Determining upon action, his resolution rose dominant, his vision cleared. Once again he forced himself to look over the edge and see other things than she. He was a daring, skillful and experienced mountaineer; in a way mountaineering was his trade. He searched the side of the cañon to the right and the left with eager scrutiny and found no way within the compass of his vision to the depths below. He shut his eyes and concentrated his thoughts to remember what they had passed over that morning. There came to him the recollection of a place which as he had viewed it he had idly thought might afford a practicable descent to the river's rim. Forgetful of the patient animal beside him, he rose to his feet and with one last look at the poor object below started on his wild plunge down the trail over which some men might scarcely have crept on hands and knees. Sweat bedewed his forehead, his limbs trembled, his pulses throbbed, his heart beat almost to bursting. Remorse sharpened by love, passion quickened by despair, scourged him, desperate, on the way. And God protected him also, or he had fallen at every uncertain, hurried, headlong step. And as he ran, thoughts, reproaches, scourged him on. Why had he brought her, why had he allowed her to take that trail which but for him and for her had probably not been traversed by man or woman or beast, save the mountain sheep, the gray wolves, or the grizzly bear, for five hundred years. She had protested that she was as good a mountaineer as he--and it was true--and she had insisted on accompanying him; he recollected that there had been a sort of terror in her urgency,--he must take her, he must not leave her alone, she had pleaded; he had objected, but he had yielded, the joy of her companionship had meant so much to him in his lonely journeying, and now--he accused himself bitterly as he surged onward. After a time the man forced himself to observe the road, he discovered that in an incredibly short period, perhaps an hour, he had traversed what it had taken them four times as long to pass over that very day. He must be near his goal. Ah, there it was at last, and in all the turmoil and torture of his brain he found room for a throb of satisfaction when he came upon the broken declivity. Yes, it did afford a practicable descent; some landslide centuries back had made there a sort of rude, rough, broken, megalithic stairway in the wall of the cañon. The man threw himself upon it and with bleeding hands, bruised limbs and torn clothing descended to the level of the river. Two atoms to the eye of the Divine, in that vast rift in the gigantic mountains. One unconscious, motionless, save for faint gasping breaths; the other toiling blindly along the river bank, fortunately here affording practicable going, to the foot of the great butte upon whose huge shoulder the other lay. The living and the dead in the waste and the wilderness of the everlasting hills.