lt it was not fair, but on the
trail the foreman is an autocrat. From the other riders they borrowed a
few dollars and gave in exchange orders on their pay checks.

Within an hour they were on the road. Fresh horses had been roped from
the remuda and were carrying them at an even Spanish jog-trot through the
night. The stars came out, clear and steady above a ghostly world at
sleep. The desert was a place of mystery, of vast space peopled by
strange and misty shapes.

The plain stretched vaguely before them. Far away was the thin outline of
the range which enclosed the valley. The riders held their course by
means of that trained sixth sense of direction their occupation had
developed.

They spoke little. Once a coyote howled dismally from the edge of the
mesa. For the most part there was no sound except the chuffing of the
horses' movements and the occasional ring of a hoof on the baked ground.

The gray dawn, sifting into the sky, found them still traveling. The
mountains came closer, grew more definite. The desert flamed again, dry,
lifeless, torrid beneath a sky of turquoise. Dust eddies whirled in
inverted cones, wind devils playing in spirals across the sand.
Tablelands, mesas, wide plains, desolate lava stretches. Each in turn was
traversed by these lean, grim, bronzed riders.

They reached the foothills and left behind the desert shimmering in the
dancing heat. In a deep gorge, where the hill creases gave them shade,
the punchers threw off the trail, unsaddled, hobbled their horses, and
stole a few hours' sleep.

In the late afternoon they rode back to the trail through a draw, the
ponies wading fetlock deep in yellow, red, blue, and purple flowers. The
mountains across the valley looked in the dry heat as though made of
_papier-mache_. Closer at hand the undulations of sand hills stretched
toward the pass for which they were making.

A mule deer started out of a dry wash and fled into the sunset light. The
long, stratified faces of rock escarpments caught the glow of the sliding
sun and became battlemented towers of ancient story.

The riders climbed steadily now, no longer engulfed in the ground swell
of land waves. They breathed an air like wine, strong, pure, bracing.
Presently their way led them into a hill pocket, which ran into a gorge
of pinons stretching toward Gunsight Pass.

The stars were out again when they looked down from the other side of the
pass upon the lights of Malapi.

CHA