“No.  But, dear, listen.  Well go back some day, after years—­ten years.  Then we’ll be forgotten.  And our valley will be just as we left it.”

“What if Balancing Rock falls and closes the outlet to the Pass?”

“I’ve thought of that.  I’ll pack in ropes and ropes.  And if the outlet’s closed we’ll climb up the cliffs and over them to the valley and go down on rope ladders.  It could be done.  I know just where to make the climb, and I’ll never forget.”

“Oh yes, let us go back!”

“It’s something sweet to look forward to.  Bess, it’s like all the future looks to me.”

“Call me—­Elizabeth,” she said, shyly.

“Elizabeth Erne!  It’s a beautiful name.  But I’ll never forget Bess.  Do you know—­have you thought that very soon—­by this time to-morrow—­you will be Elizabeth Venters?”

So they rode on down the old trail.  And the sun sloped to the west, and a golden sheen lay on the sage.  The hours sped now; the afternoon waned.  Often they rested the horses.  The glisten of a pool of water in a hollow caught Venters’s eye, and here he unsaddled the blacks and let them roll and drink and browse.  When he and Bess rode up out of the hollow the sun was low, a crimson ball, and the valley seemed veiled in purple fire and smoke.  It was that short time when the sun appeared to rest before setting, and silence, like a cloak of invisible life, lay heavy on all that shimmering world of sage.

They watched the sun begin to bury its red curve under the dark horizon.

“We’ll ride on till late,” he said.  “Then you can sleep a little, while I watch and graze the horses.  And we’ll ride into Sterling early to-morrow.  We’ll be married!...We’ll be in time to catch the stage.  We’ll tie Black Star and Night behind—­and then—­for a country not wild and terrible like this!”

“Oh, Bern!...But look!  The sun is setting on the sage—­the last time for us till we dare come again to the Utah border.  Ten years!  Oh, Bern, look, so you will never forget!”

Slumbering, fading purple fire burned over the undulating sage ridges.  Long streaks and bars and shafts and spears fringed the far western slope.  Drifting, golden veils mingled with low, purple shadows.  Colors and shades changed in slow, wondrous transformation.

Suddenly Venters was startled by a low, rumbling roar—­so low that it was like the roar in a sea-shell.

“Bess, did you hear anything?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Listen!...Maybe I only imagined—­Ah!”

Out of the east or north from remote distance, breathed an infinitely low, continuously long sound—­deep, weird, detonating, thundering, deadening—­dying.

CHAPTER XXIII.  THE FALL OF BALANCING ROCK

Through tear-blurred sight Jane Withersteen watched Venters and Elizabeth Erne and the black racers disappear over the ridge of sage.