A man came first, bent over that he might climb faster up the steep trail. He was leading a horse that was drenched from ear to ankle, lathered about neck and shoulder and flank, who breathed in short, low sobs, and stepped with the uneven awkwardness of utter fatigue. Benny stopped as he recognized Bayard and Abe and his right hand which had rested lightly on the gun butt at his hip dropped to his thigh. He stood still, waiting for them to come nearer, wondering anxiously what this might mean, for he knew that the owner of the sorrel stallion would never have ridden him to that condition without cause. Bayard looked up, saw the man waiting for him and halted between strides, the one foot far advanced before the other. His face was white and he stared hard at the miner, studying him closely, dreading to ask the question that was at his lips. But after that momentary pause he blurted out, "Is everything all right, Benny?" And Lynch, shaken by Bruce's appearance, the manner of his arrival, countered: "What's wrong? What is it?"--walking swiftly down the trail toward the newcomer. "Has anybody been here before me, to-day?" "Nobody, Bruce. What is it?"--anxiously, feeling somehow that they were both in danger. "Thank God for that!" Bayard muttered, some of the intensity going from him, and turned to loose the cinch. "We weren't too late, Abe, we weren't." He dragged the saddle from the stallion's dripping back, flung it on the rocks behind him, pulled off the bridle and with hands that were not steady, stroked the lathered withers as the horse stood with head hung and let the breath sob and wheeze down his long throat while his limbs trembled under his weight. "We've come from town in th' most awful ride a horse ever made on this valley, Benny. Look at him! I had to ask him, I had to ask him to do this, to run his heart out for me; I had to do it!" He stood looking at his horse and for the moment seemed to be wholly absorbed in contemplating the animal's condition; his voice had been uncertain as he pleaded the vague necessity for such a run. "What is it, Bruce? Why was you in such a hurry?" Lynch asked, taking the cowman gently by the arm, turning him so that they confronted one another, an uneasy connection forming in his mind between his friend's dramatic arrival and his own purpose at the mine. "Ned Lytton an' his wife are comin' here to-day, Benny,"--bluntly. "I had to get here before them to stop you ... doin' what you've come here an' waited to do." The other's hand dropped from Bruce's arm; in Benny's face the look of fear, of doubt, gave way to a return of the strained, tense expression with its dogged determination. That was it! The woman, identified as such through his glass, was Lytton's wife! He felt the nerves tightening at the back of his neck. "What do you mean by that ... to stop me?" he asked, spreading his feet, arms akimbo, a growing defiance about him.