Silently they rode through the stir and thresh of the night, the two women and the man.  For guidance along the woods trail they must trust to the finer sense of their horses whose heads they could not see in the closed-in murk.  A desultory spray fell upon them as the wind wrenched at the boughs overhead, but the rain had ceased.  Infinitely high, infinitely potent sounded the imminent tumult of the invisible Powers of the night, on whose sufferance they moved, tiny, obscure, and unharmed.  It filled all the distances.

Debouching upon the open desert, they found their range of vision slightly expanded.  They could dimly perceive each other.  The horses drew closer together.  With his flash covered by his poncho, Banneker consulted a compass and altered their course, for he wished to give the station, to which Gardner might have returned, a wide berth.  Io moved up abreast of him as he stood, studying the needle.  Had he turned the light upward he would have seen that she was smiling.  Whether he would have interpreted that smile, whether, indeed, she could have interpreted it herself, is doubtful.

Presently they picked up the line of telegraph poles, well beyond the station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of assured direction.  A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness began to be felt.  The clouds were thinning.  Something ahead of them hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance.  Banneker threw up a shadowy arm.  They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into its flanks.

Io gazed intently at the flood which was to deliver her out of the hands of the Philistine.  How far away the other bank of the newborn stream might be, she could only guess from the vague rush in her ears.  The arroyo’s water slipped ceaselessly, objectlessly away from beneath her strained vision, smooth, suave, even, effortless, like the process of some unhurried and mighty mechanism.  Now and again a desert plant, uprooted from its arid home, eddied joyously past her, satiated for once of its lifelong thirst; and farther out she thought to have a glimpse of some dead and whitish animal.  But these were minor blemishes on a great, lustrous ribbon of silken black, unrolled and re-rolled from darkness into darkness.

“It’s beckoning us,” said Io, leaning to Banneker, her hand on his shoulder.

“We must wait for more light,” he answered.

“Will you trust yourself to that?” asked Camilla Van Arsdale, with a gesture of fear and repulsion toward the torrent.

“Anywhere!” returned Io.  There was exaltation in her voice.

“I can’t understand it,” cried the older woman.  “How do you know what may lie before you?”

“That is the thrill of it.”

“There may be death around the first curve.  It’s so unknown; so secret and lawless.”