Over the edge of the sky line, on the rimmed red battlements, jumping, jumping, jumping; as sheep jump at shearing time from the hot center to the cool outside, or over the backs of one another in winter cold, when the outer line jumps to the huddled center; came the herd in a gray woolly shapeless whirling mass!  Shouts, cries, shrill bleatings, storm muffled bang, bang and thud of guns!  Just for an instant, emerged from the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist; then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the sheep back from the precipice edge!

“The dastard coward, blackguard Hell-hatched hounds!” roared the old man, shaking his impotent fist.  Then he funnelled his hands and shouted the lad’s name.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye.  The man in the sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony.  The pinto reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks.  Then the cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate, shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a blinding flash, the air torn to tatters!  The cloud burst hurled down in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents.  Wayland had caught her under shelter of the rock wall.  The old man hurtled to the heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles.  A splintering crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet; and the thing was over quick as it had come.  The funnelling whirl of clouds eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters.  A roil of cloud rolled from below.

The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan.  She sprang from shelter and looked over the edge.  Jumbled at the foot of the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing mass, a weltering maimed horror.  On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the mass by the double turn of his falling horse.

For a moment none of the three uttered a word.  She was trembling so that she could not speak.  There were tears in the old man’s eyes.  To Wayland’s face had come a look.  It was like the blue flash of a pistol shot.  The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire.  He moistened his lips.

“May Hell be both deep and hot!” he said.