“Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the night comes—­a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and—­” Dolly whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed.  The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, as deliberately as a snake swallows its victim.  They were nearing the mountains.  The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more intermittently.  The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher and higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the tension of things loosen a little.

Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hard winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian superstition that was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the empty eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her.  She dared not think of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of what she might find at her journey’s end, or—­“Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl.  Is it my foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some one following?”

The mare had been trained to respond to the slightest touch on her mouth, and stopped instantly.  Judith swayed slightly in the saddle with the heaving of the sweating horse.  The blood beat at her temples, confusing what she actually heard with what her imagination pictured.  She was half-way up a towering spur of the Wind River when she slid from the saddle, and putting her ear to the ground listened, Indian fashion.  Above the throbbing stillness of the desert night, that came to her murmurously, like the imprisoned roar of the sea from a shell, she could hear the regular beat of horse’s hoofs following up the steep mountain grade.  She scrambled up with the desperate nimbleness of a hunted thing, but when she attempted to vault to the saddle her limbs failed and she sank clinging to the pommel.  Twice she tried and twice the trembling of her limbs held her captive.  With the loss of each moment the beat of the hoofs on the trail below became more distinct.  The very desperation of her plight kept her clinging to the pommel, incapable of thought, so that when she finally flung herself to the saddle she was surprised to find herself there.  To the left the trail dropped sharply to a precipice, choked by the close crowding of many scrub pines.  To the right the snow-clad spires of the Wind River kept their eternal vigil.  If she should call aloud for help, these white, still mountains would echo the anguish of her woman’s cry and give no further heed to her plight.

The trail had begun to widen.  The horse behind her again stumbled, loosening a stone that rolled with crashes and echoings down to the precipice below.  She took advantage of the widening of the trail to urge Dolly forward.  Her impulse was to put spurs to the mare and run, to take chances with loose stones, a narrowing trail, and the possibility of Dolly’s stumbling and breaking a leg; but discretion prompted the showing of a brave front, the pleasantries of the road, with flight as the last resource of desperation.