A glimpse, scarcely more it was, had been given them of Mexicali Joe's face. And at a considerable distance, at least for the reading of a man's look. But yet they marked how the face was haggard and drawn and furtive. Joe had no inkling of their presence. He had not seen their wisp of smoke; there was no wind setting toward him to carry him the smell of cooking trout. Plainly he had no desire for company other than his own. He, no less than they, fled from all pursuit. Again he was lost to them; he vanished, gone up-stream, beyond the thickets, no faintest sound of his footfalls coming back to them. From him they turned to each other, the same expression from the same flooding thought in their eyes.
"We're on the jump and we'll keep on the jump!" said Deveril softly. "And at the same time, Lynette Brooke, we'll stick as close as the Lord'll let us to Mexicali Joe's coat-tails! Don't you worry; he'll go back as sure as shooting to his gold-mine, if only to make certain that no one else has squatted on it. And where he drives a stake, we'll drive ours right alongside!"
"It's funny ... that he hasn't gotten any further ... that he should come this way, too...."
"No telling how long he had to lie still while the pack yelped about his hiding-place; that he came this way means only one thing. And that is that our luck is with us, and we're headed as straight as he is toward his prospect hole. Ready? Let's follow him!"
She jumped up. But before they started they gathered up, to the last small bit, what was left of their fish;
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 Deveril made the small bundle, fish enwrapped in leaves, with a handkerchief about the whole.
"If he should hear us?" she whispered. "If he should lie in waiting and see us?"
He chuckled.
"In any case, we'll have it on him! He can't know that we're on the run, too; he got away too fast for that. And even if he should know, what would he do about it? He has no love for Taggart, anyway; and he has no wish to get himself into the hands of that mob that he has just ducked away from, like a rabbit dodging a pack of hounds. If he catches us ... why, then, we catch him at the same time! Come on."
Thus began the second lap of their journey; thus they, fleeing, followed like shadows upon the traces of one who fled. For Mexicali Joe would obviously keep to the bed of the cañon; if he forsook it in order to climb up either slope to a ridge above, he must of necessity pass through the more sparsely timbered spaces, where he would run constantly into danger of being seen. The only danger to their plans lay with the possibility that he might overhear sounds of their following and might draw a little to one side and hide in some dense copse, and so let them go by. But they had the advantage from the beginning; they knew he was ahead, and he did not know that they followed; so long as they, listening always, did not hear him ahead, there was little danger of him hearing them coming after him. With all the noise of the water, tumbling over falls and splashing along over rocks, singing cheerily to itself at every step, there was small likelihood of any one of the three cautious footfalls being heard....
There were the times, so intent were they following the Mexican, when they forgot what was after all the main issue; forgot that they, too, were followed. For the
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 newer phase of the game was more zestful just now than the other; they had neither glimpsed nor heard anything since the passing of the two riders last night to hint that any danger of discovery threatened them. They spoke seldom, only now and then, pausing briefly, in lowered voices, as the speculations which had been occupying both minds, demanded expression. Thus they were always confronted by some new problem; at first, and for a mile or more, they had full confidence that they had Joe straight ahead of them. But presently they approached a fork of the cañon; it became imperative to know if Joe had gone up the right or the left ravine. And here, where most they wanted a glimpse of him, they had scant hope of seeing him, so dense was the timber growth; he would keep close to the bed of the stream, at times walking in the water so that the network of branches from the brushy tangle on both banks would make for him a dim alleyway, like a tunnel. They could not hope to hear him; they could not count on finding his tracks, since none would be left upon the rocks and the rushing water held none.
But they were alert, ears critical of the slightest rustling, eyes never keener. And, their good fortune holding firm, when they came to the forking of the ways, that which they had not hoped for, a track upon a hard rock, set them right. For here Joe, but a few score yards ahead of them, had slipped, and had crawled up over a boulder, and there was still the wet trace of his passing, a sign to vanish, drying, while they looked on it. Joe had gone on into the deeper cañon, headed in the direction which last night they had elected for their own, driving on toward the heart of the wilderness country.
They were no less relieved at finding what was the man's likely general direction than at making sure that they were still almost at his heels. For they had come
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 to realize that, to explain Joe's presence here, there were two directly opposing possibilities to consider: It was imaginable that Joe would be making straight for his gold; and it was just as reasonable that his craft might have suggested to him to head in an opposite direction. Now that they might follow him and still be going direct upon their own business, they were for the moment content upon all points.
Deveril, for the most part, went ahead; now and then he paused a moment for the girl to come up with him. But never did he have to wait long. He began to wonder at her; they had covered many hard miles last night; more hard miles this morning. How long, he asked himself, as his eyes sought to read hers, could such a slender, altogether feminine, blush-pink girl stand up under such relentless hardship as this flight promised to give them? And always he went on again, reassured and admiring; her eyes remained clear, her regard straight and cool. A girl unafraid; the true daughter of dauntless, hot-blooded parents.
And she, watching his tall, always graceful form leading the way, found ample time to wonder about him. She had seen him last night burst in through a window and take the time coolly, though already the hue and cry was breaking at his contemptuous heels, to rifle a man's pockets. There was an indelible picture: the debonair Babe Deveril, who had stepped unquestioningly into her fight, going down on his knees before his fallen kinsman ... calmly bent upon robbery. For she had seen the bank-notes in his hand.
The sun rose high and crested all the ridges with glorious light, and poured its golden warmth down into the steep cañons. But, now that shadows began to shrink and the little open spaces lay revealed in detail, fresh labor was added in that they were steadily harder
[Pg 103]
 driven to keep to cover; all day long, at intervals, they were to have glimpses of the Buck Valley road, high above upon the mountain flank, and at each view of the road they understood that a man up there might have caught a glimpse of them. Ten o'clock came and found them doggedly following along the way which they held the viewless Mexicali Joe must have taken before them. They paused and stooped to the invitation of the creek, and thereafter ate what was left them of their grilled trout. Having eaten, they drank again; and having drunk, they again took up the trail....
"If you can stand the pace?" queried Deveril over his shoulder. And she read in the gleam in his eyes that he was set on seeing this thing through; on sticking close to Mexicali Joe until he came, with Joe, upon his secret.
"Why, of course!" she told him lightly, though already her body ached.
It was not over an hour later when they set their feet in a trail which they were confident Mexicali Joe had followed; from the moment they stepped into the trail they watched for some trace of him, but the hard, rain-washed, rocky way which only a mountaineer could have recognized as a trail, was such as to hold scant sign, if the one who travelled it but exercised precaution. Babe Deveril, with his small knowledge of these mountains, held it the old short-cut trail from Timkin's Bar, long disused, since Timkin's Bar itself had a score of years ago died the death of short-lived mining towns. Brush grew over it, and again and again it vanished underfoot, and they were hard beset to grope forward to it again. Yet trail of a sort it was, and it set them to meditating: Timkin's Bar, in the late '80's, had created a gold furor, and then, after its short and hectic life, had been abandoned, as an orange, sucked dry by
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 a child, is thrown aside. Was it possible that among the old diggings Mexicali Joe had stumbled upon a vein which the old-timers had overlooked?
At any rate, the trail lured them along, winding in their own general direction; and Mexicali Joe still fled ahead. Of this latter fact they had evidence when they came to the unmistakable sign ... to watchful eyes ... of his recent passing: here, on the steep, ill-defined trail he had slipped, and had caught at the branches of a wild cherry. They saw the furrow made by his boot-heel and the scattered leaves and broken twigs.
Gradually the trail led them up out of the cañon-bed, snaking along the flank of the mountain. And gradually they were entering the great forest land of yellow pines. If not already in Timber-Wolf's country, here was the border-line of his monster holdings: few men could draw the line exactly between the wide-reaching acres which were his and those contiguous acres which were a portion of the government reserve. Standing himself had quarrelled with the government upon the matter and what was more, after no end of litigation, had won a point or two.
Once they diverged from the trail to climb and slide to the bottom of the cañon for a long drink. But this and the sheer ascent took them in their hurry only a few minutes. Again they took up the trail. It was high noon and they were tired. But, alike disdainful of fatigue, driven and lured, they pressed on.
Suddenly she startled him by catching him by the arm and whispering warningly:
"Sh! Some one is following us!"
In another moment, drawing back from the trail, they were hidden among the wild cherries in a little side ravine.
"Where?" he demanded, his voice hushed like hers,
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 as he peered back along the way they had come. "Who? How many of them?"
"I didn't see," she answered.
"What did you hear?"
"Nothing ... I just know ... I felt that some one was trailing us just as we are trailing Mexicali Joe! I feel it now; I know!"
"But you had something—something that you saw or heard—to tell you?"
She shook her head. And he saw, wondering at her, that she was very deeply in earnest as she admitted:
"No. Nothing! But I know. I tell you, I know. Can't you feel that there is some one back there, following us, spying on us, hiding and yet dogging every step we take? Can't you feel it?"
She saw him shaken with silent laughter. She understood that he, a man, was convulsed with laughter at the imaginings of her, a maid. And yet, also, since she was quick-minded, she noted how his laughter was silent! He meant her to see that he put no credence in her suspicions; and yet, for all that, he was impressed, and he did take care that no one, who might follow them, should overhear him!
"One doesn't feel things like that," he told her, as though positive. But in the telling he kept his voice low, so that it was scarcely louder than her own whisper.
"One does," she retorted. "And you know it, Babe Deveril!"
"But," he challenged her, "were you right, and were there a man or several men back there tracking us, why all this caution on their parts? What would they be waiting for, being armed themselves and knowing us unarmed? What better place than this to take us in? Why give us a minute's chance to slip away in the brush?"
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"I don't know." She shrugged, and again he marvelled at her; she looked like one who had little vital concern in what any others, pursuing, might or might not do.
Despite his cool determination to adhere to calm reason and to discount feminine impressionism, which he held to be fostered by a nervous condition brought about by overexertion, Babe Deveril began to feel, as she felt, that there was something more than imagination in her contention. How does a man sense things which no one of his five senses can explain to him? He could not see any reason in this abrupt change in both their moods; and yet, none the less, it seemed to him, all of a sudden, as though eyes were spying on him from behind every pine trunk, and from the screen of every thicket.
"Joe won't escape us in a hurry," he muttered. "Not in this cañon. And we'll see this thing through. Let's sit tight and watch."
And so, with that inexplicable sense that here in the wilderness they were not yet free from pursuit, they crouched in the bushes and bent every force of every sense to detect their fancied pursuers. But the forest land, sun-smitten, a playland of light and shadow and tremulous breeze, lay steeped in quiet about them, and they saw nothing moving save the gently stirring leaves and occasional birds; half a dozen sparrows briefly stayed their flight upon a shrub in flower with pale-pink blossoms; a bevy of quail, forty strong, marched away through the narrow roadways under the low, drooping branches, with crested topknots bobbing; the forest land murmured and whispered and sang softly, and seemed empty of any other human presence than their own. And yet they waited, and at the end of their waiting, grown nervous despite themselves, though they had had
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 no slightest evidence that pursuit was drawing close upon their heels, they were not able to shake from them that feeling that danger, the danger from which they fled, was become a near-drawn menace. And all the more to be feared in that it approached so silently, covertly, hidden and ready to strike when their guard was down.
"Just the same," said Deveril, deep in his own musings, "it can't be Jim Taggart, for that's not Taggart's way, having the goods on a man, and, besides, I fancy I put him out of the running." Then he looked at her curiously, and added: "And it can't be Bruce Standing, since you put him down and out and...."
It was the first time that such a reference to the past had been made. Now she startled him by the quick vehemence of her denial, saying:
"I didn't shoot Bruce Standing! I tell you...."
He looked at her steadily, and she broke off, as she saw dawning in his eyes a look which was to be read as readily as were white stones to be glimpsed in the bottom of a clear pool. She had made her statement, and, whether true or false, he held it to be a lie.
"In case they should somehow lay us by the heels," he said dryly, "you would come a lot closer to clearing yourself by saying that you shot him in self-defense than in denying everything. But they haven't got their ropes over our running horns yet!... Do you still feel that we are followed?"
His look angered her; his words angered her still further. So to his question she made no reply. He looked at her again curiously. She refused to meet his eyes, coolly ignoring him. A little smile twitched at his lips.
"It's a poor time for good friends to fall out," he said lightly. "I don't care the snap of my fingers who shot him, or why. He ought to have been shot a dozen years
[Pg 108]
 ago. And now I'll tell you what, I think, explains this business of some one being close behind us, if you are right in it. The big chance is that some one has been trailing Mexicali Joe all along; and dropped in behind us when we dropped in behind Joe. We've been doing a first-class job of sticking to cover; mind you, we haven't caught a second glimpse of Joe all this time, and therefore it is as likely as not that the gent whom you feel to be trailing us hasn't caught a glimpse of us. If this is right, we've got a bully chance right now to prove it. We lie close where we are for ten minutes, and see if your hombre doesn't slip on by us, nosing along after Joe."
In silence she acquiesced. That sense of the nearness of another unseen human being was insistent upon her. For a long time, as still as the deep-rooted trees about them, they crouched, listening, watching. She heard the watch ticking in Babe Deveril's pocket. She heard her own breathing and his. She heard the brownie birds threshing among dead leaves. Then there was the eternal whispering of the pines and the faint murmurings from the stream far down in the cañon. At last it would have been a relief to straining nerves if a man, or two or three men, had stepped into sight in the trail from which she and Deveril had withdrawn. For more certain than ever was Lynette Brooke, though she could give neither rhyme nor reason for that certainty, that her instincts had not tricked her. Therefore, instead of being reassured at seeing or hearing no one, she was depressed and made anxious; the silence became sinister, filled with vague threat; that she saw no one was explicable to her by but the one ominous condition: that person or those persons were watching even now, and knew where she and Babe Deveril hid, and did not mean to stir until first their quarry stirred.
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 Why all this caution? She could not explain that to h............