ever git on their trail. I used to chase
Apaches with yore paw, boy!"

It was Bill Johnson's turn to talk that evening and like most
solitaries who have not "gone into the silence," he availed himself of
a listener with enthusiasm.

Stories of lion hunts and "b'ar fights" fell as trippingly from his
lips as the words of a professional monologist, and when he had
finished his account of the exploits of Captain Samuel Barrows Hardy,
even the envious Lightfoot regarded Rufus with a new respect, for
there is no higher honor in Arizona than to be the son of an Indian
fighter. And when the last man had crawled wearily into his blankets
the old hermit still sat by the dying fire poking the charred ends
into the flames and holding forth to the young superintendent upon the
courage of his sire.

Hardly had the son of his father crept under the edge of Creede's
blankets and dropped to sleep before that huge mountain of energy rose
up and gave the long yell. The morning was at its blackest, that murky
four A. M. darkness which precedes the first glimmer of light; but
the day's work had to be done. The shivering horse-wrangler stamped on
his boots and struck out down the canyon after the _remuda_, two or
three cooks got busy about the fire which roared higher and higher as
they piled on the ironwood to make coals, and before the sun had more
than mounted the southern shoulder of the Four Peaks the long line of
horsemen was well on the trail to Hell's Hip Pocket.

The frontier imagination had in no wise overleaped itself in naming
this abyss. Even the tribute which Facilis Descensus Vergil paid to
the local Roman hell could hardly be said of the Pocket--it is not
even easy to get into it. From the top of the divide it looks like a
valley submerged in a smoky haze through which the peaks and pinnacles
of the lower parks rise up like cathedral spires, pointing solemnly to
heaven. As the trail descends through washed-out gulches and
"stone-patches," now skating along the backbone of a ridge and now
dropping as abruptly into some hollow waterway, the cliffs and
pinnacles begin to loom up against the sky; then they seem to close in
and block the way, and just as the canyon boxes in to nothing the trail
slips into a gash in the face of the cliff where the soft sandstone
has crumbled away between two harder strata, and climbs precariously
along through the sombre gloom of the gorge to the bright light of the
fair valley beyond.

It