“Cordts all right,” replied Creech.  “I knowed thet before I seen him.  Fer two mornin’s back I seen his hoss grazin in thet wide canyon.  But I thought I’d slipped by.  Some one seen us.  Or they seen our trail.  Anyway, he’s after us.  What beats me is how he sticks to thet trail.  Cordts never was no tracker.  An’ since Dick Sears is dead there ain’t a tracker in Cordts’s outfit.  An’ I always could hide my tracks. . . .  Beats me!”

“Creech, I’ve been leaving a trail,” confessed Lucy.

“What!”

Then she told him how she had been dropping cedar berries and bits of cedar leaves along the bare and stony course they had traversed.

“Wal, I’m—­” Creech stifled an oath.  Then he laughed, but gruffly.  “You air a cute one.  But I reckon you didn’t promise not to do thet. . . .  An’ now if Cordts gits you there’ll be only yourself to blame.”

“Oh!” cried Lucy, frantically looking back.  The moving specks were plainly in sight.  “How can he know he’s trailing me?”

“Thet I can’t say.  Mebbe he doesn’t know.  His hosses air fresh, though, an’ if I can’t shake him he’ll find out soon enough who he’s trailin’.”

“Go on!  We must shake him.  I’ll never do that again! . . .  For God’s sake, Creech, don’t let him get me!”

And Creech led down off the high open land into canyons again.

The day ended, and the night seemed a black blank to Lucy.  Another sunrise found Creech leading on, sparing neither Lucy nor the horses.  He kept on a steady walk or trot, and he picked out ground less likely to leave any tracks.  Like an old deer he doubled on his trail.  He traveled down stream-beds where the water left no trail.  That day the mustangs began to fail.  The others were wearing out.

The canyons ran like the ribs of a wash-board.  And they grew deep and verdant, with looming, towered walls.  That night Lucy felt lost in an abyss.  The dreaming silence kept her awake many moments while sleep had already seized upon her eyelids.  And then she dreamed of Cordts capturing her, of carrying her miles deeper into these wild and purple cliffs, of Slone in pursuit on the stallion Wildfire, and of a savage fight.  And she awoke terrified and cold in the blackness of the night.

On the next day Creech traveled west.  This seemed to Lucy to be far to the left of the direction taken before.  And Lucy, in spite of her utter weariness, and the necessity of caring for herself and her horse, could not but wonder at the wild and frowning canyon.  It was only a tributary of the great canyon, she supposed, but it was different, strange, impressive, yet intimate, because all about it was overpowering, near at hand, even the beetling crags.  And at every turn it seemed impossible to go farther over that narrow and rock-bestrewn floor.  Yet Creech found a way on.

Then came hours of climbing such slopes and benches and ledges as Lucy had not yet encountered.  The grasping spikes of dead cedar tore her dress to shreds, and many a scratch burned her flesh.  About the middle of the afternoon Creech led up over the last declivity, a yellow slope of cedar, to a flat upland covered with pine and high bleached grass.  They rested.