"We'll say no more about it. I don't know where you're goin', but wherever it is, there I'm goin', too, an' on my way. You can tell me or not, just as you please, but let's go." For a long time Tharon Last sat in the starlight and watched the crests of the distant mountains fringed with the silver of the moon that was rising behind them, and her throat ached with tears. All these things that hurt her, these unknown, tangled things that she knew dimly meant Life, had come to her with the advent of Kenset in Lost Valley. She wished passionately for a fleeting moment that he had never come, that the old swinging, rushing life of the ranges had never known his holding influence. Then she felt again the hammering of his heart beneath her palms, and nothing mattered in all the world beside. It was a thing beyond her ken, something ordered by fate. She must go on, blindly as running waters, regardless of all that drowned. But she loosed her hand from Billy's, leaned to his shoulder, put her arm about his neck and drew his face to hers. Softly, tenderly, she kissed him upon the lips, and she did not know that that was the cruelest thing she had ever done in all her kindly life, did not see the deathly pallor that overspread his face. "I'm goin' to th' Canon Country, Billy," she said simply, "to find th' Cup o' God an' Kenset." Then she straightened in her saddle and gave El Rey the rein. * * * * * It was two of the clock by the starry heavens when these two riders entered the blind opening in the Rockface and disappeared. El Rey, the mighty, tossed his great head and whistled, stamped his hoofs in the dead sift of the silencing floor. He had never before lost sight of the sky, never felt other breath in his nostrils than the keen plain's wind. Now he shook himself and halted, went on again, and again halted, to be urged forward by Tharon's spurred heels in his flanks. Up through the eerie pass they went without speech, for each heart was filled to overflowing with thoughts and fears. To Billy there was something fateful, bodeful in the dead darkness, the stillness. It seemed to him as if he left forever behind him the open life of the ranges, the gay and careless days of riding after Tharon's cattle.