Suddenly gaining what seemed to be a plateau, she wheeled and waited the coming of this possible friend or foe.  The thudding of hoofs through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move of the horseman above.  They were so near that Judith could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse.  The blackness of the night had become a tangible thing.  The towering mountains were one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand.  The horse below resumed its stumbling gait.  Judith crowded Dolly close to the rocky wall.  If the chance comrade of the wilderness should pass her by in the darkness—­God speed him!

“What the devil are you blocking the trail for?” sung out a voice from the darkness.  At sound of it Judith’s heart stopped beating.  The voice was Peter Hamilton’s.

XI

The Cabin In The Valley

And Judith, taken unawares by the unexpected turn of things, comforted as a lost child that is found, told all her feeling for him in the way she called his name.  The easy tenderness of the man awoke; his senses swayed to the magic of her voice, the mystery of the night, the shadow world in which they two, ’twixt earth and sky, were alone.  They rode without speaking.  Peter’s hand sought hers, and all her woman’s terror of the desolation, her fear of the vague terrors of the dreadful night, spoke in her answering pressure.  It was as if the desert had given them to each other as they groped through the silent darkness.  In the great company of earth, sky, silence, and this great-hearted woman, Peter grew conscious of a real thrill.  There were depths to life—­vast, still depths; this woman’s unselfish love for him made him realize them.  He felt his soul sweeping out on the great tide of things.  Farther and farther it swept; his patron saint, caution, beckoning frantically from the receding shore, was miles behind.  “Judith!” he said, and he scarce recognized his own voice.  “Judith!” he struggled as a swimmer in a drowning clutch.  Then his patron saint threw him a life-line and he saved the situation.

“Judith!” he said, a third time, and now he knew his voice.  It was the voice of the man who tilted at life picturesquely in a broad-brimmed hat, who loved his darling griefs and fitted them as a Rembrandt fits its background.  And still, in the same voice, the voice he knew, he said:  “I feel as if we had died and our souls were meeting.  You know Aldrich’s exquisite lines: 

    “Somewhere in desolate, wind-swept space,
        In twilight land—­no man’s land—­
    Two hurrying shapes met face to face
        And bade each other stand.

    “‘And who are you?’ cried one, agape,
        Shuddering in the gloaming light. 
    I know not,’ said the other shape,
    ‘I only died last night.’”