With no uncertain hand she jerked the blade from the profound pages, leapt to her feet, snatched a stub of pencil from a broken mug on a shelf, tore a fly-leaf from the precious Book, and, bending in the light, wrote something on it. She folded the bit of paper, thrust the knife point through it and, turning swiftly, flung them viciously through the window where the thin curtain had been parted. She stood so, facing the window defiantly, scorning to blow out the light. Then she dropped her eyes to the desecrated Word and they were flaming—and this is what she had written on the fly-leaf: “The Lord is the strength of my life—of whom shall I be afraid? Though a host shall encamp against me, my heart shall not fear.” Very deliberately she closed the door and window, turned locks on both, picked up her lamp and Bible and went into her own room beyond. Serene in the abiding faith of those divine words she soon forgot the world and all it held of work and care, of veiled threat and menace. At daybreak she opened the window and scanned the ground outside. There was no thin-bladed knife in sight, no folded bit of paper with its holy defiance. The whole thing might have been a dream. CHAPTER III THE IRON HAND OF SKY LINE Kate Cathrew—Cattle Kate Cathrew—lived like an eagle, on the crest of the world looking down. She looked down along the steep slopes of Mystery Ridge, dark with the everlasting green of conifers, speckled with the lighter green of glade and brush patch, the weathered red of outcropping stone—far down to the silver thread of Nameless River flowing between its grass-clad banks, the fair spread of the valley with its priceless feeding land. The buildings of Sky Line Ranch lay nestled at the foot of Rainbow Cliff, compact, solid, like a fortress, reached only by cattle trails, for there was no wagon road. There could have been none on these forbidding steeps. The buildings themselves were built of logs, but all that was within them had come into the lonesome country on pack-mules, even to the big steel range in the kitchen. The house itself was an amazing place, packed with all necessities, beautiful with luxuries, its contents worth a fortune. It had many rooms and a broad veranda circled it. Pine trees stood in ranks about it, and out of the sheer face of Rainbow Cliff at the back a six-inch stream of crystal water shot forth in a graceful arc from the height of a man’s shoulder, to fall into a natural basin in the solid rock by its own ceaseless action. And stretching out like widespread wings on either side this majestic cliff ran crowning the ridge for seven miles, a splendid escarpment, straight up-and-down, averaging two hundred feet from its base in the slanting earth to the sharp line of its rimrock.