Venters drew a full breath that rushed out in brief and sudden utterance.

“Good Heaven!  Of all the holes for a rustler!...There’s a cavern under that waterfall, and a passageway leading out to a canyon beyond.  Oldring hides in there.  He needs only to guard a trail leading down from the sage-flat above.  Little danger of this outlet to the pass being discovered.  I stumbled on it by luck, after I had given up.  And now I know the truth of what puzzled me most—­why that cattle trail was wet!”

He wheeled and ran down the slope, and out to the level of the sage-brush.  Returning, he had no time to spare, only now and then, between dashes, a moment when he stopped to cast sharp eyes ahead.  The abundant grass left no trace of his trail.  Short work he made of the distance to the circle of canyons.  He doubted that he would ever see it again; he knew he never wanted to; yet he looked at the red corners and towers with the eyes of a rider picturing landmarks never to be forgotten.

Here he spent a panting moment in a slow-circling gaze of the sage-oval and the gaps between the bluffs.  Nothing stirred except the gentle wave of the tips of the brush.  Then he pressed on past the mouths of several canyons and over ground new to him, now close under the eastern wall.  This latter part proved to be easy traveling, well screened from possible observation from the north and west, and he soon covered it and felt safer in the deepening shade of his own canyon.  Then the huge, notched bulge of red rim loomed over him, a mark by which he knew again the deep cove where his camp lay hidden.  As he penetrated the thicket, safe again for the present, his thoughts reverted to the girl he had left there.  The afternoon had far advanced.  How would he find her?  He ran into camp, frightening the dogs.

The girl lay with wide-open, dark eyes, and they dilated when he knelt beside her.  The flush of fever shone in her cheeks.  He lifted her and held water to her dry lips, and felt an inexplicable sense of lightness as he saw her swallow in a slow, choking gulp.  Gently he laid her back.

“Who—­are—­you?” she whispered, haltingly.

“I’m the man who shot you,” he replied.

“You’ll—­not—­kill me—­now?”

“No, no.”

“What—­will—­you—­do—­with me?”

“When you get better—­strong enough—­I’ll take you back to the canyon where the rustlers ride through the waterfall.”

As with a faint shadow from a flitting wing overhead, the marble whiteness of her face seemed to change.

“Don’t—­take—­me—­back—­there!”

CHAPTER VI.  THE MILL-WHEEL OF STEERS

Meantime, at the ranch, when Judkins’s news had sent Venters on the trail of the rustlers, Jane Withersteen led the injured man to her house and with skilled fingers dressed the gunshot wound in his arm.

“Judkins, what do you think happened to my riders?”