her troubled eyes, and they went on
in silence together. They left behind them the bones and the bald level
on which they lay, and came to where the canon's broader descent
quickened until they sank below that sight of the cattle, and for a time
below the home and trees. They went down steeply by cactus and dry rock
to a meeting of several canons opening from side rifts in the Sierra,
furrowing the main valley's mesa with deep watercourses that brought no
water. Finding their way in this lumpy meeting-ground, they came upon
the lurking-place of the Tinaja Bonita. They stood above it at the edge
of a pitch of rock, watching the motionless crystal of the pool.

"How well it hides down there in its own canon!" said Luis. "How pretty
and clear! But there's plenty of water, Lolita."

"Can you see the Black Cross?"

"Not from here."

They began descending around the sides of the crumbled slate-rock face
that tilted too steep for foothold.

"The other well is dry, of course," said Lolita. In the slaty,
many-ledged formation a little lower down the canon, towards the peep of
outlying open country which the cloven hills let in, was a second round
hole, twin of the first. Except after storms, water was never in this
place, and it lay dry as a kiln nine-tenths of the year. But in size and
depth and color, and the circular fashion of its shaft, which seemed
man's rather than nature's design, it might have been the real Tinaja's
reflection, conjured in some evil mirror where everything was faithfully
represented except the water.

"It must have been a real well once," said Luis.

"Once, yes."

"And what made it go dry?"

"Who knows?"

"How strange it should be the lower well that failed, Lolita!"

The boy and girl were climbing down slowly, drawing near each other as
they reached the bottom of the hollow. The peep of open country was
blocked, and the tall tops of the mountains were all of the outer world
to be seen down here below the mesa's level. The silence was like
something older than this world, like the silence of space before any
worlds were made.

"Do you believe it ever can go dry?" asked Luis. They were now on the
edge of the Tinaja.

"Father Rafael says that it is miraculous," said the girl, believingly.

Opposite, and everywhere except where they were, the walls went sheer
down, not slate-colored, but white, with a sudden up-cropping formation
of brick-shaped stones. These also were many-layered and cr