It happened in the twinkling of an eye. The man in the sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate, shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. Wayland had caught her under shelter of the rock wall. The old man hurtled to the heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles. A splintering crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet; and the thing was over quick as it had come. The funnelling whirl of clouds eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled from below. The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan. She sprang from shelter and looked over the edge. Jumbled at the foot of the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing mass, a weltering maimed horror. On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the mass by the double turn of his falling horse. For a moment none of the three uttered a word. She was trembling so that she could not speak. There were tears in the old man's eyes. To Wayland's face had come a look. It was like the blue flash of a pistol shot. The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire. He moistened his lips. "May Hell be both deep and hot!" he said. It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices innocence on the altar of guilt. While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor slackened pace. While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored; and Who or What tallied? The men round the fire the night before in the cow-camp, the men of "the bunco game" had stacked cards and played trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter's orders about the boy. The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after a code not honored by the law of nations.