There came little flat spaces, then broken boulders to clamber over, then steep, rugged climbs, when they grasped the rough rocks with both hands and moved on with painful slowness.  It seemed to the girl that they had been climbing for long, tedious hours since they had slipped out of their saddles; though to him she said nothing, locking her lips stubbornly, she knew that at last she was tired, very tired, that an end of this laborious ascent must come soon or she would be forced to stop and lie down and rest.

“Fifteen minutes more,” said the sheriff, “and we’re there.  We’ll use the first five minutes of it for a rest, too.”

He made her sit down, unstoppered a canteen which, like the coil of rope, she had not known he carried, and gave her a drink of water which seemed to her the most wonderfully strength-making, life-giving draft in the world.  Then he dropped down at her side, looked at his watch in the light of a flaring match carefully cupped in his hand, and lighted his pipe.

“Nearly midnight,” he told her.

Without replying she lay back against the slope of the mountain, closed her eyes and relaxed, breathing deeply.  Her chest expanded deeply to the long indrawn breath which filled her lungs with the rare air.  She felt suddenly a little sleepy, dreaming longingly of the unutterable content one could find in just going to sleep with the cliff-scarred mountainside for couch.

She stirred and opened her eyes.  Rod Norton, the sheriff of San Juan, a man who a few brief hours ago had been unknown to her, his name unfamiliar, sat two paces from her, smoking.  She and this man of whom she still knew rather less than nothing were alone in the world; just the two of them lifted into the sky, separated by a dreary stretch of desert lands from other men and women . . . bound together by a bit of rope.  She tried to see his face; the profile, more guessed than seen, appeared to her fancy as unrelenting as the line of cliff just beyond him, clear-cut against the sky.

Yet somehow . . . she did not definitely formulate the thought of which she was at the time but dimly, vaguely conscious . . . she was glad that she had come to San Juan.  And she was not afraid of the silent man at her side, nor sorry that circumstance had given them this night and its labors.

Norton knocked out his pipe.  Together they got to their feet.

“More careful than ever now,” he cautioned her.  “Look out for each step and go slowly.  We’re there in ten minutes.  Ready?”

“Ready,” she answered.

CHAPTER VII

IN THE HOME OF CLIFF-DWELLERS