So they traversed the roofed cut and came out into the starlight of the first cañon. Up this they went in single file. They passed the place where Albright had found the dark spray on the cañon wall, the standing rock where the gun with the untrue firing pin had kicked away its shell. A little farther on was the disturbed and trampled heap of slide which had held Old Pete’s body. In silence they rode on, the horses’ hoofs striking a million echoes from the reverberating crosscuts.
The moon was shining above, but here there was only a sifted light, a ghostly radiance of starlight and painted walls. Tharon, riding ahead, went unerringly forward as if she traveled the open ways of the Valley floor. She turned from the main cañon toward the left and passed the mouth of Old Pete’s snow-bed. Between this and that standing spire and pinnacle she went, with a strong certainty that presently stirred Billy to speech.
“Tharon, dear,” he said gently, “hadn’t we better leave a mark or two along this-a-way? Ain’t you got no landmarks?”
“Can if you want,” the girl said briefly, “I don’t need landmarks.” 243
“Then how you know the way? There ain’t no one knows th’ Cañon Country––but Courtrey.”
“I don’t know it,” she said simply but with profound conviction. “I’m feelin’ it, Billy. I know I’m goin’ straight to th’ Cup o’ God. I’m blind as a bat, it seems, yet goin’ straight.”
She lifted a hand and crossed herself.
“Goin’ straight––Mary willin’––an’ I’ll come back straight. It lies up there an’ to th’ left again.” She made a wide gesture that swept up and out, embracing the towering walls, the half-seen peaks against the stars.
Billy shut his lips and said no more.
Up there lay False Ridge, the sinister, dropping spine that came down from the uplands outside where the real great world began, and lured those who traveled down it to crumbling precipice and yawning pit, to sliding slope and slant that, once ridden down, could never be scaled again, according to the weird stories that were told of it.