Rainbow Cliff, grim guardian of the Upper Country and the Deep Heart hills themselves, supposed to be impassable in all its length, dark in the early day but gleaming afar with all the colors of the spectrum when the sun dropped over toward the west at noon. It was this gorgeous radiance, caused by the many shades of the weathered stone, which had given the battlement its name. No man was ever known to have scaled the cliff—save and except John Allison, found dead at its foot two years back—for the giant spine was alike on both sides. Men from the Upper Country had penetrated the Deep Hearts to its northern base, but there they had stopped, to circle its distant ends, void of the secrets they had hoped to wrest from it. And Kate Cathrew lived under it, a strange, half-sybaritic woman, running her cattle on the slopes of Mystery, riding after them like any man, standing in at round-up, branding, beef-gathering, her keen eyes missing nothing, her methods high-handed. Her riders obeyed her lightest word, though they were mostly of a type that few men would care to handle, hard-featured, close-lipped, sharp-eyed, hard riders and hard drinkers, as all the world of the Deep Hearts knew. Once in a blue moon they went to Bement, the town that lay three days’ ride to the north beyond the hills, and what they did there was merely hinted at. They drank and played and took possession of its four saloons, and when they finally reared out of it to go back to their loneliness and work, the town came out of its temporary retirement, breathing again. Yet Kate Cathrew handled these men and got good work out of them, and she belonged to none of them. Not but what there were hot hearts in the outfit and hands that itched for her, lips that wet themselves hungrily when she passed close in her supreme indifference. But Rio Charley carried a bullet-scar in his right shoulder, and Big Basford walked with a slight limp—yet they both stayed with her. “Sort of secret-society stuff,” said Price Selwood once, “Kate is the Grand Vizier.” There was no other white woman at Sky Line. She would have none. Minnie Pine, a stalwart young Pomo half-breed, and old Josefa, brown as parchment and non-committal, carried on the housework under her supervision, and no one else was needed. At noon of the day after Kate’s visit to the store at Cordova, she sat in the big living-room at Sky Line looking over accounts. An observer having seen her on the previous occasion, would hardly have recognized her now. Gone were the broad hat, the pearl-buttoned shirt, the fringed riding skirt and the boots.