she noticed that the cynical smile
was gone from the clean-cut profile. For miles he did not speak.
Antelope Butte was near, now.

"I am thirsty," she said. A gauntleted hand fumbled for a moment with
the slicker behind the cantle, and extended a flask.

"It's water. I figured someone would get thirsty."

The girl drank from the flask and returned it: "If there are posses out
won't they watch the water-holes? You said there are only a few in the
bad lands."

"Yes, they'll watch the water-holes. That's why we're goin' to camp on
Antelope Butte--right up on top of it."

"But, how will we get water?"

"It's there."

"Have you been up there?" The girl glanced upward. They were already
ascending the first slope, and the huge mass of the detached mountain
towered above them in a series of unscaleable precipices.

"No. But the water's there. The top of the Butte hollows out like a
saucer, an' in the bowl there's a little sunk spring. No one much ever
goes up there. There's a little scragglin' timber, an' the trail--it's
an old game trail--is hard to find if you don't know where to look for
it. A horse-thief told me about it."

"A horse-thief! Surely, you are not risking all our lives on the word
of a horse-thief!"

"Yes. He was a pretty good fellow. They killed him, afterwards, over
near the Mission. He was runnin' off a bunch of Flourey horses."

"But a man who would steal would lie!"

"He didn't lie to me. He judged I done him a good turn once. Over on
the Marias, it was--an' he said: 'If you're ever on the run, hit for
Antelope Butte.' Then he told me about the trail, an' the spring that
you've got to dig for among the rocks. He's got a grub _cache_ there,
too. He won't be needin' it, now." The cowboy glanced toward the
west. "The moon ought to just about hold 'til we get to the top. He
said you could ride all the way up." Without an instant's hesitation
he headed his horse for a huge mass of rock fragments that lay at the
base of an almost perpendicular wall. The others followed in single
file. Bat bringing up the rear driving the pack-horse before him.
Alice kept her horse close behind the Texan's which wormed and twisted
in and out among the rock fragments that skirted the wall. For a
quarter of a mile they proceeded with scarcely a perceptible rise and
then the cowboy turned his horse into a deep fissure that slanted
upward at a most precarious angle seemingly straight into th