“That’s what you say,” said Mary, and with her hat spanked the rump of the horse that Henry was to lead to stir him into a gallop from the jump.
A clatter of hoofs up the darkening desert road, and Leach and Morley were alone with their thoughts.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later Mary slowed down to a walk, and, racked with pain, sat gasping in her saddle.
“Ma’am,” said Shirttail Henry, whose horse had slowed with his mate, “ye’re a outlandish uncommon woman. I never guessed ye was th’ kind to ever run a dance hall like that Silver Fox place ye told about back there.”
“No?” gulped Mary. “Well, I never did—but don’t you suppose I ever read a story in my life? You talk too much. My rib hurts like fury. Shut up!”
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LAST TABLET
OVER the Valley of Arcana the snow banners streamed from the mastheads of the surrounding peaks. Snow fell in the valley—soft snow that somehow seemed warm instead of cold. It disappeared on the bosom of the river, but thickened in eddies and made slush against piles of driftwood. The Valley of Arcana had not yet felt the grip of winter, but up above the banners of triumph waved and the artillery of the blizzards boomed.
The Cave of Hypocritical Frogs was comfortable. The cold did not penetrate to its inner recesses. At the mouth Andy kept a fire going, and enough deadwood had been gathered to last all winter.
The snowbound prisoners sat together below the cave, on boulders close to the redwood saplings which made a bridge over the waterfall that told them weird tales of the waste places night and day. Often the speech of the talkative water changed to music, gathered unto itself rhythm and tunefulness. Sometimes choir boys were singing; sometimes male quartets; more often they fancied that ghost women, wild and distraught from woes undreamed of by mortal beings, were wiping their wet, clinging hair from their faces and lifting their voices in a piercing heathen chant of denunciation.
They sat together above the fall and watched the boiling water in the pool below—marvelled over the frenzied happiness of a lone water ouzel that frolicked there.