ll; which was water for their horses.

The boys were riding along in silence, sitting over to one side with a
foot dangling free of its stirrup; except Andy, who had hooked one
leg over the saddle-horn and was riding sidewise, smoking a meditative
cigarette and staring out between the ears of his horse. They were
tired; horses and men, they were tired to the middle of their bones.
But they went ahead without making any complaints whatever or rasping
oneanother's tempers with ill-chosen remarks; and for that Luck's eyes
brightened with appreciation.

Presently, when they had ridden at least a mile down the arroyo, a gray
hat-crown came bobbing into sight over a low tongue of rocky ground
that cut the channel almost in two. The horses threw up their heads and
perked cars forward inquiringly, and in a moment Happy Tack came into
view, his gloomy, sunburned face wearing a reluctant grin.

"Well, we got on the trail," he announced as soon as he was close
enough. "And we follered it to water. Applehead says fer you to come on
and make camp. Tracks are fresher around that' water-hole'n what they
have been, an' Applehead, he's all enthused. I betche we land them
fellers t'morrow."

Out of the arroyo in a place where the scant grassland lapped down over
the edge, Happy Jack led the way and the rest followed eagerly. Too
often had they made dry camp not to feel jubilant over the prospect even
of a brackish water-hole. Even the horses seemed to know and to step out
more briskly. Straight across the mesa with its deceptive lights that
concealed distance behind a glamor of intimate nearness, they rode into
the deepening dusk that had a glow all through it. After a while they
dipped into a grassy draw so shallow that they hardly realized the
descent until they dismounted at the bottom, where Applehead was already
starting a fire and the others were laying out their beds and doing the
hundred little things that make for comfort in camp.

A few bushes and a stunted tree or two marked the spring that seeped
down and fed a shallow water-hole where the horses drank thirstily.
Applehead grinned and pointed to the now familiar hoofprints which they
had followed so far.

"I calc'late Ramon done a heap uh millin' around back there in that
rocky arroyo," he observed, "'fore he struck off over here. Er else they
was held up fer some reason, 'cause them tracks is fresher a hull lot
than what them was that passed the Injun ranch. Musta laid