Two bullets, close together, snarled past him, one above, the other just ahead, perhaps in a line behind his horse's ears. He hoped wildly that they were directing all their fire at him, that he was drawing it from the girl above but even as this hope mounted the skies coruscated again and he saw that the pinto was stopped, saw that Jane was slipping to the narrow trail, her body wedged between the cliff and the body of the horse. For an interminable time blackness seemed to hold. The big brown, whose breath was now laboring with exhaustion as well as with excitement, gasped scarcely a dozen breaths before the greeny light came again but to his rider it was an aeon of time. Tom Beck passed through the veriest depths of torment in that interval and unconsciously he shouted into the night incoherent cries of suffering. He had been too late! He had sent her to physical suffering, to her death, perhaps, and before he could make her understand that he blamed himself as only a just man who has been unjust can crush himself with execration! But light came and he saw her, still alive, still safe! The pinto was down, hind feet over the trail. Wounded, he had tried to turn back, tail to the abyss as a mountain bred animal will turn. He had moved on unsteady limbs, his hind feet slipped over the edge and moaning, head back, eyes bulging, he clawed with his fore hoofs to stay his fall. Clinging to the reins, calling aloud her encouragement, the girl helped with voice and limbs. For an interval she balanced the pull of the animal's own weight.... And when Tom Beck could see again she was alone on the trail, one arm raised to her face as she cringed from the bullets that spattered all about! He cursed his horse, lashing furiously, spurring in the shoulders without mercy. He came up to her and she faced him, lips tight and in the dance of cloud fire he saw her eyes wide, nostrils distended. "Get up here!" he muttered and lifted her to his saddle horn, winding his arms about her, bowing his head and shoulders over hers to take the missiles in his own body first. She clutched him frantically, her warm arms around his neck, her trembling limbs across his thigh with his hand hooked beneath the knees, her soft breast cleaving to his and, slipping through his opened shirt the little gold locket that was at her throat pressed against his heart.... It was cold from the night and he felt it send a tingle through his body. Even then he wondered, with the strange sharpness which stressed thought will give to irrelevant matters, what it contained! "Tom! It's good to have you!" Good to have him! With death singing all about her it was good to have him; it was her first thought! "It would be good to die for you!" he said. "No, no!"--sharply. "Not that, Tom! Live for me ... live for me!"