t help that.  You brought me out here, and saved my life.  I know what I owe you.  Mescal meant to marry your son when I left for the range last fall.  But she’s a true woman and couldn’t.  August Naab, if we ever find her will you marry her to him—­now?”

“That depends.  Did you know she intended to run?”

“I never dreamed of it.  I learned it only at the last moment.  I met her on the river trail.”

“You should have stopped her.”

Hare maintained silence.

“You should have told me,” went on Naab.

“I couldn’t.  I’m only human.”

“Well, well, I’m not blaming you, Hare.  I had hot blood once.  But I’m afraid the desert will not be large enough for you and Snap.  She’s pledged to him.  You can’t change the Mormon Church.  For the sake of peace I’d give you Mescal, if I could.  Snap will either have her or kill her.  I’m going to hunt this desert in advance of him, because he’ll trail her like a hound.  It would be better to marry her to him than to see her dead.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“Hare, your nose is on a blood scent, like a wolf’s.  I can see—­I’ve always seen—­well, remember, it’s man to man between you now.”

During this talk they were winding under Echo Cliffs, gradually climbing, and working up to a level with the desert, which they presently attained at a point near the head of the canyon.  The trail swerved to the left following the base of the cliffs.  The tracks of Noddle and Wolf were plainly visible in the dust.  Hare felt that if they ever led out into the immense airy space of the desert all hope of finding Mescal must be abandoned.

They trailed the tracks of the dog and burro to Bitter Seeps, a shallow spring of alkali, and there lost all track of them.  The path up the cliffs to the Navajo ranges was bare, time-worn in solid rock, and showed only the imprint of age.  Desertward the ridges of shale, the washes of copper earth, baked in the sun, gave no sign of the fugitives’ course.  August Naab shrugged his broad shoulders and pointed his horse to the cliff.  It was dusk when they surmounted it.

They camped in the lee of an uplifting crag.  When the wind died down the night was no longer unpleasantly cool; and Hare, finding August Naab uncommunicative and sleepy, strolled along the rim of the cliff, as he had been wont to do in the sheep-herding days.  He could scarcely dissociate them from the present, for the bitter-sweet smell of tree and bush, the almost inaudible sigh of breeze, the opening and shutting of the great white stars in the blue dome, the silence, the sense of the invisible void beneath him—­all were thought-provoking parts of that past of which nothing could ever be forgotten.  And it was a silence which brought much to the ear that could hear.