Tharon turned back and looked long at El Rey. She wondered if she would ever see the great silver-blue stallion again, ever feel the wind singing by her cheeks, ever hear the thunder of his running on the hollow ranges. She saw the stain of Jim Last’s blood on the big studded saddle and a pain like death stabbed her.
“I’ll get him,” she had promised on that tragic day, “so help me God!” and had made the sign of the Cross.
What did she now?
Cast away all certainty of that fulfilment because a man––a man almost a stranger––lay somewhere in the Cañon Country, crawled somewhere along False Ridge, perhaps, wounded and sick with fever.
“Oh, hurry!” she whispered as Billy made secure his last light knot in the rope gateway across the cut and came to join her.
She scrambled up the bench in the cañon floor, gained her feet and went forward at a rush. 248
“Steady, Tharon,” warned the rider, “you ain’t used to climbin’. Save your wind.”
It was true advice. Long before the sun was high overhead and day was broad in the painted cracks she had begun to heed it. As she swung up the ever lifting floors, threaded this way and that between the thin intercepting walls that towered hundreds of feet straight up, she cast her wide eyes up in wonder. Always she had watched the Cañon Country from her western door, always it had held her with a binding lure.
There was that about its mystery, its austere majesty, that had thrilled her heart from babyhood. She had pictured it a thousand times and always it had looked just so––pink and grey and saffron, pale and misty with light when the sun was high, blue and wonderful and black as the luminary lowered, leaving the quick shadows.
Hour after hour they climbed, mostly in silence, speaking now and then some necessary word of caution, of assent. This way and that Tharon turned, but always moving upward in the same direction. From time to time Billy dropped a shred of the red kerchief about his neck, touched the soft walls with the handle of the knife he carried. This left a mark plain as a trail to his trained eyes.