"Certainly not. But if the others turn back, I may need it. Stay right here with the horses. He will lose the trail in a minute now. When he reaches the rock I'll go down and keep him from getting off his horse--he won't fight from the saddle." But with an instinct better than knowledge, Sassoon, like a wolf scenting danger, stopped again. He scanned the broken and forbidding hump in front, now less than a quarter of a mile from him, questioningly. His eyes seemed to rove inquisitively over the lava pile as if asking why a Morgan Gap pony had visited it. In another moment he wheeled his horse and spurred rapidly after his companions. The two drew a deep breath. De Spain laughed: "What we don't know, never hurts us." He drew Nan to him. Holding the rifle muzzle at arm's length as the butt rested on the ground, she looked up from the shoulder to which she was drawn: "What should you have done if he had come?" "Taken you to the Gap and then taken him to Sleepy Cat, where he belongs." "But, Henry, suppose----" "There wouldn't have been any 'suppose.'" "Suppose the others had come." "With one rifle, here, a man could stand off a regiment. Nan, do you know, you fit into my arm as if you were made for it?" His courage was contagious. When he had tired her with fresh importunities he unpinned her felt hat and held it out of reach while he kissed and toyed with and disarranged her hair. In revenge, she snatched from his pocket his little black memorandum-book and some letters and read, or pretended to read them, and seizing her opportunity she broke from him and ran with the utmost fleetness up into the rocks. In two minutes they had forgotten the episode almost as completely as if it never had been. But when they left for home, they agreed they would not meet there again. They knew that Sassoon, like a jackal, would surely come back, and more than once, until he found out just what that trail or any subsequent trail leading into the beds meant. The lovers laughed the jackal's spying to scorn and rode away, bantering, racing, and chasing each other in the saddle, as solely concerned in their happiness as if there were nothing else of moment in the whole wide world. CHAPTER XX FACING THE MUSIC They had not underestimated the danger from Sassoon's suspicious malevolence. He returned next morning to read what further he could among the rocks. It was little, but it spelled a meeting of two people--Nan and another--and he was stimulated to keep his eyes and ears open for further discoveries. Moreover, continuing ease in seeing each other, undetected by hostile eyes, gradually rendered the lovers less cautious in their arrangements. The one thing that possessed their energies was to be together.