. He must be one of those cherubim who on God's bidding speed; he
could not serve with those who only stand and wait. His hot soul grew
parched and faint with longing, and all the instincts of his battling
blood began to war among themselves. At length one night there was
hammering and clinking at the red field-fires, and by daybreak they were
off for a mad gallop over plain and mountain, down river-banks and
across deserts into New Mexico.

Fording the shallow Arkansas, trailing their way through prairie and
timber,--reaching and skirting the scorching stretch,--riding all day,
consumed with thirst, from green-mantling pool to pool, till the last
lay sixty miles behind them, and men and horses made desperately for the
stream, dashing in together to drink their fill, when they found it
again foaming down the centre of its vast level plain, that receded
twenty miles on either side without shrub or hillock,--finally their
path wound in among the hills, and a day dawned that Ray will never
forget.

The stars were large and solemn, hovering golden out of the high, dark
heaven, as the troop defiled into the _canon_; they glinted with a
steely lustre through the roof of fallen trees that arched the gorge
from side to side, then a wind of morning blew and they grew pallid and
wan in a shining haze, and, towering far up above them, vaguely terrific
in shadow, the horsemen saw the heights they were to climb all grayly
washed in the night-dew. So they swept up the mountain-side in their gay
and breezy career, on from ascent to ascent, from abutment to abutment,
crossing shrunken torrents, winding along sheer precipices, up into the
milky clouds of heaven itself, till the rosy flare of dawn bathed all
the air about them. There they halted, while, struggling after them, the
first triumphant beam struck the bosses of their harness to glittering
jewel-points, and, breaking through layer on layer of curdling vapor at
their feet, suffused it to a wondrous fleece, where carnation and violet
and the fire that lurks in the opal, wreathing with gorgeous involution,
seethed together, until, at last, the whole resplendent mist wound
itself away in silver threads on the spindles of the wind. Then boot in
the stirrup again, onward, over the mountain's ridge, desolate rook
defying the sun, downward, plunging through hanging forests, clearing
the chasm, bridging ravines, and still at noon the eagles, circling and
screaming above them, shook ove