Turning from the ranch trail, then, she found another that led off to the north and away from the Pagosa road—off into a wooded wilderness of hills where she would be safe from discovery. She halted again on the first ridge above the camp, sitting motionless in the shadow, her eyes on the little moon-flooded opening across the lake where the cabin trail came down to the shore. That was a walk for lovers, but they could not walk there now. After a little time she whirled Cooney about in a sudden gust of fierceness and sent him along the winding ridge, keeping close within the shadow.
When the trail fell away into the first of the unknown valleys she breathed a sigh of relief and release. Her burden was falling from her. She could not again be cheated back from her refuge.
She began to rejoice in the wide, wild sweetness of the night, its piny fragrance, the soft-footed scurryings of its lesser people, the gloom of its sharply defined shadows, and the silvering haze that enveloped the peaks. She came on a deer feeding in the open, and was delighted when it did not run. It only lifted its head to look at her.
She began to rejoice, also, in the cleverness of her plan. As well as she might she had preserved the decencies. A week might ensue before they missed her. Cooney, stripped of his trappings, would appear at the lake cabin, to be laughed at and chided for his desertion of the Bar-B ranch, a week before she was missed; and then she would never be found. There was, indeed, small chance of their having the pain of that. She would keep to the trail as long as the night hid her; then a climb up some unpathed slope, over rocks that would show no trace of her passage; then a tangled thicket, remote, secret, improbable—and the tale of a lost woman, a woman who wandered confusingly far on a night of tempting splendor. She thought of Virginia's pain with a feeble pity. It seemed as if humanity was dead in her.
The narrow trail wound beckoningly before her, the land stretched off to peaks of silver or barren gray slopes or shadowed promontories, glooming above ravines where little rivers turned restlessly in their beds; and over all hung the mystic shimmer of moon rays, softening all angles and picking the fronds of trees with dancing lights as she passed.
An owl boomed from a dead pine, and a little off the trail she heard the scream of a cougar, like the scream of a woman in some strange terror. But all sounds were indifferently alike to her, the shrilling of the beast, the sibilance of running water, the bellow of the owl, the whistle of a deer, or the throaty mutterings of an awakened bird. She heard them as receding echoes of a life already remote.
She kept Cooney moving as rapidly as the trail permitted, checking his little snatches at the wayside herbage. He could fast with her for one night, she told him. To-morrow he could feast his way home harassed by no rider. He stopped at times to test some doubtful bit of trail with a cautious forefoot; or slowed to feel a sure way down a gullyside of loose stones; or lingered knee deep in a melody of swift water, to drink, with swelling sides. She was glad to have this last night with the little horse that had been Ewing's. Ewing—only not to think of him—for one cannot ride with the heart all bled away.
The light faded from the lower ways after a while. The moon had completed its short arc and fell below the mountain ahead of her; defining sharp little notches in its rim.
The hills seemed to steal upon her in the darkness then, huddling close about her, muffling her with their black plumage. But she was glad of this—surmounting the mere physical oppression of it—for she felt that it doubled the secrecy of her going; and Cooney's eyes, with his skilled feet, sufficed for the trail.
At times she shrank as under the touch of a palpable hand reached out to her from the darkness, a thing that frantically protested, pleaded, expostulated—but she knew it for the hand of mere brute life, a cowardly, blind, soulless thing, that would subvert all fitness. She shook it off, knowing herself its superior by right of mind, with power to inflict justice upon it. And he was dead, he, the young and strong—alas, poor slayer, poor slain! How her heart bled away. To expiate——