She would go and look for him.  Perhaps it would not be too late—­she had heard of such things.  A dynamic force consumed her.  She had no consciousness of her body.  Her feet and hands did things with incredible swiftness—­lighted a lantern, selected a knife, ran to the corral for an old ladder that had been there when they took possession of the deserted house; and through all her frantic haste she could feel this new force, as it were, lick up the red blood in her veins, burn her body to ashes as it gave her new power.  She felt that never again would she have need of meat and drink and sleep.  This force would abide with her till all was over, then leave her, like the whitened bones of the desert.

It was dark in the valley, but the menacing stillness seemed to be lifting.  The range-cattle had again taken up their plaint, the sounds of the desert night swept across the stony walls of the canon.  Alida knew that it must have happened at the dead cotton-woods.  There were no other high trees about for miles.  Again she listened before advancing.  There was no sound of hoof or champing bit or men moving quickly.  They had gone their way into the valley.  She ran swiftly, her lantern throwing its beam across the scrubby inequalities of ground, but for her there was no need of its beacon.  To-night she was beyond the halting, stumbling uncertainties of tread to which man is subject.  There was magic in her feet and in her hands and brain.  Like the wind she ran, the wind on the great plain where there are no foot-hills to hinder its course.  The black, dead trees stood out distinctly against the starry sky, and from a cross-limb of one of them dangled something with head awry, like a broken jumping-jack, something that had once been a man—­and her husband.  She could touch the feet of this frightful thing and feel its human warmth.  A wind came up from the desert and blew across the canon’s rocky walls into the valley, and the parody of a man swayed to it.

She had been expecting this thing.  For weeks the image of it had been graven on her heart.  Sleeping or waking, she had seen nothing but his dangling body from the cross-limb.  Yet with the actual consummation before her, she felt its hideous novelty as though it were unexpected.  At sight of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings of that day went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the rope, that she had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers, dangling from her nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her.  Again and again she called to the dead man for help, called to him as she had been accustomed to call when her woman’s strength had been unequal to some heavy household task.

Far down the trail she could hear the gallop of a horse coming closer, and mingled with the sounds of its flying feet was a voice urging the horse to greater speed in the shrill cabalistic “Hi-hi-hi-ki!” of the plains-man.  What was it—­one of them returning to see that she did not cheat the rope of its due?—­to hang her beside him, as an after-thought, as they hanged Kate Watson beside her man?  Let them.  She was standing near the swaying thing when horse and rider gained the ground beside her, and what was left to her of consciousness made out that the rider was Judith.  She pointed to it, and stood helpless with the dangling rope in her hand.