“One thing, Lassiter.  You’ll not tell Jane about Bess?  Please don’t!”

“I reckon not.  But I wouldn’t be afraid to bet that after she’d got over anger at your secrecy—­Venters, she’d be furious once in her life!—­she’d think more of you.  I don’t mind sayin’ for myself that I think you’re a good deal of a man.”

In the further ascent Venters halted several times with the intention of saying good-by, yet he changed his mind and kept on climbing till they reached Balancing Rock.  Lassiter examined the huge rock, listened to Venters’s idea of its position and suggestion, and curiously placed a strong hand upon it.

“Hold on!” cried Venters.  “I heaved at it once and have never gotten over my scare.”

“Well, you do seem uncommon nervous,” replied Lassiter, much amused.  “Now, as for me, why I always had the funniest notion to roll stones!  When I was a kid I did it, an’ the bigger I got the bigger stones I’d roll.  Ain’t that funny?  Honest—­even now I often get off my hoss just to tumble a big stone over a precipice, en’ watch it drop, en’ listen to it bang an’ boom.  I’ve started some slides in my time, an’ don’t you forget it.  I never seen a rock I wanted to roll as bad as this one!  Wouldn’t there jest be roarin’, crashin’ hell down that trail?”

“You’d close the outlet forever!” exclaimed Venters.  “Well, good-by, Lassiter.  Keep my secret and don’t forget me.  And be mighty careful how you get out of the valley below.  The rustlers’ canyon isn’t more than three miles up the Pass.  Now you’ve tracked me here, I’ll never feel safe again.”

In his descent to the valley, Venters’s emotion, roused to stirring pitch by the recital of his love story, quieted gradually, and in its place came a sober, thoughtful mood.  All at once he saw that he was serious, because he would never more regain his sense of security while in the valley.  What Lassiter could do another skilful tracker might duplicate.  Among the many riders with whom Venters had ridden he recalled no one who could have taken his trail at Cottonwoods and have followed it to the edge of the bare slope in the pass, let alone up that glistening smooth stone.  Lassiter, however, was not an ordinary rider.  Instead of hunting cattle tracks he had likely spent a goodly portion of his life tracking men.  It was not improbable that among Oldring’s rustlers there was one who shared Lassiter’s gift for trailing.  And the more Venters dwelt on this possibility the more perturbed he grew.

Lassiter’s visit, moreover, had a disquieting effect upon Bess, and Venters fancied that she entertained the same thought as to future seclusion.  The breaking of their solitude, though by a well-meaning friend, had not only dispelled all its dream and much of its charm, but had instilled a canker of fear.  Both had seen the footprint in the sand.

Venters did no more work that day.  Sunset and twilight gave way to night, and the canyon bird whistled its melancholy notes, and the wind sang softly in the cliffs, and the camp-fire blazed and burned down to red embers.  To Venters a subtle difference was apparent in all of these, or else the shadowy change had been in him.  He hoped that on the morrow this slight depression would have passed away.