"Th' Canon Country!" she said softly, "I always knew it would be like this--too great to tell about! I knew it would hold somethin' for me--always knew it--either life an' its best--or death." There was a simple grandeur about the earnest words, and Billy, his face grey in the steely light, felt the heart in his breast thrill with their portent. No matter what the Canons held for her--either that glorious fulfillment of life, or the simple austerity of death--he would have a part in it, would have served her to the last, true to the love he bore her, true to himself. And nothing--nothing under God's heaven, save death itself--could ever wipe out the memory of that kiss, given from the depths of her loving heart, the sign-manuel of her undying affection and friendship, the one and only touch of her inviolate red lips that he had ever known the Mistress of Last's to give to any man, save Jim Last himself. He wiped a hand across his forehead, damp with more than the night cold, and dismounted. "We'll leave th' horses here," he said. "I've an extra rope to string across an' make a small corral." He did not add that he would fasten this slim barrier lightly, so that a horse that really wanted to break out--in the frantic madness of thirst, say,--might do so. Then he set about his task--but Tharon stood with strained eyes looking up--and up--and ever up to the dimly appearing, looming spine of False Ridge. Over there, she knew in her heart, lay the hidden Cup o' God, with its secret, the secret that meant all the world to her. CHAPTER X THE UNTRUE FIRING PIN Tharon turned back and looked long at El Rey. She wondered if she would ever see the great silver-blue stallion again, ever feel the wind singing by her cheeks, ever hear the thunder of his running on the hollow ranges. She saw the stain of Jim Last's blood on the big studded saddle and a pain like death stabbed her. "I'll get him," she had promised on that tragic day, "so help me God!" and had made the sign of the Cross. What did she now? Cast away all certainty of that fulfilment because a man--a man almost a stranger--lay somewhere in the Canon Country, crawled somewhere along False Ridge, perhaps, wounded and sick with fever. "Oh, hurry!" she whispered as Billy made secure his last light knot in the rope gateway across the cut and came to join her. She scrambled up the bench in the canyon floor, gained her feet and went forward at a rush. "Steady, Tharon," warned the rider, "you ain't used to climbin'. Save your wind." It was true advice. Long before the sun was high overhead and day was broad in the painted cracks she had begun to heed it. As she swung up the ever lifting floors, threaded this way and that between the thin intercepting walls that towered hundreds of feet straight up, she cast her wide eyes up in wonder. Always she had watched the Canon Country from her western door, always it had held her with a binding lure.