The gaunt man checked his leader’s tracking, and the little man on the white horse rode behind, a man lost in a dream.  They rode one after another, the man with the silver bridle led the way, and they spoke never a word.  After a time it came to the little man on the white horse that the world was very still.  He started out of his dream.  Besides the little noises of their horses and equipment, the whole great valley kept the brooding quiet of a painted scene.

Before him went his master and his fellow, each intently leaning forward to the left, each impassively moving with the paces of his horse; their shadows went before them—­still, noiseless, tapering attendants; and nearer a crouched cool shape was his own.  He looked about him.  What was it had gone?  Then he remembered the reverberation from the banks of the gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of shifting, jostling pebbles.  And, moreover——?  There was no breeze.  That was it!  What a vast, still place it was, a monotonous afternoon slumber!  And the sky open and blank except for a sombre veil of haze that had gathered in the upper valley.

He straightened his back, fretted with his bridle, puckered his lips to whistle, and simply sighed.  He turned in his saddle for a time, and stared at the throat of the mountain gorge out of which they had come.  Blank!  Blank slopes on either side, with never a sign of a decent beast or tree—­ much less a man.  What a land it was!  What a wilderness!  He dropped again into his former pose.

It filled him with a momentary pleasure to see a wry stick of purple black flash out into the form of a snake, and vanish amidst the brown.  After all, the infernal valley was alive.  And then, to rejoice him still more, came a little breath across his face, a whisper that came and went, the faintest inclination of a stiff black-antlered bush upon a little crest, the first intimations of a possible breeze.  Idly he wetted his finger, and held it up.

He pulled up sharply to avoid a collision with the gaunt man, who had stopped at fault upon the trail.  Just at that guilty moment he caught his master’s eye looking towards him.

For a time he forced an interest in the tracking.  Then, as they rode on again, he studied his master’s shadow and hat and shoulder, appearing and disappearing behind the gaunt man’s nearer contours.  They had ridden four days out of the very limits of the world into this desolate place, short of water, with nothing but a strip of dried meat under their saddles, over rocks and mountains, where surely none but these fugitives had ever been before—­for that!

And all this was for a girl, a mere wilful child!  And the man had whole cityfuls of people to do his basest bidding—­girls, women!  Why in the name of passionate folly this one in particular? asked the little man, and scowled at the world, and licked his parched lips with a blackened tongue.  It was the way of the master, and that was all he knew.  Just because she sought to evade him...