An owl boomed from a dead pine, and a little off the trail she heard the scream of a cougar, like the scream of a woman in some strange terror. But all sounds were indifferently alike to her, the shrilling of the beast, the sibilance of running water, the bellow of the owl, the whistle of a deer, or the throaty mutterings of an awakened bird. She heard them as receding echoes of a life already remote. She kept Cooney moving as rapidly as the trail permitted, checking his little snatches at the wayside herbage. He could fast with her for one night, she told him. To-morrow he could feast his way home harassed by no rider. He stopped at times to test some doubtful bit of trail with a cautious forefoot; or slowed to feel a sure way down a gullyside of loose stones; or lingered knee deep in a melody of swift water, to drink, with swelling sides. She was glad to have this last night with the little horse that had been Ewing's. Ewing--only not to think of him--for one cannot ride with the heart all bled away. The light faded from the lower ways after a while. The moon had completed its short arc and fell below the mountain ahead of her; defining sharp little notches in its rim. The hills seemed to steal upon her in the darkness then, huddling close about her, muffling her with their black plumage. But she was glad of this--surmounting the mere physical oppression of it--for she felt that it doubled the secrecy of her going; and Cooney's eyes, with his skilled feet, sufficed for the trail. At times she shrank as under the touch of a palpable hand reached out to her from the darkness, a thing that frantically protested, pleaded, expostulated--but she knew it for the hand of mere brute life, a cowardly, blind, soulless thing, that would subvert all fitness. She shook it off, knowing herself its superior by right of mind, with power to inflict justice upon it. And _he_ was dead, he, the young and strong--alas, poor slayer, poor slain! How her heart bled away. To expiate---- She clung to that: it was an obligation that lay on her, a secret obligation, but the more imperative for that. She could not hold a forfeited life. She must redeem herself. The hardest thing was demanded of her. And then, one could not go on with this bleeding heart.