Sibyl had buttoned her glove, and she now took the rein herself and settled firmly in the saddle. “Do you think there is danger? How horrid to have a thing like this happen and spoil our ride!” To her unpracticed eyes the appearance of the moiling herd was not as threatening as at first. The cattle in front were pushing into those behind and staying their forward progress. Farther back, where the stampede madness was doing its deadliest work, she could not see, for the cattle there were hidden by the dust cloud. “We must get out of this,” said Clayton, in a nervous voice, as he set his horse in motion. “Unless we ride fast they may cut us off at the lower end of the cañon.” The forward line of moving cattle was hurled on again, as the receding wave is caught by the one behind it and flung against the shore. The thunder of pounding hoofs rose like the lashing of surf on a rocky coast. Then that long line, flashing out of the dust, deepened backward beneath the lifting cloud until it resembled a stretch of tossing sea. The resemblance was more than fanciful. The irregular heaving motion of a choppy sea was there, the white glint of horns was as the shine of wave crests, the tumultuous roar rose and fell like the thunder of billows, and the dust cloud hovered like thick mist. Clayton and Sibyl were galloping at a swift pace. Terror clutched at her heart now and shone in her dark eyes. She heard the mad roar behind her, and dared not look back. Clayton looked back, and his face became set and white. “A little faster,” he begged, when he had thus glanced behind. He struck her horse with his hand to urge it on, while his heels flailed the sides of his own beast. Her ribboned whip lifted and fell, and she cried out to her horse in fear. The whole herd was in motion. It was crescent-shaped; widest in its center, like the horned moon; one end rested, or rather moved, on the cañon’s rim; the other, out on the flat mesa, was swinging in toward the cañon, farther down. It was this lower point of the crescented herd that Clayton feared most; the great moon-shaped mass was crumpling together, its ends were converging, and if that lower point reached the cañon before the riders could pass through the gap which now beckoned there, they would be caught in the loop of the crumpled crescent and crushed to death or hurled into the cañon. The only hope lay in passing through that opening while it still remained an opening. And toward that gap they were riding, with a portion of the herd thundering behind along the cañon wall. “We can make it,” Clayton cried hopefully; “we can make it!” And he urged the horses on. Though the words encouraged her, Sibyl could not fail to perceive the deadly peril of the closing gap toward which they were speeding. Fortunately the ground was level, broken only by grassy hillocks and bunches of sage. The few obstructing plum bushes that had survived the fire or had sprouted since that time had been passed already.