With the words, he put the pistol to the head of the trembling horse and fired. It was but a small pellet of lead, but it went true, and the horse fell. He stepped up to its body and sent the second shot at the leading steer. He glanced at the sky an instant, then at Sibyl fleeing away along the cañon wall in the direction of the distant ranch buildings. The strange light deepened in his eyes. “I have saved her,” he whispered; “and even God can die, when the reason is great enough!” Sibyl did not hear those shots in the confusion that clamored behind her, and she had not courage to look back. Having lost her ribboned whip in the fall, she beat the horse with her gloved hand. A numbing pain gripped her heart and made her breathing quick and heavy. At times her sight blurred, and then fear smote hardest, for she felt that she was falling. Yet she rode on, reeling in the deep saddle, and when faint maintained her position by clinging to the saddle horn. At the door of the ranch house she fell forward on the neck of the horse and slipped in a limp heap to the ground; but she was up again, with hand pressed to her heart, when Pearl Harkness dashed out to assist her. Behind Pearl came Lucy Davison and Mary Jasper. They had heard the thundering of hoofs, and but a minute before had seen Sibyl ride into view at that mad pace from behind the screening stables. She had outridden the stampeded cattle. The curving cañon wall had turned them at last, and they were beginning to mill. There was blood on Sibyl’s lips and a look of death in her ghastly face; yet she smiled, and tried to stand more erect, when she saw Mary. “Help me into the house, please,” she whispered faintly; “I—I’m afraid I’m hurt.” Supported by Pearl on one side and by Lucy and Mary on the other, Sibyl entered the house. Inside the doorway she reeled and put her hand to her eyes. She stiffened with a shudder, as she recovered. “I must lie down!” she gasped; but when she took another step the blindness and faintness returned, and she fell, in spite of the supporting arms. Pearl’s cry of alarm and consternation reached the room where Philip Davison lay. It was a lower room and furthest removed from the mesa, but he had heard the rumble of the stampede. The sound of excited voices, Sibyl’s heavy fall, and that outcry from Pearl Harkness, called back the wasted strength to his weakened body. He appeared in the connecting doorway, half dressed, and with a blanket drawn round his shrunken shoulders. He looked a spectre and not a man; his bearded cheeks were hollowed, his straight nose appeared to crook over the sunken mouth like the beak of a bird, and his blue eyes, gleaming from cavernous sockets, stared with unnatural brightness. Seeing Sibyl on the floor with the frightened women about her, he came forward and offered to help. Nothing could have astounded them more than this, for they thought he had not strength to walk.