ntly in sweeping covers and
rode forward toward the water hole.

CHAPTER II

CONCERNING AN ARROW

The bleak foreground of gray soil, covered with drifts of alkali and
sand, was studded with clumps of mesquite and cacti and occasional tufts
of sun-burned grass, dusty and somber, while a few sagebrush blended their
leaves to the predominating color. Back of this was a near horizon to the
north and east, brought near by the skyline of a low, undulating range
of sand hills rising from the desert to meet a faded sky. The morning
glow brought this skyline into sharp definition as the dividing line
between the darkness of the plain in the shadow of the range and the fast
increasing morning light. To the south and west the plain blended into
the sky, and there was no horizon.

Two trails met and crossed near a sand-buffeted bowlder of lava stone,
which was huge, grotesque and forbidding in its bulky indistinctness.
The first of the trails ran north and south and was faint but plainly
discernible, being beaten a trifle below the level of the desert and
forming a depression which the winds alternately filled and emptied of
dust; and its arrow-like directness, swerving neither to the right nor
left, bespoke of the haste which urged the unfortunate traveler to
have done with it as speedily as possible, since there was nothing
alluring along its heat-cursed course to bid him tarry in his riding.
There was yet another reason for haste, for the water holes were over
fifty miles apart, and in that country water holes were more or less
uncertain and doubtful as to being free from mineral poisons. On the
occasions when the Apaches awoke to find that many of their young men
were missing, and a proved warrior or two, this trail become weighted
with possibilities, for this desert was the playground of war parties, an
unlimited ante-room for the preliminaries to predatory pilgrimages; and
the northern trail then partook of the nature of a huge wire over which
played an alternating current, the potentials of which were the ranges
at one end and the savagery and war spirit of the painted tribes at the
other: and the voltage was frequently deadly.

The other trail, crossing the first at right angles, led eastward to the
fertile valleys of the Canadian and the Cimarron; westward it spread out
like the sticks of a fan to anywhere and nowhere, gradually resolving
itself into the fainter and still more faint individual paths which
fed