He found more of them, made that morning. And, keen now as never before on her trail, he set out to find her. The tracks led up the canyon. Tappan came out into a little grassy clearing, and there stood Jenet, as he had seen her thousands of times. She had both long ears up high. She seemed to stare out of that meek, gray face. And then one of the long ears flopped over and drooped. Such perhaps was the expression of her recognition. Tappan strode up to her. “Jenet--old girl--you hung round camp--waitin’ for me, didn’t you?” he said, huskily, and his big hands fondled her long ears. Yes, she had waited. She, too, had grown old. She was gray. The winter of that year had been hard. What had she lived on when the snow lay so deep? There were lion scratches on her back, and scars on her legs. She had fought for her life. “Jenet, a man can never always tell about a burro,” said Tappan. “I trained you to hang round camp an’ wait till I came back.... ‘Tappan’s burro,’ the desert rats used to say! An’ they’d laugh when I bragged how you’d stick to me where most men would quit. But brag as I did, I never knew you, Jenet. An’ I left you--an’ forgot. Jenet, it takes a human bein’--a man--a woman--to be faithless. An’ it takes a dog or a horse or a burro to be great.... Beasts? I wonder now.... Well, old pard, we’re goin’ down the trail together, an’ from this day on Tappan begins to pay his debt.” III Tappan never again had the old _wanderlust_ for the stark and naked desert. Something had transformed him. The green and fragrant forests, and brown-aisled, pine-matted woodlands, the craggy promontories and the great colored canyons, the cold granite water springs of the Tonto seemed vastly preferable to the heat and dust and glare and the emptiness of the waste lands. But there was more. The ghost of his strange and only love kept pace with his wandering steps, a spirit that hovered with him as his shadow. Madge Beam, whatever she had been, had showed to him the power of love to refine and ennoble. Somehow he felt closer to her here in the cliff country where his passion had been born. Somehow she seemed nearer to him here than in all those places he had tracked her. So from a prospector searching for gold Tappan became a hunter, seeking only the means to keep soul and body together. And all he cared for was his faithful burro Jenet, and the loneliness and silence of the forest land. He was to learn that the Tonto was a hard country in many ways, and bitterly so in winter. Down in the brakes of the basin it was mild in winter, the snow did not lie long, and ice seldom formed. But up on the Rim, where Tappan always lingered as long as possible, the storm king of the north held full sway. Fifteen feet of snow and zero weather were the rule in dead of winter. An old native once warned Tappan: “See hyar, friend, I reckon you’d better not get caught up in the Rim Rock country in one of our big storms. Fer if you do you’ll never get out.”