They skirted the base of the cliffs for half a mile.  Then Howard turned Sanchia’s horse loose, driving the animal down into a dark ravine where there would be no finding it in the night-time.

‘It’s only a chance,’ he said, ’but then that’s better than just sitting and sucking our thumbs.  We take the up-trail here.’

They came out upon the tablelands above Bear Valley.  There was better light here; the trail was less narrow and steep; they could look down and see the light in the cabin.

Later they were to know just what had been Sanchia Murray’s quick reply to their move.  And then they were to know, too, where Jim Courtot’s hang-out had been during these last weeks in which he had seemed to vanish.  Sanchia, with a golden labour before her, had promptly turned to her ‘right hand.’  On foot, since there was no other way, and running until she was breathless and spent, she hurried across the narrow valley, climbed the low hills at its eastern edge, and plunged down into the ravine which was the head of Dry Gulch.  Up the farther side she clambered, again running, panting and sobbing with the exertion she put upon herself, until she came to another broken cliff-ridge.  There she had stood calling.  And, from a hidden hole in the rocks, giving entrance to a cave, like a wolf from its lair, there had come at her calling Jim Courtot.

Chapter XXVI

When Day Dawned

Upon the flat top of Red Dirt Hill, Howard and Helen drove their stakes.  Thereafter they made a little fire in the shelter of a tumble of boulders and camped throughout the night under the blazing desert stars.  Were they right?  Were they wrong?  They did not know.  In the darkness they could make out little of the face of the earth about them.  Alan thought himself certain of one thing:  that only near here could it be likely that Longstreet should have broken off fragments of stone with so plain a marking of red dirt on them.  Helen merely knew that her father had more than once climbed up here, though she had laughed at him for seeking gold upon the exalted heights.  To know anything beyond this meagre and unsatisfying data, they must await the dawn.

The hours passed and Sanchia Murray did not come.  Before now, they estimated, she could have hurried here even though she came on foot; before now, had she thought of it and had the patience, she might have found Longstreet’s horse.  Yet she did not come.  The fact made their uncertainty the greater.  They had ample opportunity to ask themselves a hundred times if they had done the foolish thing in racing off here.  Should they have held by Sanchia?

Toward morning it grew chill and they came closer together over their little brush fire.  They spoke in lowered voices, and not always of Helen’s father and of his gold.  At times they spoke of themselves.  To-morrow Helen might be mistress of a bonanza; to-morrow she might be, as she was to-night, a girl but briefly removed from pennilessness.  As the stars waxed and began at last to wane and the sky brightened, as the still thin air grew colder at the first promises of another day, they discussed the matter quietly.  And it seemed that this was not the only consideration in the world, nor yet even the chiefest.  But——­