Silently they rode through the stir and thresh of the night, the two women and the man. For guidance along the woods trail they must trust to the finer sense of their horses whose heads they could not see in the closed-in murk. A desultory spray fell upon them as the wind wrenched at the boughs overhead, but the rain had ceased. Infinitely high, infinitely potent sounded the imminent tumult of the invisible Powers of the night, on whose sufferance they moved, tiny, obscure, and unharmed. It filled all the distances.

Debouching upon the open desert, they found their range of vision slightly expanded. They could dimly perceive each other. The horses drew closer together. With his flash covered by his poncho, Banneker consulted a compass and altered their course, for he wished to give the station, to which Gardner might have returned, a wide berth. Io moved up abreast of him as he stood, studying the needle. Had he turned the light upward he would have seen that she was smiling. Whether he would have interpreted that smile, whether, indeed, she could have interpreted it herself, is doubtful.

Presently they picked up the line of telegraph poles, well beyond the station, just the faintest suggestion of gaunt rigor against the troubled sky, and skirted them, moving more rapidly in the confidence of assured direction. A very gradual, diffused alleviation of the darkness began to be felt. The clouds were thinning. Something ahead of them hissed in a soft, full, insistent monosonance. Banneker threw up a shadowy arm. They dismounted on the crest of a tiny desert clifflet, now become the bank of a black current which nuzzled and nibbled into its flanks.

Io gazed intently at the flood which was to deliver her out of the hands of the Philistine. How far away the other bank of the newborn stream might be, she could only guess from the vague rush in her ears. The arroyo's water slipped ceaselessly, objectlessly away from beneath her strained vision, smooth, suave, even, effortless, like the process of some unhurried and mighty mechanism. Now and again a desert plant, uprooted from its arid home, eddied joyously past her, satiated for once of its lifelong thirst; and farther out she thought to have a glimpse of some dead and whitish animal. But these were minor blemishes on a great, lustrous ribbon of silken black, unrolled and re-rolled from darkness into darkness.

"It's beckoning us," said Io, leaning to Banneker, her hand on his shoulder.

"We must wait for more light," he answered.

"Will you trust yourself to _that_?" asked Camilla Van Arsdale, with a gesture of fear and repulsion toward the torrent.

"Anywhere!" returned Io. There was exaltation in her voice.

"I can't understand it," cried the older woman. "How do you know what may lie before you?"

"That is the thrill of it."

"There may be death around the first curve. It's so unknown; so secret and lawless."

"Ah, and I'm lawless!" cried Io. "I could defy the gods on a night like this!"

She flung her arms aloft, in a movement of sweet, wild abandon, and, as if in response to an incantation, the sky was reft asunder and the moon rushed forth, free for the moment of the clutching clouds, fugitive, headlong, a shining Maenad of the heavens, surrounded by the rush and whirl that had whelmed earth and its waters and was hurrying them to an unknown, mad destiny.

"Now we can see our way," said Banneker, the practical.

He studied the few rods of sleek, foamless water between him and the farther bank, and, going to the steel boat which Mindle had brought to the place on the hand car, took brief inventory of its small cargo. Satisfied, he turned to load in Io's few belongings. He shipped the oars.

"I'll let her go stem-first," he explained; "so that I can see what we're coming to and hold her if there's trouble."

"But can you see?" objected Miss Van Arsdale, directing a troubled look at the breaking sky.

"If we can't, we'll run her ashore until we can."

He handed Io the flashlight and the map.

"You'll want me in the bow seat if we're traveling reversed," said she.

He assented. "Good sailorwoman!"

"I don't like it," protested Miss Van Arsdale. "It's a mad business. Ban, you oughtn't to take her."

"It's too late to talk of that," said Io.

"Ready?" questioned Banneker.

"Yes."

He pushed the stern of the boat into the stream, and the current laid it neatly and powerfully flat to the sheer bank. Io kissed Camilla Van Arsdale quickly and got in.

"We'll wire you from Miradero," she promised. "You'll find the message in the morning."

The woman, mastering herself with a difficult effort, held out her hand to Banneker.

"If you won't be persuaded," she said, "then good--"

"No," he broke in quickly. "That's bad luck. We shall be all right."

"Good luck, then," returned his friend, and turned away into the night.

Banneker, with one foot in the boat, gave a little shove and caught up his oars. An unseen hand of indeterminable might grasped the keel and moved them quietly, evenly, outward and forward, puppets given into the custody of the unregarding powers. Oars poised and ready, Ban sat with his back toward his passenger, facing watchfully downstream.

Leaning back into the curve of the bow, Io gave herself up to the pulsing sweep of the night. Far, far above her stirred a cosmic tumult. The air might have been filled with vast wings, invisible and incessant in the night of wonders. The moon plunged headlong through the clouds, now submerged, now free, like a strong swimmer amidst surf. She moved to the music of a tremendous, trumpeting note, the voice of the unleashed Spring, male and mighty, exulting in his power, while beneath, the responsive, desirous earth thrilled and trembled and was glad.

The boat, a tiny speck on the surface of chaos, darted and checked and swerved lightly at the imperious bidding of unguessed forces, reaching up from the depths to pluck at it in elfish sportiveness. Only when Ban thrust down the oar-blades, as he did now and again to direct their course or avoid some obstacle, was Io made sensible, through the jar and tremor of the whole structure, how swiftly they moved. She felt the spirit of the great motion, of which they were a minutely inconsiderable part, enter into her soul. She was inspired of it, freed, elated, glorified. She lifted up her voice and sang. Ban, turning, gave her one quick look of comprehension, then once more was intent and watchful of their master and servitor, the flood.

"Ban," she called.

He tossed an oar to indicate that he had heard.

"Come back and sit by me."

He seemed to hesitate.

"Let the boat go where it wants to! The river will take care of us. It's a good river, and so strong! I think it loves to have us here."

Ban shook his head.

"'Let the great river bear us to the sea,'" sang Io in her fresh and thrilling voice, stirring the uttermost fibers of his being with delight. "Ban, can't you trust the river and the night and--and the mad gods? I can."

Again he shook his head. In his attitude she sensed a new concentration upon something ahead. She became aware of a strange stir that was not of the air nor the water.

"Hush--sh--sh--sh--sh!" said something unseen, with an immense effect of restraint and enforced quiet.

The boat slewed sharply as Banneker checked their progress with a downthrust of oars. He edged in toward the farther bank which was quite flat, studying it with an eye to the most favoring spot, having selected which, he ran the stern up with several hard shoves, leapt out, hauled the body of the craft free from the balked and snatching current, and held out a hand to his passenger.

"What is it?" she asked as she joined him.

"I don't know. I'm trying to think where I've heard that noise before." He pondered. "Ah, I've got it! It was when I was out on the coast in the big rains, and a few million tons of river-bank let go all holds and smushed down into the stream.... What's on your map?"

He bent over it, conning its detail by the light of the flash which she turned on.

"We should be about here," he indicated, touching the paper, "I'll go ahead and take a look."

"Shan't I go with you?"

"Better stay quiet and get all the rest you can."

He was gone some twenty minutes. "There's a big, fresh-looking split-off in the opposite bank," he reported; "and the water looks fizzy and whirly around there. I think we'll give her a little time to settle. A sudden shift underneath might suck us down. The water's rising every minute, which makes it worth while waiting. Besides, it's dark just now."

"Do you believe in fate?" asked the girl abruptly, as he seated himself on the sand beside her. "That's a silly, schoolgirl thing to say, isn't it?" she added. "But I was thinking of this boat being there in the middle of the dry desert, just when we needed it most."

"It had been there some time," pointed out Banneker. "And if we couldn't have come this way, I'd have found some other."

"I believe you would," crowed Io softly.

"So, I don't believe in fate; not the ready-made kind. Things aren't that easy. If I did--"

"If you did?" she prompted as he paused.

"I'd get back into the boat with you and throw away the oars."

"I dare you!" she cried recklessly.

"We'd go whirling and spinning along," he continued with dreams in his voice, "until dawn came, and then we'd go ashore and camp."

"Where?"

"How should I know? In the Enchanted Canyon where it enters the Mountains of Fulfillment.... They're not on this map."

"They're not on any map. More's the pity. And then?"

"Then we'd rest. And after that we'd climb to the Plateau Beyond the Clouds where the Fadeless Gardens are, and there..."

"And there?"

"There we'd hear the Undying Voices singing."

"Should we sing, too?"

"Of course. 'For they who attain these heights, through pain of upward toil and the rigors of abstention, are as the demigods, secure above evil and the fear thereof.'"

"I don't know what that is, but I hate the 'upward toil' part of it, and the 'abstention' even more. We ought to be able to become demigods without all that, just because we wish it. In a fairy-tale, anyway. I don't think you're a really competent fairy-tale-monger, Ban."

"You haven't let me go on to the 'live happy ever after' part," he complained.

"Ah, that's the serpent, the lying, poisoning little serpent, always concealed in the gardens of dreams. They don't, Ban; people don't live happy ever after. I could believe in fairy-tales up to that point. Just there ugly old Experience holds up her bony finger--she's a horrid hag, Ban, but we'd all be dead or mad without her--and points to the wriggling little snake."

"In my garden," said he, "she'd have shining wings and eyes that could look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a lover. It would be worth all the toil and the privation."

"Nobody ever made up a Paradise," said the girl fretfully, "but what the Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with thorns and stings.... Look, Ban! Here's the moon come back to us.... And see what's laughing at us and our dreams."

On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing its arms in gnomish derision of their presence.

"How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove their existence?" she said. "And, look! There's the good spirit in front of that shining cloud."

She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty.

"When I saw my first yucca in blossom," said Banneker, "it was just before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and silver. It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled."

"That's the injustice of death," she answered. "To take one before one knows and ha............