“It is just around this rock that juts out in front. Is your head steady? It falls off sheer below and the path is narrow.” “Go on,” he said, and set his teeth. The path was steep as well as narrow, and the descent below was sheer and far. Mid-way around the rocks a mist came over his eyes. He put up his hand, stumbled, fell forward and out, was dimly aware that he had fallen against his guide. A crash and cry awoke the echoes of the canyon. Then silence settled over it again--dead silence--and the night came down. Their bodies were not found until three days later. When the Eastern detectives had identified their man they proposed his burial, but Wilson turned from the place with the muscles of his throat working with impotent emotion, and a grim look about his mouth that lifted his lips like those of a snarling beast. “Carrion! Let it lie,” he said, with so dark a face that the men followed him silently, saying nothing more, and the two were left lying upon the ground which had drunk with impartial thirst the current that oozed from their jagged wounds. The suspicions of primitive men are of a primitive nature. Those three days in which nothing had been seen or heard of his wife or Forbes had been a long agony to Wilson. And now that the end had come it seemed to him that his basest suspicions were confirmed. To his restricted apprehension there was but one passion in the world that could have sent his wife to this stranger’s side, to guard and save him at her cost. So thinking, it seemed to him that swift justice had been done. And that he might not forget, nor let his fierce thoughts of her grow more tender, the next day when the train had gone eastward and he was left alone to his desolation he took his brush and laboriously wrote across the end of the high platform, in great letters for all men to see and wonder at, the phrase he thought her fitting epitaph: THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH. And there it still stands, remaining in its stupid, brutal accusation the sole monument on earth of a woman’s ended life. HARDESTY’S COWARDICE I