“Oh, Bern!... But look! The sun is setting on the sage—the last time for us till we dare come again to the Utah border. Ten years! Oh, Bern, look, so you will never forget!”
Slumbering, fading purple fire burned over the undulating sage ridges. Long streaks and bars and shafts and spears fringed the far western slope. Drifting, golden veils mingled with low, purple shadows. Colors and shades changed in slow, wondrous transformation.
Suddenly Venters was startled by a low, rumbling roar—so low that it was like the roar in a sea-shell.
“Bess, did you hear anything?” he whispered.
“No.”
“Listen!... Maybe I only imagined—Ah!”
Out of the east or north from remote distance, breathed an infinitely low, continuously long sound—deep, weird, detonating, thundering, deadening—dying.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE FALL OF BALANCING ROCK
Through tear-blurred sight Jane Withersteen watched Venters and Elizabeth Erne and the black racers disappear over the ridge of sage.
“They’re gone!” said Lassiter. “An’ they’re safe now. An’ there’ll never be a day of their comin’ happy lives but what they’ll remember Jane Withersteen an’—an’ Uncle Jim!... I reckon, Jane, we’d better be on our way.”