"Of course. Any fool ought to have thought of that," he muttered, ashamed that it had been she instead of himself who had foreseen the danger.
So they hearkened to the voice of caution and paralleled the road, keeping a dozen or a score of paces to its side, and often tempted, because of its comparative smoothness and the difficult brokenness of the mountainside over which they elected to travel, to yield utterly to its inviting voice. They turned back and glimpsed the twinkling lights of Big Pine; they lost the lights as they forged on; they found them again, grown fainter and fewer and farther away.
"Can you go on walking this way all night?" he asked her once.
"All night, if we have to," she told him simply.
They tramped along in silence, their boots rising and falling regularly. The first tenseness, since human nerves will remain taut only so long, had passed. They had time for thought now, both before and after. Mentally each was reviewing all that had occurred to-night and, building theoretically upon those happenings, was casting forward into the future. The present was a path of hazard, and surely the future lay shut in by black shadows. Yet both of them were young, and youth is the time of golden hopes, no matter how drearily embraced by stony facts. And youth, in both of them, despite the difference of sex, was of the same order: a time of wild blood; youth at its animal best, lusty, vigorous, dauntless, devil-may-care; theirs the spirits which leap, hearts glad and fearless. And when, after a while, now and then they spoke again, there was youth playing up to youth in its own inevitable fashion; confidence asserting itself and begetting more confidence; youth wearing its outer cloakings with its own inimitable swagger.
They had trudged along the narrow mountain road for a full hour or more when they heard the clattering noise of a horse's shod hoofs.
"I knew it," said Deveril sharply. "Damn them."
With one accord he and she withdrew hastily, slipping into the convenient shadows thrown by a clump of trees, and peered forth through a screen of high brush. The hurrying hoof beats came on, up-grade, hence from the general direction of Big Pine. Two men, and riding neck and neck, driving their horses hard. The riders drew on rapidly; were for a fleeting moment vaguely outlined against a field of stars ... swept on.