“Near enough for Tom to hear the shooting.”

They grew silent again.  Clearly Norton had done what explaining he deemed necessary and was taking her no deeper into his confidences.  She told herself that he was right, that these were not merely his own personal secrets, that as yet he would be unwise to trust a stranger further than he was forced to.  And yet, unreasonably or not, she felt a little hurt.  She had liked him from the beginning and from the beginning she felt that in a case such as his she would have trusted to intuition and have held back nothing.  But she refrained from voicing the questions which none the less insisted upon presenting themselves to her:  What was the thing that had brought both Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter to Mt.  Temple?  What had they been seeking there in a wilderness of crag and cliff?  Why was Roderick Norton so determined that Jim Galloway should not so much as suspect that these men were watchful in the mountains?  What sinister chain of circumstance had impelled Moraga, who Norton said was Galloway’s man, to shoot down the cattle foreman?  And Galloway himself, what type of man must he be if all that she had heard of him were true; what were his ambitions, his plans, his power?

Before long Norton pointed out the shadowy form of Mt.  Temple looming ever vaster before them, its mass of rock, of wind-blown, wind-carved peaks lifted in sombre defiance against the stars.  It brooded darkly over the lower slopes, like an incubus it dominated the other spines and ridges, its gorges filled with shadow and mystery, its precipices making the sense reel dizzily.  And somewhere up there high against the sky, alone, suffering, perhaps dying, a man had waited through the slow hours, and still awaited their coming.  How slowly she and Norton were riding, how heartless of her to have felt the thrill of pleasure which had possessed her so utterly an hour ago!

Or less than an hour.  For now again, wandering out far across the open lands, came the heavy mourning of the bell.

“How far can one hear it?” she asked, surprised that from so far its ringing came so clearly.

“I don’t know how many miles,” he answered.  “We’ll hear it from the mountain.  I should have heard it to-day, long before I met you by the arroyo, had I not been travelling through two big bands of Engle’s sheep.”

Behind them San Juan drawn into the shadows of night but calling to them in mellow-toned cadences of sorrow, before them the sombre canons and iron flanks of Mt.  Temple, and somewhere, still several hours away, Brocky Lane lying helpless and perhaps hopeless; grim by day the earth hereabouts was inscrutable by night, a mighty, primal sphinx, lip-locked, spirit-crushing.  The man and girl riding swiftly side by side felt in their different ways according to their different characters and previous experience the mute command laid upon them, and for the most part their lips were hushed.