Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/193

Rh but, even if she found them, she could not saddle nor manage them. And the place was seeped with the threat of Hollister. She must get away. Away.

She reached the turfy strip, treading lightly, kneeled by the brook and drank her fill. Then she got up and went on down to the main canyon, turning east towards the sunrise and the desert, towards the way by which she must return, looking here and there for some sharp-edged rock, fearful every moment of a shout from Hollister, a volley of shots.

She tried to remember what she had heard of such blindness. She believed it to be alcoholic, but she could not be sure how long it might last and she could conceive with what diabolical cunning Hollister might wait for his revenge after she had failed to answer him in the cave.

She was almost out of the canyon of the Painted Rocks when she found a large fragment of lava capping fallen from some pillar or pyramid that had succumbed to the weather. The stuff was flinty and she placed herself on one knee beside it, chafing the thongs at her wrists against its edges. It was clumsy work and the sides of her hands were soon bleeding. But it was effective and, finally, she was free. She could walk, could climb, could choose and hurl a stone for a weapon, at need. But she could not rid herself, overwrought as she was, of the suggestion that some one was following her, dogging her footsteps, hidden behind rock masses, coming ever closer. It drove her out of the City of Silence, out into the desert, plodding through the shifty sand.