There was no stoic Sioux in Judith now. The girl that breasted the crests of the foot-hills shrank in terror from the loneliness and the suggestion of foes lurking in ambush. The sun dropped behind the mountain, leaving a blood-red pool in his wake, like fugitive Cain. Already night was sweeping over the earth from mountain shadows that flowed imperceptibly together like blackened pools. To the girl following the trail the silence was more dreadful than a chorus of threatening voices. She listened till the stillness beat at her ears like the stamping of ten thousand hoofs, then pulled up her horse, and the desert was as still as the chamber of death. “Ah, Dolly, my dear, a house is the place for women folk when the night comes—a house, the fire burning clear, the kettle singing, and—” Dolly whinnied an affirmative without waiting for the picture to be completed. The wilderness was being gradually swallowed by the shadows, as deliberately as a snake swallows its victim. They were nearing the mountains. The hot blasts of air from the desert blew more and more intermittently. The breeze swept keen from the hills, towering higher and higher, and Judith breathed deep of the piny fragrance and felt the tension of things loosen a little. Whitening cattle bones gleamed from the darkness, tragic reminders of hard winters and scant pasturage, and Judith, with the Indian superstition that was in the marrow of her bones, read ghostly warnings in the empty eye-sockets of the grinning skulls that stared up at her. She dared not think of the dangers that the looming darkness might conceal, or of what she might find at her journey’s end, or—“Whoa, Dolly! softly, girl. Is it my foolish, white-blood nerves, or is some one following?”