lower end, it was your last chance to quit."

"Quite true. I've burnt my bridges. The question now is one of advance,
not retreat. What if there are Indian watchers on those ridges? Would it
not be best for me to hold their attention by going straight up the open
valley, while you take the horse around through the cedars?"

Carmena met his proposal with a chuckle that brought a flush into
Lennon's lean face. But her troubled eyes had cleared and there was a
note of relief underlying her mirth.

"What's the matter with you, too, keeping under cover?" she rallied.
"Besides, we don't go to the head of the valley. We slant up to the left
through that notch in the ridge."

This banter, coupled with the assurance that the girl knew exactly what
she was about, cooled Lennon's excitement. His high strung nerves
relaxed.

"No need to remind you I'm a tenderfoot," he jibed at himself. "Coming
up the canon I've been shooting Apaches at every bend."

The mirth left Carmena's face. Her lips straightened in hard lines and
her eyes flashed.

"It's no joke," she said. "I'm right glad you're steadying down. If we
meet that bunch of bronchos, there's just one thing to do--shoot first.
It'll be time enough to ask questions afterward. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly, Miss Farley. I have you to consider, and I presume no
peaceful Indians come into these bad lands."

"Pimas and Moquis cut their hair square across the forehead. If you see
any others, shoot--to kill!"

"I will," said Lennon, certain that he understood the cause of the
girl's almost fierce insistence. He knew that the treatment of captured
women by renegade Indians is a far worse fate than death.

Carmena took note of his set jaw, drew in a deep breath, and swung
around to angle up the slope at the side of the canon head. Half an hour
of winding advance through the midst of the scraggly low-growing trees
brought them to the notch in the rim-ridge. Below this break the mesa
side pitched steeply into a great basin that was blotched with white
alkali flats, wave-marked with sand dunes, and broken with jagged hills
and skeleton-like ridges.

The air was so dry and clear that even far out in the Basin, many miles
away, Lennon could distinguish patches of green. Nearer at hand appeared
blurs of a grayish vegetation. But at his pleased exclamation Carmena
told him that he was looking at no oasis. What he saw was only the green
of mesquite and palo verde, the fluted columns o