dad out of his hole."

The girl's eyes dilated.

"Don't--don't tell Dad!" she gasped. "It's not the money I want. You
don't sabe. Promise you won't say a word to Dad about the money--or the
mine?"

"Why, if you do not wish me----"

"Not a word--not the barest hint! Promise!"

"Very well. Only----"

"You'll learn all too soon!" she murmured, and she started quickly up
the last ascent.

When they rounded the brink, twelve hundred feet above the canon bed,
the girl did not linger to talk. She dropped the pony's reins and
started off at a jog across the hot, level, cedar-dotted top of the
mesa.

Lennon galloped ahead of her, tied the pony, and ran on afoot. Carmena
copied the maneuver. In this manner, taking turn about, they covered the
ground almost as fast as if both had been mounted. As each drank from
the canteen at every stop and Carmena twice wet the nostrils of the
pony, none was yet exhausted when, at the end of five or six miles, the
girl headed down into a quickly narrowing valley.

The funnel-shaped trough pinched to a steep chute between precipices
that leaned closer together overhead the deeper the fugitives descended.
The bed of the narrow mountain crack became even more steep. In places
the pony had to jump like a goat down five and six-foot ledges. Time and
again he slid on his haunches. At the worst place of all the beast was
saved from certain destruction only by snubbing his horsehair picket
rope around a corner of rock and so easing his descent to better
footing.

But, as Carmena remarked, the steeper the grade the sooner it was ended.
They came down into the bottom of the lower canon, bruised and exhausted
but with no bones broken.

"Almost there," panted Carmena, and she reeled ahead along the
boulder-strewn bed of the chasm.

At the second turn the cliff ended in a vertical slit-glare of sunlight.
The pony whinnied. Carmena led the way out into an oval cliff-walled
valley, two or three miles long and half as broad.

First to strike Lennon's desert-starved eyes was the vivid grateful
verdure of irrigated cornfields. Beyond, in browning hay meadows, grazed
a herd of cattle and twenty or thirty head of horses. Three quarters of
a mile to the left, in a cavity forty feet up the rock wall and well
under an overhang of the towering precipices, nestled a group of stone
ruins.

Lennon pointed toward the ancient buildings.

"Cliff dwellings, I take it."

"Yes--I told Elsie to be ready wi