He did so, still grumbling. "And you skip back, if you're going back. You're cold as ice. So long, weathervane! And come over when you feel like it." "I'll be warm, dear--and good-by." She watched him down the slope and across the meadow until he vanished into the black of the forest wall. Then she rode on to the camp. Without dismounting she took from the end of a broken branch a revolver in its holster that she had hung there earlier in the day. She made sure again that it was loaded and buckled the holster about her waist. Turning from the ranch trail, then, she found another that led off to the north and away from the Pagosa road--off into a wooded wilderness of hills where she would be safe from discovery. She halted again on the first ridge above the camp, sitting motionless in the shadow, her eyes on the little moon-flooded opening across the lake where the cabin trail came down to the shore. That was a walk for lovers, but they could not walk there now. After a little time she whirled Cooney about in a sudden gust of fierceness and sent him along the winding ridge, keeping close within the shadow. When the trail fell away into the first of the unknown valleys she breathed a sigh of relief and release. Her burden was falling from her. She could not again be cheated back from her refuge. She began to rejoice in the wide, wild sweetness of the night, its piny fragrance, the soft-footed scurryings of its lesser people, the gloom of its sharply defined shadows, and the silvering haze that enveloped the peaks. She came on a deer feeding in the open, and was delighted when it did not run. It only lifted its head to look at her. She began to rejoice, also, in the cleverness of her plan. As well as she might she had preserved the decencies. A week might ensue before they missed her. Cooney, stripped of his trappings, would appear at the lake cabin, to be laughed at and chided for his desertion of the Bar-B ranch, a week before she was missed; and then she would never be found. There was, indeed, small chance of their having the pain of that. She would keep to the trail as long as the night hid her; then a climb up some unpathed slope, over rocks that would show no trace of her passage; then a tangled thicket, remote, secret, improbable--and the tale of a lost woman, a woman who wandered confusingly far on a night of tempting splendor. She thought of Virginia's pain with a feeble pity. It seemed as if humanity was dead in her. The narrow trail wound beckoningly before her, the land stretched off to peaks of silver or barren gray slopes or shadowed promontories, glooming above ravines where little rivers turned restlessly in their beds; and over all hung the mystic shimmer of moon rays, softening all angles and picking the fronds of trees with dancing lights as she passed.