as a splendid beast, and its spotless hide of snowy white
glowed in the rays of the afternoon sun. With bit chains jingling, it
gracefully leaped a gully, landing with all the agility of a mountain
lion, in spite of its enormous size.

The rider, still whistling his Texas tune, swung in the
concha-decorated California stock saddle as if he were a part of his
horse. He was a lithe young figure, dressed in fringed buckskin,
touched here and there with the gay colors of the Southwest and of
Mexico.

Two six-guns, wooden-handled, were suspended from a cartridge belt of
carved leather, and hung low on each hip. His even teeth showed white
against the deep sunburn of his face.

"Reckon we-all bettah cut south, Blizzahd," he murmured to his horse.
"We haven't got any business on the Llano."

He spoke in the soft accents of the old South, and yet his speech was
colored with just a trace of Spanish--a musical drawl seldom heard far
from that portion of Texas bordering the Rio Bravo del Norte.

Wheeling his mount, he searched the landscape with his keen blue eyes.
Behind him was broken country; ahead of him was the terrible land that
men have called the Llano Estacado. The land rose to it in a long
series of steppes with sharp ridges.

Queerly shaped and oddly colored buttes ascended toward it in a
puzzling tangle. Dim in the distance was the Llano itself--a mesa with
a floor as even as a table; a treeless plain without even a weed or
shrub for a landmark; a plateau of peril without end.

The rider was doing well to avoid the Llano Estacado. Outlaw Indian
bands roamed over its desolate expanse--the only human beings who could
live there. In the winter, snowstorms raced screaming across it, from
Texas to New Mexico, for half a thousand miles. It was a country of
extremes. In the summer it was a scorching griddle of heat dried out
by dry desert winds. Water was hard to find there, and food still
harder to obtain. And it was now late summer--the season of mocking
mirages and deadly sun.

The horseman was just about to turn his steed's head directly to the
southward when a sound came to his ears--a cry that made his eyes widen
with horror.

Few sounds are so thrillingly terrible as the dying scream of a mangled
horse, and yet this was far more awful. Only the throat of a human
being could emit that chilling cry. It rose in shrill crescendo, to
die away in a sobbing wail that lifted the hair on the listener's h