It seemed hours she sat there staring into the little fire and listening for sounds from the dark. But the only sounds that came to her were the sounds of the feeding horses, and in utter weariness she lay back with her head upon a folded blanket, and slept. When the Texan swung onto his horse after having made the girl comfortable for her long vigil, a scant half-hour of moonlight was left to him. He gave the horse his head and the animal picked his way among the loose rocks and scrub timber that capped the ridge. When darkness overtook him he dismounted, unsaddled, and groped about for firewood. Despite its recent soaking the resinous bull pine flared up at the touch of a match, and with his back to a rock-wall, the cowboy sat and watched the little flames shoot upward. Once more he felt for his "makings" and with infinite pains dried out his papers and tobacco. "It's the chance I be'n aimin' to make for myself," he mused, as he drew the grey smoke of a cigarette deep into his lungs, "to get Bat an' the pilgrim away--an' I ride off and leave it." The cigarette was consumed and he rolled another. "Takin' a slant at himself from the inside, a man kind of gets a line on how damned ornery folks can get. Purdy got shot, an' everyone said he got just what was comin' to him---- Me, an' everyone else--an' he did. But when you get down to cases, he wasn't no hell of a lot worse'n me, at that. We was both after the same thing--only his work was coarser." For hours the man sat staring into his fire, the while he rolled and smoked many cigarettes. "Oh, hell!" he exclaimed, aloud. "I can't turn nester, an' even if I did, she couldn't live out in no mud-roof shack in the bottom of some coulee! Still, she---- There I go again, over the same old trail. This here little girl has sure gone to my head--like a couple of jolts of hundred-proof on an empty stummick. Anyhow, she's a damn sight safer'n ever she was before, an'--I'll bet the old man _would_ let me take that Eagle Creek ranch off his hands, an' stake me to a little bunch of stock besides, if I went at him right. If it wasn't for that damn pilgrim! Bat was right. He holds the edge on me--but he's a man." The cowboy glanced anxiously toward the east where the sky was beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn. He rose, trampled out his fire, and threw the saddle onto his horse. "I've got to find him," he muttered, "if Bat ain't found him already. I don't know much about this swimmin' business but if he could have got holt of a tree or somethin' he might have made her through." Now riding, now dismounting to lead his horse over some particularly rough outcropping of rocks, or through an almost impenetrable tangle of scrub, the man made his way over the divide and came down into the valley amid a shower of loose rock and gravel, at a point some distance below the lower end of the canyon.