“Are—­you—­there?” The girl’s voice came low from the blackness.

“Yes,” he replied, and was conscious that his laboring breast made speech difficult.

“Are we—­in a cave?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, listen!...The waterfall!...I hear it!  You’ve brought me back!”

Venters heard a murmuring moan that one moment swelled to a pitch almost softly shrill and the next lulled to a low, almost inaudible sigh.

“That’s—­wind blowing—­in the—­cliffs,” he panted.  “You’re far from Oldring’s—­canyon.”

The effort it cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme lassitude following upon great exertion.  It seemed that when he lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last before utter prostration.  He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting veins.  And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he had begun to rest.

Rest came to him that night, but no sleep.  Sleep he did not want.  The hours of strained effort were now as if they had never been, and he wanted to think.  Earlier in the day he had dismissed an inexplicable feeling of change; but now, when there was no longer demand on his cunning and strength and he had time to think, he could not catch the illusive thing that had sadly perplexed as well as elevated his spirit.

Above him, through a V-shaped cleft in the dark rim of the cliff, shone the lustrous stars that had been his lonely accusers for a long, long year.  To-night they were different.  He studied them.  Larger, whiter, more radiant they seemed; but that was not the difference he meant.  Gradually it came to him that the distinction was not one he saw, but one he felt.  In this he divined as much of the baffling change as he thought would be revealed to him then.  And as he lay there, with the singing of the cliff-winds in his ears, the white stars above the dark, bold vent, the difference which he felt was that he was no longer alone.

CHAPTER IX.  SILVER SPRUCE AND ASPENS

The rest of that night seemed to Venters only a few moments of starlight, a dark overcasting of sky, an hour or so of gray gloom, and then the lighting of dawn.

When he had bestirred himself, feeding the hungry dogs and breaking his long fast, and had repacked his saddle-bags, it was clear daylight, though the sun had not tipped the yellow wall in the east.  He concluded to make the climb and descent into Surprise Valley in one trip.  To that end he tied his blanket upon Ring and gave Whitie the extra lasso and the rabbit to carry.  Then, with the rifle and saddle-bags slung upon his back, he took up the girl.  She did not awaken from heavy slumber.