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230 lect to shake a leg at him before kicking his burro into motion. As for Judith, she kept herself invisible; and though he looked about for her, Alan was sensitive to Rose's tensity of emotion and forebore to aggravate it by open search or calling.

Five minutes after his return the three had ridden out of sight of the motor-car. In as much time more they had found the forking of the trails described by the chauffeur; and by tacit consent, none questioning the move, struck off on what the chauffeur had termed the up-trail—the town of Mesquite, whatever its character and wherever it might be, their goal.

The trail mounted at a sharp grade, seldom wide enough to permit one burro to pass another at need, not seldom skirting the brink of some declivity so sheer that by common instinct the fugitives kept their eyes studiously averted from the abyss.

But the frequency of such passages bred indifference in their sleepy minds. Before morning they were all riding like so many hypnotized subjects, fatigue bearing so heavily on all their senses that none spoke or cared to speak. Broad daylight surprised them in this state, still stubbornly travelling; and shortly afterward showed them one place so perilous that it shocked them temporarily awake.

This was simply a spot where the trail came abruptly to an end on one side of a cleft in the hills quite thirty feet wide and several hundred in depth,