The
BLACK PANTHER
OF THE NAVAHO

“Hi! Hi!—Back!—Halt!”

[Page [224]]

The
BLACK PANTHER
OF THE NAVAHO

BY
WARREN H. MILLER
AUTHOR OF “THE RING-NECKED GRIZZLY,” “THE
BOYS’ BOOK OF HUNTING AND FISHING,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: 1921 :: LONDON

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1921, by The Curtis Publishing Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

THE BLACK PANTHER
OF THE NAVAHO

CHAPTER I
THE WONDERLAND OF THE SOUTHWEST

COLONEL COLVIN sat in a great roomy armchair in the Colvin Trophy Den, puffing reminiscently at a short black pipe and gazing abstractedly into the flickering flames of glowing logs in the rugged stone fireplace that was the heart of the Den. Sid, his son, and Sid’s chum, Scotty, were patching their cruiser moccasins with hand sewing-awls, the former now and then glancing over at his father anxiously.

The Colonel looked peaked and worn,—a thin, gray ghost of his former robust self,—for his duty during the War had been onerous in the extreme, as head of the Army Detail Office at Washington. Sid feared a total collapse of the old Indian fighter, for nothing is harder on the system of a man raised to years of violent outdoor life than a long period of desk work. Sid knew the only road back to health. His father knew it too, but, so far, he had not made the first move toward hitting the trail again. However, a certain expectant look in the Colonel’s eyes, certain mysterious telegrams which the boy had been detailed to send, addressed to an old Army friend out in Arkansas, had distilled the air of big events to come which hovered persistently in the atmosphere of the Den.

Sid himself was heavier and even more bronzed than when we saw him last, on his hunt for the Ring-Necked Grizzly out in Montana. The War, he realized, had been but an episode,—a tremendous episode, it is true—but still only an episode in his life. For some mysterious reason both he and Scotty had been transferred to the artillery, where he had risen to sergeant and had been the little king over two six-inch howitzers. His memories of the War had been of miles and miles of muddy roads and ceaseless rain; of tractors and tanks that had hauled his howitzers always forward behind the Front; of dog-tired days and weeks when they had crept toward the Vesle, ditched for passing staff cars and corduroyed out of mud sinks around shell holes. And then there had been glorious, stunning, vivid moments when he had stood between his two guns, telephone receivers over ears, shaken off his feet by the blinding yellow flashes all around him, watching the timing, correcting the ranges and deflections coming in from his spotter, or rushing to the gun shields when a Boche H. E. seemed about to register a direct hit. It was a man’s job, while it lasted; almost unnoticed, Nature had put on his upper lip a fine black fuzz that told the world that Sid was no longer a boy.

To Scotty the War had been more than an episode. It had introduced a great change in the red-haired boy’s life, for he now wore a black bandage on his arm, and the Henderson service flag bore a gold star. Of them all, the good old Doctor had not returned. A Fokker ’plane bomb had found out the first-aid dressing station where the grizzled old physician had stood, bathed to his shoulders in gore, working without rest or sleep for the thirty-six hours of a major engagement. That was all; there was nothing left of the dugout after that shell had crashed through its roof and exploded. But there were aching hearts in the Henderson home because of it, and Scotty looked older and sadder. The worry of measuring his earning power against this new and hectic America that had emerged from the War had cast a settled sternness on his youthful face. Days in the open would now be a matter of precarious vacations for him!

As the boys mended camp gear the rumble of a big automobile express sounded out in the street, its brake shrieking as it stopped before the house. Colonel Colvin moved in his chair and listened expectantly. They heard the grunt of men struggling under some heavy load, and then the stamp of their feet as they came around the yard path and stopped before the outside door of the Den. A thunderous knock brought all inside to their feet.

“Come in!” shouted the Colonel, springing up to open the door. Two expressmen stood grinning out in the snow, holding between them a long, heavy crate. The leader proffered a thumbed and dogeared book for the Colonel to sign.

“Bring ’em right in and set her down, men,” ordered the Colonel, after paying out a bill and some change. The expressmen crowded into the Den, setting down the crate with a big sigh of relief. “I think you’ll find ’em all right, sir,” grinned the man of the official cap. “Nice pups, eh?”

Sid jumped for the crate, and a tingle of joy thrilled through him. Pups, eh! Why, then——

“Beauties!” chortled the Colonel, replying to the man. “Three Redbone pups, by Ruler out of Music, sir. Reg’lar old-fashioned Southern cold-trailers from Arkansas.”

The expressman evidently owned some rabbit beagles himself, for he looked over the dogs with renewed interest. “What breed of houn’ dogs might these be, Colonel, if I might ask?”

“Coon hounds, man! The old pioneer’s hound—best bear and lion dogs in the world,” explained the Colonel enthusiastically, while Sid winked blissfully over at Scotty.

The very smell of their lithe, active bodies seemed to bring the tang of mighty mountain ranges into the Den again. Watching the dogs, the Colonel’s age fell away from him as a mantle; his eyes sparkled, he moved about the crate, eying the pups like a boy, and then sent Sid into the main house for tools. The log-walled Den, hung with game heads, rifles and saddles, was a replica of the Colonel’s western log cabin of his younger days. Built as a wing on to their great town house, there was an entrance direct into the house from it. The expressmen departed, with many a comradely grin, while the Colonel and Scotty waited impatiently for Sid to return with his hammer and cold chisel. Then two upper slats of the crate were lifted, and out jumped the pups, one after another, to range about the room on long, skinny legs. Never were such long-eared, rat-tailed smell-dogs, it seemed to Sid and Scotty, as they watched them delightedly, while the Colonel dug up a set of new collars and chains out of a drawer in his desk. Evidently he had known all about those dogs in advance, reasoned Sid, as he watched this proceeding. And, as they could not possibly be used anywhere in the eastern states, there was more to this than appeared on the surface!

They took them out into the snow for a brief airing. Once back in the Den again, Sid nailed the Colonel imperatively.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve, Father,—don’t tell me!” he laughed, “Where are we going, and when is it coming off?”

The Colonel grinned indulgently. “I tried my level best to buy Ruler, the father of these pups; but Judge Hawkes would rather part with his own right hand than with Ruler!” he remarked, irrelevantly.

“Answer me, sir—please!” begged Sid. “When—oh, when, Father?—and where?”

“The big problem is how to give them a bit of training,” grinned the Colonel, imperturbably. “None of the states around here allow deer running with hounds——”

“Scats cats!—That means the West, anyhow!” whooped Sid, triumphantly. “How about it, Scotty, eh?”

“’Fraid it lets me out,” remarked the sandy-haired boy, quietly. “I’ve got to be looking for a job these days.”

Sid looked his sympathy and put his arm about Scotty’s shoulders. “We’ll manage it, somehow, old bunkie—never fear!” he said, consolingly. “It may be your last,—but we just got to have this one together!”

The Colonel smiled enigmatically. “Sure you’re going, Lester—job and all!” he assured him. “And how about training these pups, boys?”

Scotty couldn’t see it, but at least he would be glad to help train the dogs, anyhow, he reflected. It would give him some precious days in the mountains under tent cloth. How such vacations were to be treasured—now!

The Colonel took three pedigree certificates out of his desk drawer. “Pepper, Bourbon and Lee,” he read, naming the pups, “the markings will tell which is which.” Then he looked toward the house door of the Den like a guilty boy. “Boys—how will we—how dare we lead ’em in?” he whispered. “Your mother, Sid, knows nothing of this—and you know how she hates dogs!”

The boy chuckled. The Colonel was in a worse fix than he ever had been facing Apache Geronimo! “Looks like they would have to live right here, sir!” laughed Sid, looking up from making friends with the first puppy. “Couldn’t wish for better den mates, I’ll say!”

The Colonel knew more than either of the boys about the trouble he was getting into. That haunting, houndy look in the pups’ eyes, as their long, silken ears drooped from high, pointed crowns, told him of a diabolical persistence and a wild, ineradicable thievishness that would play havoc with Mrs. Colvin’s domestic arrangements! You could feed them with a shovel and still there would be room for more. And, as to the neighbors’ cats and chickens—he shuddered at the thought.

“Well—we might as well have it out now!” he remarked, grimly, seizing the chains and pushing open the house door.

A feminine shriek greeted him. “Where did you get those horrid dogs?—Send them away at once—I won’t have them!” came Mrs. Colvin’s indignant protest. Pepper, the biggest of the trio, jumped and broke away at that moment, darting for the pantry door with the boys in hot pursuit. A wild African yell came from the kitchen where Aunty Sally was preparing supper. Then there was a crash of broken china, another war whoop, and Pepper came yelping, booted through the door to dash under the dining-table legs.

Aunty Sally charged wheezily after him. “He done broke de Dresden china bowl!—Dat ornery houn’ dawg he done broke de Missus’ china oyster dish!” she yelled.—“Whar he at!—Let me beat him black an’ blue!”

A wail of anguish went up from Mrs. Colvin. The Colonel stood, thunderstruck and unhappy, yanking back on the chains of his other two leaping pups. Just then Pepper darted kiyi-ing from under the table and raced for the upstairs stairway. Aunty couldn’t reach him with her broom, but she whipped off a huge boot and hurled it after him, just missing a Vernis-Martin glass cabinet by inches as Pep bolted up the stairs to hide under a bed, where the boys followed, howling with glee, to recapture him.

Aunty Sally stopped and glared at the Colonel reprovingly.

“Marse Colvin, you done got three of them thievin’, potlicker smell-dawgs?” she accused,—“I’se shore ’shamed of you-all!—There, there, honey, don’t cry!” she soothed, taking Mrs. Colvin in her arms while the boys came back with Pepper, yelling with ungodly joy.

“He’s gwine take them right out’n yeah, Missus,—or I don’t cook him another waffle—so there, Kuhn-nel, ’deed I isn’t!” she flared at him.

Colonel Colvin’s jaw dropped as he stood irresolutely, with the pups winding their chains about and about his legs. Aunty Sally was an ancient institution in the Colvin household. She had raised Sid from a baby, and had grown up with the Colvins since they had settled east. A power in the household, he could not conceive how they were to get along without her, for no one else could cook any such waffles!

Then he beat a masterly and strategic retreat. “I guess it’s outdoors for them!” he surrendered, at discretion. “We’ll build a kennel for them, right away—look out, Scotty!—there goes Bourbon!—Catch him, boys!”

Scotty had volunteered to hold Bourbon, the second pup, but somehow his fingers had become relaxed and Bourbon was off like a flash, darting for the pantry door where his nose told him there were eats. The boys followed on the run. They found the kitchen empty, save for an atmosphere of appetizing odors. No sign of the pup anywhere!

They stood still and listened. Then a cold draft from somewhere led them to the back door of the kitchen. It stood partly ajar, and from outside came a swift lapping as of a dog’s tongue. Dashing out, there was Bourbon, standing in the snow, his nose deep in a huge tureen of chicken gumbo for the whole family, put out there to cool off! It was red hot, but Bourbon was transferring it, as fast as he could make his tongue go.

“Yeow!” whooped Sid, leaning up against Scotty, who leaned against him, weak from laughter. “Come on—bring ’em out, Father—they might as well all finish it up, now!”

“Coming—what’s the matter now?” called the Colonel’s voice as they heard him striding through the kitchen, accompanied by the hard click of horny hound nails. He opened the door, Pepper and Lee nearly yanking him off his feet as they both leaped for the tureen. The Colonel roared with Gargantuan laughter—the wild and woolly Outdoors had surely come again to Colvin House! There were feminine sniffs behind him, and another uproar from Aunty Sally, but the mischief was done. No question about Ruler’s pups getting theirs first, that night!

Be that as it may, they could get nothing further out of the Colonel but quizzical grins concerning the proposed hunting trip. Spring came and ripened into summer, finding him still sphinxlike. But every evening he kept them at mending tents and duffel and hunting clothes, while Pepper, Bourbon and Lee put weight on their black and tan bodies until they were great hulking things of over fifty pounds, lacking only hardening to make them full-grown dogs. Occasionally, when Scotty could get off from the job that he had taken in the bank, they went up into the mountains for a brief camp and a run for the dogs. Pepper saw his first deer. After that hunt the pups had to be chased, rounded up and chained in camp until it got to be a plaguy nuisance, no less!

Then came a letter from Big John that gave the Colonel’s secret away. The boys found it lying open on the cedar log table in the Den, probably forgotten during some call into the house.

“Got your letter telling how Jedge Hawkes is sending out Ruler and am sharpening up the camp axe,” began the letter, as the boys giggled over this cryptic sentence. “Will be in Santa Fe Oct. 1, and go on to Hinchman’s Ranch to see about hosses,” they read on with joyful eyes. Then they skipped away from the table, for the Colonel was coming back through the house door. He eyed them suspiciously as his glance fell on the open letter. Then Sid burst into a whoop and threw his arms around him boyishly.

“Oh, Dad!—is it the Southwest? Are we really and truly going to the Southwest?” he caroled.

“Who said anything about the Southwest?” growled the Colonel, trying to twist down his lips under his white mustache. “You been reading my letters?”

“Couldn’t help it, Dad! Gee, I can see those big hen-tracks of John’s ’way from here! And he’s going to meet us in Santa Fe, too—with Ruler!”

“Who’s ‘us,’ young man?” queried the Colonel. “Well! I might as well tell you, now; and I’ll begin with Scotty. You wanted to go into mining, didn’t you, Scotty?” inquired the Colonel.

“Yes, sir—but I can’t afford a technical college course, now,” said the boy, sadly. “Mother has nothing but her pension——”

“Yes; but that will take care of her alone, son,” said Colonel Colvin kindly. “I don’t know but the best way to learn mining is the same as the way you learned soldiering, from the ranks up. I’m taking you to the best mining state in the Union, where you can handle the stuff right on the ground, find your own lodes, study mineralogy with the minerals in your own hands,—so you will know carbonate ore when you see it. That’s half the battle; the technology of process work you can pick up right at the mines and mills. There’s lots of room for the young mineralogist who can go right along with his own saddle horse and outfit, take care of himself in a dry country, and know real lodes when he sees them. We’re going up through the eastern part of the Navaho reservation, where there’s pine forests. Big John used to punch cows down in that country; it’s an old story to him. We’ll explore some ancient cliff dwellings up in the Canyon Cheyo and then cross over to the Colorado and get up on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. That’s the best cougar, bear and deer country in the Southwest. How’d you like to camp in a rainless land, boys? Where there’s no snow, no dreary northeasters, lots of queer new plants and trees that you never saw before, and where a man can ride like thunder on a hot cougar trail under great western pines! Where a brush sunshade is all the camp you need for weeks on end, and where you can loaf or explore or shoot or weave blankets or do anything you darn please, anyhow, any time! Something new,—eh?”

“You said it, Dad! Gee, I’ve just longed to camp out in that country, for once!” sighed Sid. “How about you, Les?”

“’Fraid I can’t,” returned his chum. “Gorry, but I’d love to, though!” he added, wistfully.

“But you shall, my boy!” came back the Colonel, positively. “Your mother and I have talked it over. She has enough to live on with you away, and it will be a practical opening in mining for you. I know some big people down there in Prescott, and I know what I am talking about!” he insisted.

Scotty leaped at Sid with glad enthusiasm. “Whee—yow!” he yelled. “Am I really going?—Thanks, Colonel, ever so much!” he gasped out, wringing his hand. “What do we take for outfit, sir?”

“The little five-by-six-foot paraffined muslin wall tent for you two. Just a light tarp and my Army bed roll for me”—grinned the Colonel. “Otherwise your Montana outfits will do, just as they stand——”

“What—in that hot country, Dad?” inquired Sid, incredulously.

“She’s cold enough, at night, son,” laughed the Colonel. “Those stag shirts and the canvas fleece-lined coats will come in mighty handy. Sid, you’ll take the .30 Government carbine, and Scotty the Doctor’s .405, while I’ll pack the old meat gun, the .35 Model ’95. Big John’s attending to the horse outfit.”

“Cracky!—Won’t it be some pickles to hunt with the old iron-man again, though! They say he did wonders in France,” cried Sid, all happy excitement over the prospects of going West again.

“Sure did!” chuckled the Colonel. “There was a good story going around his regiment that they tell on Big John, boys. It seems they were in the middle of a charge, when someone yelled out—‘Hey—Big John!—shake off your bayonet—there’s three Boches dangling on it!’”

“Reminds me of a dare-devil I had in my battery,” grinned Sid. “That fellow, a big, red-haired Maine man, was afraid of nothing! During our Argonne advance we had a battery assignment with one gun to go right under a tree. The Boches had left a bomb there dangling from a branch by a rope, so that if you took it down it would surely go off. Up comes Mike, as we all stood looking at it, figuring out how to get rid of the thing. ‘Lave me at ut!’ says he, brushing the rest aside, and before I could yell out a word he had ripped it loose—every one scattering right and left—and then he hurled it,—and the thing went off in mid-air and liked to have blown down our tree!”

“Great times you boys must have had!” sighed the Colonel, “but fighting was not so damn devilish in my day. Glad it’s all over, and we can get back to the clean joys of hunting again! We’ll get our hats in Albuquerque—wait till you see ’em! A big Mex. sombrero, with a sugar-loaf crown and a brim a yard wide—unless things have changed from my old Apache days. And they don’t change, much, down there. New Mexico’s still half Spanish.”

The boys realized that when, two weeks later, their transcontinental bade good-by to Colorado at Spanish Peaks and dropped down the old Santa Fe trail into New Mexico. Mesas, Indian pueblos still inhabited, and little Mexican ’dobe villages greeted them on every hand, keeping the boys continually crossing to opposite windows of their Pullman to stare out. This was not the old U. S. at all! It just couldn’t be! As the train climbed the grade toward Arizona, the country grew wilder and more desolate. Navaho and Zuni Indians came down to the stations to trade baskets and pottery; the pueblo of Laguna rose close at hand; the high rock of Acoma, whose pueblo has defied the conqueror for centuries, was to be seen, dim and misty, down a bare valley. They saw a great natural bridge carved by water out of the solid cliff, and then, high above, the train passed those remarkable carved and pinnacled buttes called Navaho Church, as the tracks dipped down-grade again, to follow the winding valley of the Puercos into Arizona. Bare and desolate and empty and dry was that stream bed, with frightful bad lands rising across the river to the rim of a high plateau, fringed with scraggy timber.

Shortly after dinner of that last day, the train slowed down to stop at a little water tank station. Hinchman’s Ranch could be reached, forty-five miles north from here. The boys searched avidly the little flat, back of the station, with eager eyes. It seemed a mile or so wide and was backed by rock-ribbed bad lands that ascended to the plateau. Whirling clouds of red dust, each the storm center of a cowboy on a cayuse, smoked through the sparse greasewood that dotted the plain, banging out a welcome with fanning revolvers. Alongside the track they spied Big John, mounted on a restive white wild mustang that had evidently only recently been “gentled,” for he seemed inclined to hop right over their locomotive. With him were two saddled ponies, evidently for them, and a big roan horse for the Colonel. Barking at the train was the largest and boniest hound the boys had ever seen.

“That must be Ruler, Les—and there’s Big John with the horses—Gee—roo! I want to yell!—Can’t we get this window open?” cried Sid excitedly.

“C’mon, boys, grab your rifles and let’s vamoose,” called the Colonel, hustling out of the smoking compartment with the stump of a black cigar smoldering under his white mustache. “Here, Sambo, fall on this duffel, boy.”

They tumbled out of the vestibule and the Colonel, after a hearty handshake with Big John, hurried forward to see about their crate of dogs in the baggage car.

“Hi, Sergeant Sid!—Gosh-all, but you do look nat’ral!” yelled Big John from the white horse, as Sid rushed across the cinder platform of the station. “Down, Ruler, down!—you ol’ pisen houn’ dawg!” he roared.—“An’ dam’f thar ain’t that ornery little shavetail Looie, Scotty! Put ’er here, you li’l rooster!—Put ’er here!” chortled Big John, leaning far out of his saddle as the white horse braced against his weight on the stirrup.

The boys fell all over one another shaking Big John’s huge paw. Except for a frightful shrapnel scar that seamed his face, he had not changed much since Montana days. The same big hawk nose, the same piercing black eyes and long, twirling mustache, the same intense black hair, under—yes,—the same old Stetson that he had worn in the Rockies! Evidently the giant Montanan scorned the “greaser” hat of the Southwest.

“Them black eyes and black hair of yourn, Sid, make you look like a reg’lar greaser under that dome;—an’, gosh, ef he ain’t raisin’ a mustache,” guffawed Big John. “Scotty, you look like a red candle what’s hed a extinguisher set on to it,” observed the irrepressible cowman. “Otherwise the Colonel ain’t made no mistakes,” he added, sizing up their outfit critically.

Just then that gentleman himself came down the platform, followed by two of the ranch teamsters carrying a huge dog crate.

“Here, John, take a look at these pups!” called the Colonel, as the crate was set down and he fumbled for his keys. Unlocking its door, Pepper, Bourbon and Lee climbed out and shook themselves all over. At sight of them Ruler bared fangs and flew at them. He didn’t know his own offspring! A furious dog-fight ensued. They booted the dogs apart, and a growly peace was enforced;—in the midst of which there was a rapid clatter of hoofs and the two cowboys the boys had seen from the car window came loping in, to be introduced by Big John.

“This here’s Red Jake, an’ t’other’s Mesa Joe, Colonel,” explained Big John, introducing them. “Up at Hinchman’s they just natchelly lives hearty on fried t’rantulas an’ centipedes, reg’lar; but they ain’t nohow averse to eatin’ a baked Apache if they kin ketch one. The Colonel here, fellows, is one of the old original Geronimo hunters,—an’ these is his cubs,” concluded Big John, introducing the boys with a final wave of his hand.

Red Jake and Joe grinned, but said nothing, as they shook hands all around.

“Wait till we gets you out behind the bunk house, John!” muttered the red-haired one behind his hand, as they looked the Colonel over respectfully, glad to meet an old Indian fighter. Both were typical Arizonans, leathery and lean and sunburned, with hard, gray eyes all puckered from the constant desert glare.

“Well, Sid, climb this here twister and we’ll get up the bad lands to the rim,” said Big John, as the ranch teamsters finished piling their duffel into the wagon. “All ready, sir?”—this to the Colonel—“we gotta make Navaho Wells by sundown.”

Sid found that his pony was trained to start as soon as his foot touched the stirrup. His pinto bolted off with him, with the rest of the outfit strung after in hot pursuit. Presently the two Arizonans passed him like the wind, their horses thundering by in a cloud of dust. All Sid had ever dreamed about riding was nothing to this! He yelled and waved his hat, whereat the “twister” rose and bucked and sunfished, requiring an iron knee grip and a yank on his Mexican curb to bring him to earth again.

With Ruler and the pups leaping around the horses’ heads, it was a furious race for a while, but then came the steep ascent through bare and hideous clayey ravines. Arrived at the top, the party stopped to rest the horses and there was a chance to look around. This was a mighty red and purple land, thought Sid, as his eyes rested, now on the snowy cones of the San Francisco peaks, a hundred miles to the west, now on the endless jumble of flat mesas to the north of him. It was a land of great horizontal ridges, yellow and red and blue and black; sloping up, sloping down, always in immensely long, gentle slants. And between them there were rocky talus beds strewn with pebbles and bowlders. Of vegetation there was almost none.

Later the sage and greasewood became more abundant, and then, forty miles to the north, a ridge of pink layer-cake buttes jutted up into the clear air, with a faint tinge of green at their bases, along what was evidently a river bed. Here would be Hinchman’s Ranch. Sid reached for the cavalry canteen on his saddle hook, and turning, saw Scotty doing the same thing.

“Here’s how, Pal!” he said; “this is sure going to be one thirsty country, Les!”

CHAPTER II
ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT

“SEE them blue an’ white striped buttes yander, Sid?” asked John, pointing across the stony desert with his quirt. “That’s limestone, in these parts, an’ it ginerally means a tank ef thar’s any water at all. Navaho Wells is in there, and we’ll camp for the night.”

“Just what I wanted—to have my first night in the desert out under the stars!” exclaimed Colonel Colvin, happily. “We stop here for the night, eh, John?”

“Shore; no more water for twenty miles, sir. Them boys ain’t growed their saddle corns yet, neither, an’ they’ll be plumb glad to get down. I know how ’tis! Thar’s a nice flat up on the buttes, Colonel. Dust off the t’rantulas and horned toads an’ rattlers off it, an’ a man’ll sleep thar peaceful as a new borned babe.”

Sid nodded approvingly. He was glad they were sleeping out, too. There couldn’t be too much of it for him! He said nothing about his aching knees, but his gait told the older men for him. He heeded no bodily aches, now, however, for a new and delicious happiness was filling his breast and a load of worry was vanishing fast. His father, he could see, was fast picking up health and strength; had been ever since they had started on this trip. Thirty years ago he had ridden these same hills, with hostile Apaches ambushed in these very buttes. Sid could imagine those blue-clad, yellow-scarfed cavalrymen with their friendly Indian scouts and the plainsmen rangers, all just like a Remington picture, painted with this place for a stage. In those days his father was one of the young lieutenants of the command. Now he could see the life-giving power of memory at work, for the strength of those rugged days seemed to be reëntering the Colonel’s body and spirit. In two more weeks he would be heavy and lean and iron-hard.

They headed the horses up a slope of the buttes. Its little flat commanded a magnificent prospect. Away to the west stretched line on line of stratified ridges, with the flat top of the Hopi mesa far on the horizon. To the east lay a silver-green flat of sage brush, bounded by jagged red peaks. Great woolly clouds rolled in rose and lavender masses over the bare rock saw-tooth ridges that filled in under the horizon. Water was there none, but of arid plant life there was abundance.

“Here!” said the Colonel, looking silently across the desert, while memories of old Indian days crowded his mind, “it was right over there beyond those buttes to the east, that we of the Fifth Cavalry came down from Fort Defiance on our southward trail after Chief Chuntz and his Apaches, boys. A bad business; but it had to be done, I suppose. I’ll tell you of that cave fight, some day. This place is good enough for us, John.”

Mesa Joe and Red Jake turned out the horses while Big John loped out into the sage to wait for the ranch wagon and get provisions and the sleeping gear from it. The boys set about cutting a quantity of sage bushes, from which they stripped a huge pile of fragrant browse. Colonel Colvin untied his cantle roll, and out of it took a six-by-nine foot light tarp, which was all the shelter he ever used. Setting it up with two stakes and its rear corners guyed to the rocky ledge back of the camp site, they had a sun shelter under which browse was spread out. The canteens were hung in a row in the shade, and out of the saddle bags of his McClellan army saddle the Colonel produced emergency rations that had been packed there in the Den, back home, before shipping the saddle out. There was bacon and corn meal, sugar and coffee, and a can of condensed cream.

Then the cowman came in and started a small fire of greasewood while Colonel Colvin produced an aluminum army mess tin with cover and folding handle, about nine by seven inches and perhaps an inch and a half deep.

“Best little desert baker you ever saw, boys,” he laughed. “Many a corn cake I’ve shaken up in her!” He made a thick batter of flour, corn meal and baking powder, and poured the pan about half full. Balancing it on two stones over a bed of coals, he heaped a pile of live coals on the cover. In about fifteen minutes he brushed them off and peered inside.

“Brown as your hand! She’d go better with an egg beaten into the batter. Here’s for another one.”

The boys were too tired and sore to do much beside watch the cake-making. When six of them were done, Big John came riding back from the ranch wagon that had gone into camp out on the flat. He had a bag of oats, a ham, and a sweating canvas bag of water hung to his saddle.

“Shore, fill up the crowd with hog an’ hominy, Colonel,” he grinned. “Ain’t nothing better’n ham and corn cakes been invented since Pharaoh missed the ford, I’m settin’ here to tell ye!”

He got after the ham with his bowie knife, and soon a huge slice was sizzling in the Colonel’s mess kit. The boys went up on the rocks and watched the sunset, unwilling to miss a single moment of their first evening in the desert. A wild and beautiful land was this; color,—red and rose and purple and yellow,—with gleaming glories of the sunset tinting the cloud edges. Deep blue shadows crept out under the flanks of the mesas. All was still and silent; a peace passing understanding brooded over the whole world.

“Gosh, but that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Scotty, fervently, as the sun plunged over the western rim of the world, striking turret and pinnacle and bastion alike brick-red in scarlet edgings of fire. “I tell you, Sid, these moments are what we live for in the open! Will we ever forget this scene?”

“Makes me feel calm, and serene, and—happy!” replied Sid, softly. “Happiness is what everybody is striving after—oh, so hard!—and few or none ever have any. This is the secret of it, to me. A simple, healthful life in the open, and plenty of the big, beautiful outdoors to look at and wonder over,” concluded the youth, surprised at his own eloquence.

“You said it, Sid!” came the Colonel’s deep voice behind them. “My happiest hours have all been out here, where a man can see a big enough chunk of the earth to realize his own insignificant place in the scheme of things. Back east we tend too much to magnify our own importance, and I always feel cramped and worried, and get pestered by trifles. No chance for that out here—in the presence of this!”

He waved his arm to the west. Under a roseate afterglow the grand distances of the desert were bathed in a flood of purples and lavenders, with tints of deep orange on the mesa flanks to the west, while soft, tender shadows of misty blue filled the rugged valleys. They sat in silence, drinking it in, for such wine was good for the soul. The light of a distant watch fire on Walpi shone through the dusk, a tiny point of light fifty miles away. The Hopi Indians, at this time, were performing their mystic rites of the sunset, and a subtle comradeship with them reached out across the desert in the flicker of those rays——

“Chuck pile!—Come and get it!” rang out the mighty horn of Big John’s voice, breaking in on their reverie. The Colonel arose with a sigh of blissful content. “Seems like old times again, Sid! Let’s eat hearty!”

They climbed down to the little flat, where a thin wisp of gray-blue smoke rose straight up in the still air from the remnants of the cook fire. The boys fell on the ham and corn cakes and coffee ravenously, batting off the four dogs, who were most oppressively sociable, trying to gobble morsels of food right out of their masters’ mouths. The stars came out while they were eating. Then Big John and the Arizonans fell over on their backs and lit indolent cigarettes; the Colonel and the boys sought their lookout rocks, to feed on the desert, shrouded in its impenetrable gloom under a glory of western stars.

After a time the sharp night chill drove them under the shelter. Huddled forms out in the sage told of the cowmen fast asleep where they lay. Rolling in their blankets, the boys voted to call it a day. Sid lay awake, listening to the rustlings of a pack rat which had come foraging into camp, and enjoying the wild howl of the coyotes barking in shrill chorus from the mesas all about them. It was all wild, lonely and beautiful—too beautiful for anyone but outers and very honest men, he decided, as he dozed off to sleep, with the sweet tang of sage in his nostrils.

Next morning before dawn the whole party was awake, the boys shivering and glad enough to warm their hands before the fire. Bacon, flapjacks and coffee were in progress, and, downing them, the horses were unpicketed and fed and the whole cavalcade started for Hinchman’s. The sharp, bracing air was good for horses and men alike. They were full of oats and bacon and high spirits. Sid raced along with Scotty beside him, giving their ponies full rein to run off the first enthusiasm of a new day. Big John brought up the rear, singing a cow song at the top of his lungs, the meter chiming in with the jolt of his horse.

“Whoo—pee,—de—I—yaho! Git along lit—tle dogie,

For ’tis your misfortune an’ none of—my own!

Whoo—pee,—de—I—yaho! Git along lit—tle dogie,

For I know that Wy—O—ming will be your new home,”

he sang, in a monstrous shout, bawling out the I’s and O’s in a blare like a foghorn. The boys giggled with joy as verse after verse of the cowman’s riding song roared out.

“They sing that song to soothe the cattle when riding around the herd at night,” laughed Sid. “It sure carries well! The cows are perfectly contented so long as they hear a human voice. Otherwise they are apt to get nervous about wolves, and stampede.”

“What’s a ‘dogie,’ Sid?” asked Scotty, posting as his pony changed gait to a trot.

“Oh, that’s a lean little yearling that they used to drive north to Wyoming, for Government rations for the poor Indians. Listen——”

“Oh, you’ll be beef for Un-cle Sam’s Injuns,

It’s ‘Beef,—heap Beef!’ we he-ar them cry,

Git along, git along, git along lit-tle dogies,

For you’ll be beef steers by and by,”

sang Big John’s concluding verse, Red Jake chiming in on the chorus,—

“Whoop-ee, de—I—yaho!” etc.

Sunrise over the desert! A magnificent spectacle, a stunning spectacle, a gorgeous, overwhelming, awe-inspiring spectacle! The boys fell head over heels in love with the whole thing, and then as if to give it a touch of adventure, Pepper let out a squeak, with a funny break in it like a boy’s voice changing, and streaked across the sage. After him tore Lee and Bourbon, belly down, legs flying like long broom handles.

“Hi! Hi! Yip—yip!—Coyote!” yelled Red Jake, wheeling his broncho to flash off after the dogs. “Git him, boys!”

Ruler brayed a musical volley of hound notes, taking after the pups in long bounds that closed up on them fast. A gray wolfish streak was doing some fancy steps, twisting and turning through the greasewood bushes. Sid galloped, Scotty galloped; after them thundered Big John and the Colonel. The wind whistled around Sid’s ears as his pinto let out speed.

“Run him down, fellers—watch out for prairie dog holes!” snorted Big John, swerving the wild, white horse to the left to cut across the coyote’s trail. The two Arizonans had fanned out in a wide bend; Sid and Scotty jounced along together, pawing at their revolvers which were tightly jammed in the saddle holsters; the horses streaked along with a rapid clatter of hoof beats on the vast level floor of the desert, which was the stage setting for their coyote run.

Sid yelled with glee. What a lot of room there was in this country! Bare mountains and mesas ringed the horizon, but for miles the flat, gray sage and green greasewood dotted the red sand. The dogs looked like little black specks, leaping and twisting through the low bushes. The whole plain was flat as a floor, and the horses under them reached out with flying hoofs in the unrestrained joy of racing. Then a jack rabbit jumped from behind a sage bush, and the three pups dropped their hot coyote trail and started after him.

“Wa—hoo! Stop them, boys!” roared the Colonel from his huge roan. “Break ’em of that!”

He kept on after the coyote and Ruler. Sid tugged out his revolver and fanned the air ahead of the jack rabbit. His bullets threw up spats of white dust, and Pepper and Bourbon, who were yipping and squealing in hot pursuit, nearly turned somersaults as a bullet threw a splash of sand right before their faces. The dogs leaped back, falling all over each other, and then the swift ponies wheeled around in front of them. Scotty leaned far out of his saddle with swinging quirt.

“Back, Pep! Out of that, Bourbon! Nix on rabbit!—Skip!—VAMOOSE!” he barked, lashing at them with his quirt. Sid thundered up on Pinto and they headed the pups and drove them back, whimpering and cringing, to where they had left the coyote track. The men were now at least a mile away across the level basin, stringing along with Big John’s white horse in the lead and Ruler far ahead of them all. The coyote was evidently headed for some craggy red sawteeth where he could make his escape from the horses uphill.

The boys called off the pups and headed across the flat, hoping that the men would succeed in turning the coyote. Then little puffs of white smoke came from the Arizonans. They could not hear the rifle shots, but they saw the coyote turn, bewildered, heading down their way in what looked like an easy lope. He saw them start their ponies into a gallop and again turned like a flash, evidently intending to cross the sage between the two parties. Pepper rose on his hind legs, got a sight of the coyote, and started in long bounds over the sage, with Lee and Bourbon at his heels.

“Now!” gritted Sid. “Head him off, Scotty!” They raced across the coyote’s line. He was coming like the wind. Sid hauled Pinto up abruptly on his haunches and aimed his long-barreled Officer’s Model carefully. A spurt of dust sprang up just in front of the coyote. Sid held the round white bead, well down in its notch, just ahead of the flying, twisting animal, swung two yards ahead and fired. The coyote slid to his haunches, snapping savagely at a wound in his side, and then Pepper, Lee and Bourbon fell on him in a riot of howls and barks.

Sid whooped with joy as they rode down. This was fine medicine for those houn’-dawg pups! It was impossible to shoot; the whirling mass of black, tan and gray was too swift and intricate to risk a shot into it. Came a rapid clatter of paws and a great, deep-voiced bray, as Ruler charged down the slope and pitched headlong into the fray. Out of it rose the coyote, borne aloft by the great bony jaws of Ruler about his throat. There was a savage shake, a worrying and growling from the pups, and then Red Jake clattered up, leaped off his pony, booted the dogs aside and finished the gasping coyote with a single revolver shot as it lay on its side.

“That’s the stuff!” yelled Colonel Colvin, galloping up on the roan. “Mind the dogs—they’ll be at each other next—they’re wild with fight!” He had scarcely spoken before Pepper flew jealously at Ruler with bared fangs, while Bourbon turned and pitched into Lee where he was worrying gleefully at the carcass. The boys dismounted with howls of laughter and grabbed the belligerents by their collars.

“Some pups, Dad! Hang on to him, Scotty!” laughed Sid, slinging Bourbon into the sage and aiming a kick at Lee. “First trophy of the desert, fellers!”

“Nice li’l pasear,” remarked Red Jake, wiping the sweat from under his sombrero. “You-all want the hide off this-yere?” he asked, looking to the Colonel for orders.

“You bet! How far is it yet to the ranch, Jake?”

The Arizonan puckered up his eyes as he scanned the far horizon where the colored buttes back of Hinchman’s loomed up. “Oh, ’bout eleven miles, I reckon,” he decided.

Sid and Scotty stared unbelievingly. Why, those red mountains couldn’t be over five miles off! Their knees ached from the unaccustomed saddle strains, but distances were deceiving in the desert and there was an hour more of riding yet.

As they drew near the mountains, the long ’dobe walls of Hinchman’s suddenly developed out of its misty background of mountain, mesquite and cottonwood. It looked more like a fort than any ranch the boys had ever seen before. Built during Apache times, its long outer walls were bare save for a few small black windows up near the eaves of the red tile roof. All around it was a bare, level space of desert, with not a single grease bush for cover. Even now the Navahos or the Apaches might tear loose again over some real or imaginary grievance, and Hinchman’s was an outpost in their country.

The sharp clip-clop of their ponies’ hoofs rang on the stone flagging as they rode under the ’dobe arch into the big patio within the walls of Hinchman’s. A couple of Indians took their horses as the boys dismounted and looked curiously around them. Here was a sort of square court, with a well surrounded by peach trees forming the center of the stone driving space. An inner wall, with Spanish tiled roof sloping inward all around, so as to turn the rainfall into the court drain cistern and also be protected from rifle fire, formed a side to the living rooms and stables that surrounded the patio. The windows in these were larger, but also more than man high, and each room had a door, mostly open, showing glimpses of the dark, cool depths within. In one of them stood a huge, white-haired giant waving his arms joyfully.

“Howdy, Colvin!—Howdy! Get right down! Sho’ is glad to see y’u!” roared the giant, running out to take the roan’s bridle reins.

“How!—Hinchy,—you old war-in-eye! Gad, but you look good to me!” chortled the Colonel, wringing Hinchman’s hand. He leaped from his horse, and the two old Army comrades hugged each other in a ponderous bear dance about the patio. After an exchange of soul-satisfying punches the boys were introduced. They decided they were going to like this man. Black-eyed and long-nosed, he was all of six feet four in his boots; his smile was constant and kindly, and there was a merry twinkle in his eye that matched the Colonel’s own.

“Shore you look peaked, old-timer!” exclaimed Hinchman, searching the Colonel over with solicitous eyes. “Look like you’d been dragged through a knot-hole,—Jeementley-ding if you don’t!” he cried, aggrieved sympathy in his tones. “Big John told me they’d worked you to death down in Washington, but I never ’spected you’d look like this.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right, pronto,” grinned Colonel Colvin. “There wasn’t any end to it, while it lasted, but it’s all over now,—thank God! Enough of me—how’s everything with you, old settler? Still patriarch of all the Indians of this section?” he quizzed.

“Still am!” rumbled Hinchman, emphatically. “I’m old ‘White Father Hinch’ to all the Navaho north of us. They come to me with all their troubles or send in runners about it. One got in last night with a tough one for me to straighten out. It’s a medicine panther, Colvin, that’s been stealing old Neyani’s sheep. The Indians are all plumb scared of him; heap big medicine! They swear he’s black—can you beat that?”

“Black!” echoed Colonel Colvin, incredulously, while the boys listened in with flapping ears. “Freak coloration, eh? The Far East has black leopards, you know, occurring clear down into Sumatra. It’s possible, Hinchy. Where did the cougar get the black on his ugly face? No one knows—nor why there are both black and spotted leopards, either. But I don’t see where you should worry any, Hinchy—just say the word and we’ll go up there and shoot him for you. We’ve got dogs, you know.”

“Precisely just what you can’t do, Colvin!” exclaimed Hinchman, energetically. “It would be the worst kind of a sacrilege in the Navaho’s eyes. You see, Dsilyi, the Navaho demigod, he had four panthers, a white one to the north, a tawny one to the west, a blue one to the south, and a black one to the east. The Indians just know that this is Dsilyi’s black panther—there’s no use arguing with them! Therefore, either old Neyani or his son, Niltci, has been up to some deviltry and the panther is being sent as a punishment. Not a redskin of the lot will shoot him on a bet, nor even dare track him. You don’t know how superstitious they are, Colvin! Sooner than build a fire with a single stick from a hogan in which someone has died, a Navaho would freeze to death. Sooner than touch a hair of Dsilyi’s medicine panther, old Neyani and his whole family would let him take all their sheep and starve to death. Right nice mix-up fo’ me to unravel, eh?”

“You’re dead right!” agreed the Colonel emphatically. “Say, the worst uprising the Army ever had to deal with came from just such a freak animal as this. You remember the Arapaho row in ’79, Hinchy?”

“You bet! I sure hope this isn’t goin’ to be anything like that! a white buffalo, wasn’t it? And now, I’ve got a black cougar and a mess of Indian superstitions on my hands!”

CHAPTER III
THE VALLEY OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS

THE older men went inside to Major Hinchman’s big living room where, over some Mexican stogies, they discussed Neyani and his Black Panther and gossiped over old Army days. Sid and Scotty went out to help Big John with the horses and hounds and then explored the ranch patio. It was all as Spanish as old Mexico. Heavy and age-worn oak furniture—the real Mission—stone metates for grinding corn, great red ollas or porous jars for cooling water by evaporation, striped serapes and Navaho blankets, Apache and Pima baskets; saddles, raitas and ornamental embossed Mexican leather gear—the horse was King here! The place reeked of those old strenuous border days of the Southwest, and the ranch seemed to have imbibed equally of the customs and usages of the early Spanish and Indian possessors of the country. In turn, the boys peeped in the various doorways; the farriery with a smoking forge and laboring bellows; the bunk house with an interminable game of greasy cards going on; the saddlery, where a weazened old sinner of a Sonoran bent over his leather work; and the great kitchen, where dried beef and hams hung from the smoky rafters, and long braids of corn, peppers, desert onions and dried berries festooned the walls. There were bins of pinyon nuts, flour, metate-ground Indian meal, sugar, coffee and red beans—the ranch could stand a year’s siege if you asked Lum Looke, the Chinese cook who presided!

After a time Major Hinchman sought them out at the stables in the patio, where Ruler and his progeny had been made comfortable in an empty stall.

“Say, boys,” he grinned at them with a quizzically apologetic smile, “I’m mighty sorry—but thar ain’t a derned thing to eat in the ranch! Nope, not a doggone thing!” he insisted whimsically. “You’ll have to rustle your own grub. Now, Jake, thar, he was tellin’ me of a couple of deer over the river in those cottonwoods,” he confided, in an elaborate stage whisper. “Suppose you boys get you’ rifles an’ rustle us a little venison? You!—Jake!” he roared, seeing the delighted smiles on Sid’s and Scotty’s faces.

Jake came straddling out of the bunk house, the sunlight sheening on his glossy black fur chaps as he crossed the patio.

“Jake, you take these boys across the river and fetch us a deer,” he roared, turning to go back to the Colonel to continue their plans for the trip to come.

A high-riding sun bathed the desert in floods of light and color as they rode out of the patio. The pink layer-cake mountains across the river rose high and near, now. Streaks of yellow and blue, in horizontal lines, crossed the uniform red of their bare and jagged conformation. From a bluff near Hinchman’s they could survey a wide bend of the river (which was little more than a wide, fordable brook) and here was green grass land, with cattle dotted over it. Back of it was the corresponding bluff of the opposite bank, fringed with mesquite, oaks, cottonwoods, juniper and pinyons.

“Over the river!” whooped Jake, settling back on his horse to let it slide down the clay bluff. A thundering clatter of hoofs came up behind them as the boys prepared to follow. It was Big John, racing along on the white horse.

“Ain’t goin’ to leave me out, Jake, when it comes to the Colonel’s cubs!” he snorted, easing his mount down the slope. “You don’t know these pesky boys, Red. When I hed em, up Montana way, the minute they was out of my sight the dern pinheads would start somethin’! Now you take Scotty, here—he’s another red-head like you, Jake,—an’ I’ll sort of ooze along with Sid. Thataway we’ll keep the both of them out of trouble,—savvy?”

“Shore!—We’ll pass a family of Apache Injuns, boys, on our way up to the notch in them buttes,” said Jake as the ponies splashed into the ford. “I’m not denyin’ Major Hinchman’s got the right idee about the Injuns, at that. He lets a few families of them stay on his ranch all the time, livin’ the way they is used ter, tendin’ a small herd of cow-critters in return for a beef steer now an’ then. Up yander is an ole San Carlos Apache chief, his squaw, an’ their two childer,—a young buck which same rides fer us, and a gal. ‘Snakes-in-his-leggins,’ we calls the ole Injun; but he’s a pow’rful dignified ole cuss at that.”

They rode up the opposite bluff and along its brink for perhaps a mile, the boys agog with curiosity to see Apache Indians in their native state, so to speak. The thick growth of saw grass, clumps of yucca, agave, and sage increased as they rode along, while nearly every glade held a sparse growth of green deciduous trees. And then, on a point of the bluff jutting out toward the river, they came upon the Apache home. It was a mere sun shelter of poles and juniper, but the squaw and her daughter were at work on a grass hut near by, made of tall looped poles forming a system of arches and tied with yucca fiber at all crossings. The girl was binding on a thatch of bear grass in bundles. By the time the rains came it would be fairly waterproof.

Under the juniper shelter was the simplest of furniture. A few red and black blankets hung up on the leafy walls to be out of the dirt; a red pottery jar slicked over with pinyon gum varnish held fresh water; there were woven baskets in geometrical black and white figures holding pinyon nuts; strings of red peppers and onions, and braided spikes of blue and red corn ears hung from the rafters. Dried meat and fish swung under the eaves, while the old buck himself sat in the shade, straightening cane arrows with a grooved stone which he had heated in his fire. He grunted with imperturbable dignity as they rode up.

“Nothing to do till to-morrow, eh, Sid?” grinned Scotty as they reined in.

“It looks ideal to me!” responded Sid, enthusiastically, the wild blood surging up in him sympathetically at the fine simplicity of the old Indian’s life. “He’s making those arrows because they are far cheaper than cartridges, and just as effective for him. I suppose they sell those baskets—look at that one like a tall vase; isn’t it a beauty?”

The old squaw looked up from her work and smiled at Sid’s eager, pointing finger. Back of her, down on the river flat, the young buck had just ridden up, bare-backed on a pied pony. He had nothing on him but a breech clout, buckskin beaded moccasins of brilliant blue and white, and a red bandanna about his forehead. He grinned silently at the boys as his pony stopped.

“Gee, I’m goin’ to be an Indian!” laughed Sid. “I’ll build a whicki-up of my own and live here forever! I’m an adopted Blackfoot, anyhow.”

“Why don’t you be an ethnologist, Sid?” urged Scotty, inspired by his chum’s enthusiasm.

“Gee-roo, I’d be more than that!” came back Sid. “Instead of just studying their songs and customs, I’d want to do something practical toward letting the Indian live in his own way. It’s the only thing that will preserve the race contented and happy.”

“How, Snakes!—You happy?” chuckled Jake, calling out to the old buck at Sid’s words.

The Apache lifted his great head, and a coppery grin broke on his eagle features. “Plenty happy!” his deep bass voice replied. “Major Hinchm’n heap good to red man!”

“Yet this ole redskin and yore pappy and Major Hinchman, Sid, was on the war path after each other, red hot, only forty years ago! Waal; times hev changed! We must be oozin’ along, now, or there won’t be no deer on the saddle, boys.”

“You see how ’tis,” said Jake with obvious pride in his master’s system as they rode off, “them Injuns is happy, clean through. ’Cause why? They’ve got their freedom, an’ can live as they likes. Ef every ranch in Arizona would adopt a few, we’d have no need for reservations, whar they’re always discontented. It don’t take much to feed an Injun an’ keep him happy. That young buck’s as good a herdsman as we’ve got. The squaw makes baskits, an’ the ole feller does a bit of huntin’, mostly sage hens and jacks. They’re wuth their keep; yit we kin sorter look after ’em if they gits into any trouble. That’s what Hinchman’s preachin’, everywhar he goes.—Whoa, boys! We pickets the horses here, fellers, an’ gits up this coulée afoot after them deer,” he broke off, throwing a leg over his mount.

They picketed the ponies out in a bit of grass swale, and separated, going in pairs up different flanks of the red butte. The sparse mesquite and bear oak grew stunted and thick, up here, and it was all cut up with little ravines of dense clay soil and friable rock. Moisture and dew from the river, condensed at night, evidently kept it going, for even cottonwood grew in the depths of the gullies.

“Good deer country, son,—for these parts. They lies low up here and comes down at night to drink. Watch out for a track in the clay,” cautioned Big John as he and Sid climbed along, rifles at ready.

A blue-tailed, green lizard darted across their path. Sid was watching it disappear under some loose stones, when the sudden “Whew! Whew!” of a startled deer made him jump with rifle half to shoulder.

“Arter him!—up thet draw!” barked Big John, jumping for the ravine as the patter of quick hoofs died away over the ridge. Sid swarmed up the rocky talus while Big John leaped in giant strides along the flanks of the ravine. It seemed to Sid that a quick climb to a jutting shoulder above him would give him a shot, especially if the deer stopped to look back after his first fright was over. The loose soil rolled and slid under his feet; high above him towered the red wall of the butte, vertical and unscalable. When he at length turned to look around, he was high on the roof of the desert, its tumbled ridges stretching away to the south for limitless miles. Down below was the curving bend of the river and across it the low, square, ’dobe fort of Hinchman’s. Then he turned his back to it all and began to reconnoiter cautiously over the ridge. As he raised his head, the wag of a white flag told him that the deer had seen him, too. He was a large buck, an eight-pointer at least, and he was galloping up a vast arroyo that cleft into the heart of the mountains. Sid raised his rifle and opened fire at long range.

“Spang! Spang! Spang!” whipped out the sharp reports, as fast as he could work the lever.

“Whoop-ee! Burn ’im! Set fire to ’im!” roared Big John’s voice in the ravine, and then he burst out of the head of it, looking for the buck.

Sid saw his bullets strike rock in red spurts of dust. The ringing reports of Big John’s rifle now added their clamor to the din. Far off up the canyon the buck stumbled and fell; got up and went on again, and then leaped high in the air with all four feet and came down on his side.

“That got him!” yelled Big John. “I don’t know which one of us ’twas. Come on down, son,—’twon’t be no pyjama party gittin’ him out of thar, old settler!”

While Big John was paunching the buck, Sid climbed up to the head of the canyon, led on by an irresistible desire to see what might be on the other side of the top of the world. The ledges of broken and wind-scoured rock gradually gave place to shelves with vertical faces, up which he could find crevices or breaks which could be climbed. The blue margin of the sky was not far above him, now. Scaling the last bastions of the ridge, he found himself perched up on a sharp knife-edge, seemingly only a little below the white clouds overhead. The dry desert winds sang in the peaks around him and caressed him with soft, invisible fingers. He felt somehow brother to it all, as his eyes roved around the horizon. To the north stretched the flat plain of the desert, broken with sheer walled mesas and ragged outcroppings of rock ridges. To the east rose a high-walled plateau, covered with the dark green of arid-country evergreens,—cedar, pinyon and juniper. It ran for miles and miles northward, and in between him and it a purple void told of the chasm of some valley flowing north.

It was through that plateau of pine timber that their route north to the Canyon Cheyo would lie, and somewhere, cut deep in the plateau, would be that valley of the ancient cliff dwellers that they all wished to see. As Sid studied the huge panorama an overwhelming desire for solitude came over him. He wanted to be alone, to take for himself the Indian boy’s three days of trial and to face life and his future for a time with wide open eyes, alone and uncounseled. Like them, he wanted to ask questions of life and learn what it all was going to mean for him. Here, in this empty land, he could face Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the raw essentials of life, and let his own soul choose his destiny.

The Indians, he knew, encouraged this impulse in boys of his age. Then it was that they went alone into the mountains, to fast and pray to the Great Mystery, and to come back to the tribe with the beginnings of wisdom deep planted in them. The whites stifled this desire for solitude, attempted to guide their boy’s every step, and more than often hopelessly muddled his whole life in advance for him. Sid would have none of that! Never once had the old Colonel so much as hinted to him what he was to be and do, in this his life that stretched before him. His boy was free to face it in the only way it could be faced, alone. Sid wanted to think it out by himself, to be away from the very sight of people, to have these great solitudes for his counselors for at least a few days. He climbed back down the canyon and rejoined Big John, turning over the desire in his mind. He did not realize that the Desert had taken hold of his soul with its grip of the infinite,—as it has done to the mind of man since countless ages,—but, true to instinct, he was following its silent beckoning.

“John, I’m thinking of doing a little pasear up into the mountains for a day or so,—by myself,” he announced, as the cowman looked up from cleaning his gory hands with a few drops from his canteen.

Big John looked him over quizzically.

“How ’bout me, old-timer? Colonel Colvin’ll skin me like a mule team ef I comes back without ye!”

“Dad’ll understand—and I know you do. This country’s got me, John! I’m just crazy to do a lone hike in it, for a while. Suppose you fellows pick me up in the Canyon on your way north? I’ll be there, and ready for you ’bout that time.”

Big John grinned, as he scratched the black locks under his sombrero. “You ain’t, nohow, regular intimate with that region, is yer, Sid?” he inquired, blandly.

“No, but it’s a canyon, like all the rest of them, with sheer walls and a lot of prehistoric cliff dwellers’ places in it, isn’t it?” said Sid, confidently.

It is to be presumed that some of the Arizona sense of humor was infecting that stanch Montanan, Big John, for all he said was, “All right, old-timer! Make it the mouth of the Monument Canyon, though, so we can find ye when we want ye.... I’ve hed that lonesome itch myself, son. You hev your blanket and tarp on the pinto’s cantle, and here’s a haunch of venison. Ef you only hed a bag of pinole, now, I’d be plumb willing to turn ye loose.”

“I have,” remarked Sid, turning around to show a buckskin bag at his belt. “Parched and ground corn. You eat a tablespoonful of it and wash down with a drink,—and you’re fed for at least six hours to come. Scotty and I made a lot of it back east.”

“Smart ez lightnin’, you two!” chuckled Big John, shaking his head. “After them Montana days, though, I’d trust ye anywhar, Sid. Sho’—they ain’t nawthin’ to harm you, from here to the Canyon. Git along, son—don’t I know jest what’s eatin’ ye! The Colonel kin take it out on me—I’ll fix it with him! You help me down with this yere critter, and I’ll start ye on the trail.”

Between them they got the buck down the slope, and then led the horses up through the ravine to where the buck could be easily slung. Big John then shook Sid’s canteen, looked over his saddle trappings, and cut off a haunch of the venison and they slung it to Sid’s saddle bow opposite the canteen.

“See thet notch, up thar in them buttes to the east, Sid?” asked Big John, pointing with a horny finger. “This here trail goes up thar, over the divide. Folly it down ’til you comes into Red Valley. This time o’ year thar ain’t much water, but thar’s plenty of tanks,—pools, like,—whar the water lays in rocky holes. Stick to the valley till you comes to the Canyon. We’ll be along thar in about two days. So long, kid! Hev it out with yourself, son—’twill do ye good!”

He mounted his horse, with the buck tied across the saddle, and waved a farewell as Sid rode off up the steep trail from the river.

Up through a country of bear grass, sage and mesquite he rode, following a well-worn trail. Once over the divide, the way led all downhill. The junipers and pinyons thinned out; yuccas and century plants sprang up among the bear grass, and then, riding out from the last fringe of trees, a mighty red valley lay before him, stretching endlessly northward in yellow and blue and black parapets, with sage-strewn slopes of gravel slanting downwards from their walls. Sid let out a wild whoop of joy as his pony cantered down the winding trail. Free! He was as free as that eagle that soared high above him in the blue—so high as to be a mere wheeling speck in the sky! He was alone with himself and Nature.

The pony slowed down as he reached the hot depths of the valley. A dry scoured-out bed of a brook wandered below; here a scummy, shallow pool, yonder the glimpse of shining water where a deep hole in the rocks still held some. None of the thirst terrors of the desert would be his, reflected Sid, as he rode by them; nothing but this inspiring high horizon of a changeless land. Here was the seat of the Infinite, thought the boy, the same last year, the same last century,—the same since the great waters had left this basin bare back in geological time. Of what other place in our country could that be said? The forests and the Indians of the East were gone forever; the prairies and the buffalo of the West were gone. Millions of white men were toiling and struggling to make a living crowded in cities which dotted that land where once was the bounteous plenty of Nature. All the men he knew were fighting a grim battle with Life, just to keep fed and clothed and have a roof over their heads. All the boys he knew were training for that same battle. All of them were tired and weary, and none really enjoyed their lives. All of them would go to their graves with the bitter sense of not having lived at all. None of that for him!

And why? puzzled Sid. Well, their lives were all too complex, for one thing. A thousand distractions pressed in on everybody’s time. There was no margin to their lives; no time for ease, for reflection, for communing through books with the great spirits of the past. None at all for those revitalizing periods when man returns to Nature and is born anew. These people spent so much of their time trying to live that they did not live at all! Only worked.

What, then, was happiness? The happiest man Sid knew was a young fellow he had met out in Montana, who worked among the homesteaders out in the new red wheat lands, where there was not a school or a church in forty thousand square miles. Among those brave and cheerful folk he was giving his life with a rich enthusiasm, that their sons might have something of an education. And his idealism was so infectious, too, that he had persuaded a young medical student to go out there with him, so that there might be at least one doctor in all that territory.

Another fellow that he knew, quite as happy, was an outdoor artist who sought out and painted the wild beauty of this beautiful world in which we live. This fellow lived up in a log cabin on a Wisconsin reservation, painting the life of the forest. He knew animals, fish, game, birds, canoes, Indians, woodsmen; and he knew how to paint them so that one looked and was transported to his scene in the very spirit of it. In the fall he would shoot game and cure it, collect wild rice and Indian potato, and stay right there, painting the forest in winter when it was more beautiful than ever. One exhibition of his pictures a year was all he needed to provide for his simple wants. Thoreau loved to study; he was happiest when he had the leisure to read the Scriptures of the ancients in their original tongues, to search for great truths and sound philosophies and pass them on to his fellow men. To get the freedom to do this he had lived alone in the forest and raised from the soil what he needed to eat.

These men were not complex. They did not want a million things that people think are necessary to happiness. So long as they were free to keep on, they had all that they asked of life. It struck Sid that the master key of all this was for a man to find the work that he loved and then be free to do it. If the work itself was such that it set a high ideal before him, then that man would be happy. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else should matter. It was essential to bar out the distractions, the meaningless nothings that frittered away one’s time, money and energy. The men of the desert came out here to get away from all that, to devote their lives to some large, simple business, like raising cattle or making the desert bloom by systems of irrigation. And they found the grand peace of the desert good for the soul. Good enough to stay here forever—in what looked to a city man a hideous, iron-bound land—and never have a wish to go back where men spoiled everything in their mad scramble to stay alive.

Sid decided three things for himself during the miles that Pinto laid behind them with that tireless gait of the plains mustang. Happiness, for him, lay close to Nature. She was by far the grandest thing in the world, the one thing of which he never tired and of whose wonders there was no end. Others might prefer the intellectual life of cities, where the body was forever weary, forever crying for good, healthy, sweating exercise, even if the mind was kept occupied. To satisfy them both and be a whole man, happy all over with the thrill of good health of mind and body, a life in the open was the only surety. That other life would be surely a misery for his body, caged like a setter dog in a city flat—there would be absolutely no escaping it. For his mind it would mean simply an exchange of interests, working with live things as the raw material instead of with machinery or in spending his days dictating letters, which was the bulk of the “work” done by most of the men he knew. He shrank from such a life as from a plague. Far better to be just reasonably well off, or even poor, than exchange for a heaping measure of dollars everything that gave one joy in living. Life in the open, for him, could be agriculture or mining or ethnology. The human interest of the latter inclined him strongly toward it. It combined idealism with practical, useful work. To make others happy, to help the misunderstood and protect the unjustly treated—that would be a life that could appeal to Sid’s generous, open-handed nature!

He had arrived at that point in his reflections and his pony had rounded perhaps the fiftieth of the great red parapets and promontories that crisscrossed ahead of him in the winding valley, when two enormous red walls, flat as masonry and hundreds of feet high came to view across the dry bed of the stream.

Sid reined up his pony, looking up at them in wonder, and then at the dim distances beyond with a feeling of utter bewilderment. Surely this was a grim joke that Big John had played on him,—the merciless Arizona humor as practiced on the abysmal tenderfoot!

“This must be the Canyon Cheyo, and those huge walls are ‘Los Capitanos del Canyon,’ as the Spanish named them—but where is the entrance?” he asked himself, perplexedly. Then the truth burst upon him. That line of dim gray cliffs, apparently five miles down the valley was the other wall of the Canyon! The whole thing was its mighty gate!

“Gee-roo! Things are done on a big scale out here!” exclaimed Sid as he surveyed it, dismayed. “You could drop a whole eastern state in the mouth of this canyon and it would never be missed! No wonder there are whole ruined cities on the floor as well as the walls of Cheyo!” he cried, ruefully, as he began to wonder how his party would ever find him in all this vast expanse of cliff and valley.

But it would narrow further up, he reassured himself. If he could find the mouth of Monument Canyon and hang around there they would surely pick him up. For miles he rode up a flat level floor, green and watered with a brook, while on both sides frowned parapets like the Palisades of the Hudson, about the same height, yet narrowed in closer, so that their grandeur and majesty hemmed him in. Up under the sheer cliffs he could see great hollowed-out caves, with stone ruins peeping out under them, walls shattered and torn, square stone watch towers with their upper stories thrown down, and a detritus of destroyed masonry scattered down the steep, tree-grown slopes.

Then a narrow side canyon attracted him. It would be fun to ride up to it and camp there for the night, thought Sid, besides being out of the main canyon and away from possible visits of passing Navahos who might take into their heads to rob a lonely boy camping out. He turned up it, winding his pony through great spruces and firs that rose out of its moist bottom, watered by a little runnel. The stratified stone ledges of the cliffs were moss-covered at their bases. High up through the cleft he could see the blue sky, with yellow sunlight striking the spires of western yellow pines that seemed like pygmy Japanese trees up there from where he was. It was already dim down in here.

Swiftly the twilight grew, while the pony slowed to a walk, his feet not making a sound in the soft duff. It was growing eerie and mysterious in here, thought Sid, as a slight shiver ran through him, and he now wished he had stayed out in the open valley. But he fought back that wish as cowardly and foolish. Men did not turn back from what they had once set their hand to!

Then a stick cracked, somewhere behind him. Sid reined up and listened. All was still as death; even the birds had gone to roost in the dim twilight of the chasm. But Pinto’s actions told him that that noise was not imagination. His pony’s ears lay flat back and he was shivering all over with fear!

Sid watched, intently, down the chasm. He thought he saw a bush move. A second’s concentration on it told him it had moved, for the tips of its lower branches still vibrated. He reached down and drew his army carbine out of its scabbard. For some minutes Sid watched the bush, his heart beating with excitement. A more experienced man than he would have hummed a shot into it to smoke out whatever might be lurking there.

But after a time he turned away and urged the pony slowly ahead. The horse jumped as the spurs touched him, and Sid had a wrangle to quiet him at all. They paced on, slowly, both listening behind them, for Pinto’s ears had not pricked forward at all. An uncanny sense that they were being followed,—by something—in the chasm, persisted. Several times Sid looked back, rifle at ready, urged by some half-heard noise.

A likely camping spot, a little dent in the chasm walls showed up ahead, and, as it was getting dark, Sid decided to stop here and make camp for the night, still keeping a wary eye out for whatever beast it was that was stalking them.

He dismounted and picketed Pinto in a little grass swale. Then he cleared away a space for his fire in the needles that lay under the clump of silver spruces in the dent. He was gathering sticks for it when Pinto gave a snort of terror and tugged frantically at his halter. Sid yelled at him, for his eyeballs showed white with fright. He snatched up his rifle to peer down the chasm. Then a shock of alarm went through him, as his eye fastened on a motionless head—looking at them from over a ledge that jutted out from the canyon walls high up. Big, round, and coal-black it was! No ears showed—they must have been laid back flat—but a green and phosphorescent flash came from the two eyes in it that glared at them.

Sid’s rifle sprang to shoulder and the red spurt of flame from its muzzle split the semidarkness.

CHAPTER IV
LOST CANYON

FOR the next few seconds after that rifle shot, Sid was fully occupied. The black head, whatever it was, disappeared in the cloud of smoke from the rifle muzzle, and Sid heard a hoarse, ropy, animal snarl and a scramble in the bushes up on the cliff ledges. But Pinto had reared high in the air at the shot, and, with a whinny of terror and a frantic tug of his head, had broken the picket lariat. He dashed snorting across the ravine. Sid dropped his rifle and fell on the dangling lariat weaving like a snake through the grass. It whipped out from under him as he made a last snatch for it and a half hitch of it caught around his wrist.

Sid was yanked to his feet, hauling against the plunging horse, and was dragged across the chasm. Only its sheer wall stopped Pinto in his mad frenzy of backing. Sid snubbed the lariat around a stump and let Pinto buck. Gradually the horse grew quiet as Sid talked to him, and he finally was able to come up on the rope and soothe him. The pony shivered with terror, but slowly became more easy, pricking his ears and looking with alarmed eyes down the chasm every time the thought of that creature that had peered out at them recurred to his equine brain. Sid led him over to the grass swale, where he fell to grazing again. After a time the pony seemed to know that their visitor had gone, for, save for an occasional stoppage to look long and intently, he went on feeding.

But that was no guarantee that the prowler might not come back again, sometime during the night, reasoned Sid.

“Bear or cougar, what he wanted was horse flesh!” muttered the boy to himself as he started his fire. “Let’s see; the Navaho hogans are not so far from here, up near the head of the Canyon to the east. That’s about eight miles. Suppose this brute was that freak panther that we heard about at Hinchman’s? Of course, it was dark and I might have been fooled, but he was black, whatever the thing might have been. It couldn’t have been black bear, or I’d have noted his ears. This thing had no ears,—and it looked catty! By George—suppose it is the Black Panther! The black leopards of the East are always larger and heavier than the spotted and clouded kinds, so this fellow must be an old Tom cougar, a lover of horse, deer and sheep. What’s to prevent him coming back and getting Pinto before I can wake up to shoot him?”

Sid puzzled a long while over what to do, as he squatted before his fire broiling a slab of venison from the haunch. He munched at it and then washed down a liberal help of pinole with brook water, still undecided. There did not seem to be any solution for this particular difficulty.

“Well, there’s one thing about it—Pinto’s as good as a watch dog,” said Sid to himself. “He’ll stay up all night, munching grass, if I know horses,” he laughed, “and he’d sense that cougar around long before I could.... I’ve got it!” he cried, slapping at his knee delightedly.

He pulled up the picket pin and drove it in again under the spruces beside the bed of dry needles among some rock hummocks that he had selected for a sleeping place for himself. Then he retied the lariat, so that there was a short length left over, and this he fastened to his bed roll.

“There!” he exclaimed. “If Sir Black Panther comes, Pinto’ll plunge and rear and pull out his pin, all in about one jump. Then the lariat will yank the bed out from under me—enough to wake up a dead man—and I ought to be up and shooting mighty sudden!” With that he leaned the rifle handy against a spruce and rolled up in his blankets on the needle bed. The last sound that drifted to his ears was the steady munching of Pinto, as unending as the murmur of the rill in the ravine.

Next morning Sid awoke with a sense of having missed something. Wasn’t there to have been a row with a cougar that was to come and take his horse? But there stood Pinto, grazing peacefully. Birds chirruped in the firs and spruces growing in the chasm; the sunlight streamed down through its silent cathedral walls; a water ousel was bathing himself in a pool of the brook and thanking God for the gift of another sunny day. All was peace in the glory of the morning. The uncanny visitor had not come, then! Sid lay lazily awake for some time, enjoying it all. The only sounds, save the soft soughing of the wind in the evergreens, were the ceaseless runnel of the brook, the liquid notes of the birds, and the champing of Pinto’s teeth on the grass beside camp, clearly audible in this vast stillness. It recalled Sid’s thoughts to desire for breakfast. He was not quite ready for the frontiersman’s fare of straight venison and pinole! Coffee and bacon with it loomed up in his mind as much more savory and palatable. And that brought him to remembrance of his emergency ration. The boys never went abroad without it. It ought to be in a canvas pouch on the back of his belt, reflected Sid. Reaching around, he was surprised to find it still there, utterly forgotten and no doubt slept upon in the excitement and fatigues of the day before.

Sid unbuckled his belt and slipped it off. It was a home-made affair, merely an empty cocoa tin with two holes punched in its upper rim and a small bale wire packed inside with the grub. It held a half pint of water when filled. Out of it Sid took a package of coffee, lumps of sugar, a paraffin paper package of bacon slices, a small tin box of salt, and a cube of dried soup powder. The cover of the tin had a tack hole in one end, so that it would make a small frying pan by tacking the tin to the end of a stick. With a small fire going he soon had coffee brewing in the can and four slices of bacon were crisped in the cover. Then washing down a spoonful of pinole, he was ready for further adventures. He was packing up the emergency kit and drowning the remnants of his fire with water carried from the brook, when to his surprise the soft duff under his feet gave way with a crackling of rotten twigs, and, before he could right himself, his boot was jammed down in a cleft of mossy bowlders whose humpy forms showed irregularly under the needle floor of the cove. Sid had spent considerable effort the night before in trying to find a level place to sleep on between those hummocks, wondering in a vague way how they came to be there. Laughing gayly at his own clumsiness, he now tugged his foot loose from the cleft and then peered down to see what might be in the hole, for nothing is insignificant to the woodsman. Down in the rubble of needles was—water! Quite a little pool of it. Evidently all the interstices between the hummocks were filled with it.

Sid watched the glistening surface for some time, for all the day was his, and he had no appointment with anything or anybody. Gradually a loose needle detached itself from the ring of them about the hole and floated slowly toward the brook! Sid’s interest at once arose mightily. He had assumed that this water was merely a backup from the brook, but that needle said, No! More of them detached and followed the pioneer across the water hole in the cleft.

Out of such small beginnings do great things grow, in the woods! There was evidently a current between the hummocks, flowing toward the brook. If so, where did it come from? Sid asked himself. A spring, back in the depths of the cove, most likely. He explored the little dent in which he had camped, carefully. The broken and jagged strata of the walls had met here, jammed together by some prehistoric movement of the earth’s crust. It was not the real plateau wall. The trees had taken advantage of the jumble of interlocking slabs, for a giant fir had effected a lodgment in the fissure, filled as it was with pockets of soil that had accumulated there.

Sid eyed it with thrills of adventure and discovery running through him like wine. There was no spring! The water came from farther back—somewhere! He raced back and crossed the brook, climbing the stratified walls of the canyon as high as he could. Squatting on a ledge, he peered upward to where the walls of the canyon towered into the cloudless blue far overhead. His eye followed the symmetrical column of the giant fir. The edges of the cove met and interlocked behind it, and for a considerable distance above its topmost spire. Then appeared a narrow cleft, a sort of fat man’s misery, extending to the top, and through it showed a thin seam of sky blue. The cove was a mere wall then, and something lay behind it—a blocked canyon perhaps.

On fire with adventure, Sid eyed it speculatively, seeking a way to climb up to that cleft. Every ruin in the main canyon was known, and had been explored and rifled of its relics by ethnologists and tourists. Two or three centuries ago they had been inhabited by tribes of pueblo Indians, but when the Navaho, the Dene (deer hunters), as they called themselves, came down from the Far North they had attacked these villages and driven out all the pueblos in their neighborhood. How the Navaho got down, from the neighborhood of Great Slave Lake where their kinsmen, the Dene, still live,—through the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, the Cheyennes and the Utes,—was a whole mystery in itself, but here they were, and had been since the times of the Spaniard. It accounted for the deserted state of all the cliff dwellings in the San Juan and Chaco Valley and Canyon Cheyo regions.

Suppose, then, there should be a box canyon in back of that cleft that no white man had ever yet explored! thought Sid, as he searched the ledgy walls of the cove before him. “Lost Canyon!—and I discovered it! What a start in ethnology for me!—Gee-roo!” he crowed to himself happily, “there’s water coming from in behind there, somewhere!”

He climbed down and cached his saddle and rifle, on general principles. Pinto would not likely be molested, for the Black Panther would not hunt in the daytime. The pony would be perfectly content with the grass and water, which he had not ceased to sample since getting over his scare of the night before. Picketing him out with the full length of lariat, Sid swarmed up the fir, for he had noted where a ledge could be reached by climbing out on one of its higher branches. Once on the ledge he looked down, and some idea of his undertaking began to dawn on him. It was a fearsome climb, up above! He was already seventy feet above the floor of the canyon and the beginning of the cleft was still at least a hundred feet above him. Luckily no slippery moss grew on the ledges up here!

It became more and more awful as he ascended from ledge to ledge. There were some that jutted out so that he climbed over them like a house eave, with his body hanging out in space and a frightful fall yawning below him if he failed to make it. And, all the time, the sense of vertical rise grew more and more uncomfortable. If only you could get some slope inward,—something less like a stone ladder of huge slabs!

After a time he grew used to the sense of height. The thing resolved itself into the immediate problem of getting over the next ledge above. They all shelved back—just a little—that was some comfort! But above him they came out again, in an enormous pediment, one of Nature’s own cornices, big as a whole Parthenon. Sid looked up, despairingly. If the cleft did not begin before that thing started out from the cliff wall, he was beaten! And he had no idea how he was ever coming down those ledges again, either!

But his route, planned out from below, turned out to be feasible. The narrow cleft started from the flat floor of a ledge twenty feet above him. He made it, with the help of some young spruces growing out of crevices in the rock. He had learned to depend on these, as they were firmly anchored by their twinelike roots. Sid at last stood on the ledge, looked down into the void below with a sigh of relief, and then looked up through the cleft with renewed hope.

“Fat Man’s Misery,” as he named the cleft, began with a steep slope of loose, dry earth. You could climb it with your elbows jammed into the rock on either side. Squirming and twisting, Sid wormed up through it, hanging on most of the time by the rocks, where a slip would have dropped him down like an avalanche, to land on Pinto’s pied back far below. Then the opposite downward slope began, just as steep. That ledged cliff was a mere wall—and he had climbed through it!

When he got down out of the cleft he found himself looking into a small valley choked full of tall spruces. Their tops rose out of the green below him. It was a small box canyon, sure enough, not over a mile to the head of it. Sid started down, his feet slipping and sliding in loose shale rock that refused to halt anywhere. Grabbing a sapling, he hung fast and listened to the shower of small stones dropping down into the valley over some ledge below him.

No way down there! He grimaced to himself, shrugging his shoulders. All right!—down the flanks of the canyon, then! He started off, sloping down wherever possible, and little by little worked below. A last plunge through firs and thick needles, and he stood on the floor of the valley. It was filled with mossy bowlders, just like those under his camp, and down in between them were cool, clear wells of running water.

Sid drank, and then started up the valley, searching the cliff walls for some of the swallow-nest houses of the cliff dwellers. Then, in a widening of the valley floor, something attracted him. Thick-grown with weeds were clumps of bladed grasses that looked somehow familiar.

“Indian corn!—Wild maize,—I do believe!” he exclaimed, examining one of the stalks curiously. A small ear with a black tassel on it arrested his hand as it slipped up a stalk. Ripping open the husk, a tiny knot of blue and white kernels came to view. There were not over thirty of them all told.

“Corn!” cried Sid. “Relapsed back to Nature! This is what it looks like in its wild state—and this little flat must have been an Indian planting ground!”

A wild vine that ran thickly through the growth like a ground nut next confirmed it. It was a true bean, gone wild, all right! It did not need the stringy pod, filled with small red beans, to reassure him. And rambling profusely over the rocks in the sunlight was a large-leaved plant that he knew to be squash or gourd, he was not sure which. Looking further he discovered a rocky and ruined trail leading upward from the vegetable patch. Overgrown with briers and weeds, still it had that look of going somewhere that marks the human trail no matter how old. Sid ran out into the valley and peered upward, but could see nothing but ledges above, half hidden behind thick evergreens that were sprouting out of every crack and crevice in the walls. He climbed up the trail, often leaping to a spruce trunk and back again to avoid places where the rock was weathered and shelving. High up on the cliff he came at last to a great out-jutting wall of rock that stood out like a bare chimney from the cliff face. Rude stone steps led up through it, and over the cleft hung balanced a great bowlder, held up on its inner side by a stout, bare tree trunk. All the former cliff dwellers had to do was to knock away that trunk to let the rock fall and seal up the entrance to their village forever.

Sid labored up the steps under it gingerly. Something great was coming off! He was surely discovering a new ruin!

If so, it must have been abandoned within the memory of men now living, reasoned Sid, for a weatherworn pole ladder next came to view, leading up to the top of the first pueblo. As the boy mounted it, he examined the rock walls closely. They were not of ’dobe clay, but of stone, closely fitted, without mortar in the joints. This placed it as having been built by someone of the San Juan tribes, for they invariably used the flat stratified rock of the region to make their fine walls. Arrived at the top of the ladder, Sid looked about him with wonder. Overhead hung the immense smooth roof of a cave scoured by water action long ago. In it was a small pueblo, only four rooms, but they were cunningly built back from the edge of the ledge, so that it could not be seen from below nor, indeed, from anywhere but the opposite wall of the canyon. And it was a little gem, in a fine state of preservation, for the characteristic blue and red porous pottery water jars still stood cemented on the corners of its roofs. The pueblo had manifestly never been attacked by hostile Navahos.

“Gorry, what a find!” ejaculated Sid to himself as he walked over the roof of the nearest trap door, out of which stuck the poles of a ladder. He looked down it, letting his eyes become adjusted to the semidarkness within. A faint, musty odor pervaded the place; somehow the very air seemed full of whispering ghosts, for the wind scoured through the vast cave and moaned in the empty windows of the houses. Gradually objects developed out of the gloom. Two large, gayly decorated granary baskets, filled with musty corn, sagged in the corners. Then he made out pottery jars, covered with black and white symbolical Indian designs. Festoons of dusty red and blue corn ears hung from the rafters, and rows of what looked like shriveled and dried red peppers. Over in one corner Sid finally made out the pottery oven, its sooty door still filled with the fragments of charcoal and sticks.

Then he drew back, with a quick start of surprise, for, huddled against the walls of the furnace he saw two figures, with ornamentally woven blankets fallen shapelessly around them. Sid whistled to himself, softly, as he glanced around with a shiver of superstitious fear. Then he got a new grip on his courage and looked down again. Yes, they were there;—two human figures squatting in the gloom, hugging the heat of their pottery fire that had long since gone out. Sid looked, and then slowly descended. They were an old man and his squaw, shriveled and dry as mummies, their clothing tattered and fallen into decay.

Their whole story was here; pathetic, gripping the heart with its human appeal. Sid added a new item to his philosophy,—the sacredness of the word HOME. These old people had stuck to their home until the last, huddling up to their life-giving fire with the ultimate feebleness of old age. Their young folk had doubtless migrated to one of the populous pueblos now flourishing; these two had stayed by the homes their fathers had built, the squaw tending her few vegetables, the old buck killing rabbits or an occasional deer, the pair making pottery and blankets as their forefathers had done since time immemorial—the last, last survivors of a communal home, where once a happy people had lived and loved!

And the flower of their lives was here, the imperishable immortality of art; for these jars and baskets were beautiful, as beautiful in form and decoration as any Greek or Etruscan vase. The story of their gods was there, just as on the Greek vases of two thousand years ago. One or both of these old folk had produced these, and left Beauty as their memorial.

Sid stood looking at them, reverently, and then stooped to examine the oven door, for the dull white of pottery decoration within had caught his eye. Raking out the sticks and charcoal, a great vase standing bottom upright within the oven came to view. Carefully he lifted it out and stood looking at it in wonder. It was tall and beautifully formed, with a swelling base and wide columnar neck that flared like a trumpet flower at the top. It was covered with black and white symbolic decorations,—rainbows, rain, clouds, lightnings, mountains, mesas, all in conventional figures that thrilled him with their mystic significance.

Now, why should these two have spent the last hours of life left to them in producing—this? ruminated Sid. Why, but the love of art, the worship of beauty that would not die within them so long as a spark of life remained! It was their monument, that immortal flowering of art,—the desire to make something beautiful that is bedded in the soul of man, is in truth the wine of life to those who have it, rich and fertile, in their beings.

Sid at length climbed up the ladder, thoughtfully, and went along the roofs of the three other pueblos. They were deserted and empty, but outside in the sun against the Old People’s room was the empty wooden frame of their blanket loom.

“Thus we lived, and thus we died; mark and learn who will!” sighed the boy, philosophically, clapping his hands together abstractedly. “And now,—how am I going to get back to Pinto and the Canyon?” he asked himself briskly. The climb back down those frightful ledges to the fir tree was only to be considered as a last resort. As he had passed no way out of the box canyon in getting to the pueblo, Sid reasoned that the entrance the former dwellers used must be somewhere up near its head, where there would be a slope of some sort. He went forward along the roofs of the four houses, hoping to find a trail that would lead to this route.

As he approached the last end wall, a faint but noisome odor smote his nostrils. The boy hesitated and laid hand on his small .32-20 belt pistol, for this smell was of tainted meat, and it warned him that an animal lair of some kind was near him. Cautiously he advanced and peered over the wall. Below him the ledge ended abruptly—the cliff men had built right to the end of it, so as to make it inaccessible from below at that end. Spruces grew out of the cliff wall and concealed it, but through their roots Sid thought he could detect worn spots where some creature had been in the habit of passing.

Then he turned his attention to the back of the high cave roof overhead whence came the odor. It shelved down behind the pueblo, and as he walked over to the inner walls, Sid could make out a black and dusty area in behind them, where the cave came down to the ledge floor. Here the shelf slabs were not three feet above the ledge floor, a slit of dense gloom, where water had once scoured out a soft stratum of rock. His eye gradually made out bones strewed on the soil under here, ribs, skulls, leg bones, all of sheep or deer; he could not say which.

“Phew!” he muttered, drawing back to the fresh air. “It’s either a cougar or a bear den—it can’t be the latter, unless it’s some small black bear, for nothing but a fly could come through those spruces on the cliff. It is a cat! Cougar—perhaps the Black Panther himself!—Why not?” he declared, with growing conviction. “I’ll just bet it was him, last night! He hunts around here, or did, until he found that stealing the Indians’ sheep was free, to him! Gosh, the beggar might be paying rent and taxes!” sniffed Sid. “Of all the nerve! He’s got a pretty soft thing—I’ll say!—until someone of us gets a shot at him, out here. And that’ll be me, I hope.”

But then he remembered that he had not his rifle with him. Nothing but the little inadequate .32-20. The quicker he got back and came up here with that rifle, the better, for the Black Panther would be quite likely to revisit his lair, perhaps this very day.

Sid climbed down by the pueblo trail he had first discovered and worked up through the spruces up the valley, confident that he would soon find a way out and speculating on how to get down from the plateau above into the chasm where his camp was. But the rim walls of the box canyon offered him little encouragement. Three hundred feet above him they towered, with bare, stratified and perpendicular walls after the lower slopes of talus ended. The large spruces in the valley contented themselves with a root hold in the wet soil in its ravine. Nowhere did they come near enough to the cliffs to be of any use in climbing out.

Sid pushed through them, looking for the place where the cliff dwellers had come into and left the canyon, for, of course, a community of people could not have lived shut up in here. But, when he burst through the tree growth at the canyon head, already the high walls of a cliff, partly seen through the trees ahead, had given him a warning of his fate. This canyon had no head slope! Instead, a giant wall of granite stretched before his troubled gaze, and in the center of it was the smooth, scoured trace of an ancient waterfall. A terrific granite slope filled up one corner, between it and the side walls, and there were cracks in it and what looked like the shallow cuttings of stone steps, but the lowest edge of this was utterly inaccessible from below. The cliff dwellers probably reached it by systems of long, notched tree trunks, which the vicissitudes of ice, snow, rain and weather had long since rotted and crumbled to dust.

For him there was no way out—save by the cleft, the ledges, and the fir tree up which he had come! Sid stood there, staring blankly, sickened by the thought of that awful climb down. He knew well that it was impossible.

CHAPTER V
THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER

RED JAKE and Scotty rode slowly to the left under the brow of the red butte, after Sid and Big John had started up the ravine for their deer. Scotty drew his .405 out of its saddle scabbard and rested it across his pommel as they approached a belt of scrub oak timber.

Red Jake eyed it quizzically. “I ain’t aimin’, no ways, to be introosive,” he drawled, “an’ I’ve kep’ my health by remainin’ strictly out of other folks’ business—but thar’s limits!” he grinned. “Which I’m burnin’ to find out, is thet thar cannon for shootin’ deer or elephants?”

Scotty flushed. “It’s all the gun I have,” he replied quietly. “She’s a bit heavy for deer, perhaps, but she was father’s old meat gun out in Montana. He left it to me.... A Hun shell killed him, in the Argonne,” added Scotty, his voice dropping over the remembrance.

“Shore, I’m sorry, kid!” came back Jake, extending a lean brown hand, all contrition. “We Arizonans has a pecooliar brand of humor with tender-feet—but we means well! Put her thar, Pal.”

He gripped Scotty’s hand warmly, and the beginning of a friendship established itself between them.

“Now you put them spurs to that rampin’ steed of yours, kid, an’ we’ll ride up this gulch. She’s ace-full on wil’ turks, an’ ye’ll hev a chance to run one up an’ do some fancy shootin’.”

His own mount began to run as he spoke. Scotty’s pony snorted, threw back his head and started into a gallop. The low branches whipped across his face; there was the constant swish and slap of flying leaves, a constant warding off of branch after branch as the horses thundered through the draw. It was grown thick with scrub oaks and scraggly pines and junipers, with here and there a locust-leaved mesquite, its pods strewing the soil. Then ahead came a roar and the flap of big wings as some large bird rose out of the thicket.

“Thar goes one—watch sharp, now!” yelled Jake, hauling up his horse on its haunches. Scotty jerked on his curb and dropped the reins as he raised the .405, peering eagerly under the low trees. Rapid footfalls sounded in the leaves all about them and the Pee! Pee! of wild turkey chicks slipping through the underbrush. Their hurtling charge had scared the flock out of their natural silent caution. Suddenly a long bronze bird, running like the wind, his red legs and shining feathers flashing in the sun, darted across an opening. Scotty drew the bead on him, swung well ahead and pressed trigger. The bellow of his heavy weapon split the air under the trees, and out of the smoke they saw the gobbler struggling on the sand, his huge wings fluttering wildly.

“Some shootin’, son!—seventy paces or I’m a hoss thief!” roared Jake. “Thar goes another!—Atter him!—Ride like a buster!” The ponies leaped into gallop as a large bird twisted and dodged through the underbrush, for all the world like a scared hen. They wheeled and spun about, following his erratic dives, now and then catching sight of him.

“Tricky as a Mex. gambler’s deck, kid!” gasped Red Jake, picking his horse up like a cat to wheel him halfway around. “Thar he goes! Ride him up!—Hi! Hi! Hi!”

Their combined onset was too much for that particular turk, who took to wing forthwith. Scotty raised his rifle but hesitated. The bird was big as a barrel, but still mighty easy to miss on the wing, with a rifle! Red Jake spurred after him at top speed, whipped out his revolver and fanned shot after shot up into the air at him. At the third report the turkey collapsed and came down into the brush with a sounding thump.

“That’s Arizona shootin’ for ye, son!” grinned Jake, reining up his pony to punch out empty shells with the rammer of his frontier Colt. “Down in this free an’ enlightened commoonity we learns to cut our teeth on a six-gun, son. For A B C’s we has the short an’ easy road to the right hip; and when we gits so’s we kin hit ’em in the air from a gallopin’ cayuse we’s outer high school,” he grinned, stopping to roll a cigarette with thumb and forefinger and lighting it deftly by snapping the match on his finger nail.

They rode over to where the turkey had fallen, and Jake swung him up on the saddle. He would go all of eleven pounds. Except for his red legs and the absence of a broad white band across his tail feathers, there was nothing to distinguish him from the domesticated turkey of the farm. They tied this one and Scotty’s together and hung them in a tree, and then rode out up the draw for further adventures. The gully rose and widened out into a swale, filled with thick brown bear grass; beyond it began the sage and greasewood bushes, as moisture became scantier in the soil. To the right reared the immense escarpments of the red buttes; ahead a long, level sky line proclaimed some sort of divide.

“Waal, son, if you’re ready to jingle a spur, it’s jest likely we may see a couple of prong-horns over that divide. They lays out back here in the desert, for thar’s no drivin’ ’em away from water. I suppose you’d like to git one, hey?” inquired Jake.

“I’d love to see an antelope, but to shoot one—not on a bet!” returned Scotty, shaking his head stoutly.

A look of pleased surprise crossed Red Jake’s face. “Waal now!” he grinned, all interest. “Ef you ain’t the first sport that’s come down here that wasn’t all-fired crazy to snake out one of our antelopes! Th’ Major, he don’t shoot none, because they’se mighty scarce—but a guest,—of course, he don’t say nothin’, but——” Jake’s pantomime was expressive. “Say, them sports’ll put in all their chips the first round to git a prong-horn!”

“Just let me see one, wild, that’s all,” said Scotty, feeling that his stock was rising in the Arizonan’s estimation. “None of us may ever look upon another, soon, you know.”

They spurred up and rode out into the desert back of the red buttes. It was hot and bare and dotted with sage. It shimmered with heat waves, and glared like iron slag under the pitiless sun. The desert was in a far different mood, now, than when the glories of sunset and dawn made it splendid; it was now a scene of endless desolation, with sun-baked gray mesas standing sentinel across it, stretched to the north.

“Look! Thar they go! See ’em!” cried Jake, pointing suddenly across the distant plains with his finger. Scotty puckered up his eyes and searched the shimmering heat as best he could. Something was moving, far to the north. Like twin gray ghosts were they, bounding with incredible speed and tirelessness. Then one stopped and looked back toward them. A white flash appeared from his rump. Immediately he melted into the same gray invisibility as before.

“That’s their signal, that rump flash!” exclaimed Jake. “The ha’rs move, jest like you’d turn plush. They signals a warning, that way, to try out anything so far off they cayn’t see it well. If we could make a white flash like that in answer they’d think we was another herd. Look your fill, sonny, this is about as near as we’ll git to them.”

The antelope disappeared behind a ledge of rocks, as Scotty sat silently, resting one leg over his pony’s saddle, scanning the torrid, iron-bound scene.

“We’ll git back to the ranch, now, son,” remarked Jake as they rode back to the turkeys. “Hyar’s meat enough, even if Montana John an’ th’ other kid don’t hang up no buck. Put away your hardware. We won’t see nothin’ on the way back.”

They rode down the draw, and then along the river bank, crossing to the ranch. Major Hinchman and the Colonel rose to greet them and exclaim delightedly over the turkeys, while a roared order from Hinchman brought the Chinese cook running out into the patio.

“You, Lum Looke!—catch’m turkey, roast top-side all over, savvy?” directed the Major, handing the birds to the grinning Celestial.

About an hour later Big John rode into the patio with the buck across his saddle.

“Where’s Sid, John—coming along?” inquired Colonel Colvin, surprisedly, as Big John dismounted and pulled at the saddle thongs that held his buck in place.

“Nope!” he grinned. “Sid’s gone locoed, Colonel. Got a lonesome fit. Shore, nawthin’d do but he must steal a haunch of my buck an’ take a bag of pinole that he’s got hitched to his belt, and off he goes for a couple of days, all by his lonesome! He says fer us to pick him up in the Canyon.”

Red Jake wagged his head approvingly. “Which the same is the right layout,” he put in. “I’m admirin’ that kid’s sperrit! Ain’t nawthin’ to hurt him, ’scusin’ p’rhaps a cinnamon b’ar that’d run away as quick as he would, in these parts.”

“I ain’t worryin’ none, either, Jake,” grinned Big John. “It’s been for a long time my the’ry that thet boy’s borned to be hung,—an’ the good Lord ain’t goin’ to let nothin’ happen to him to cheat the halter, you bet!”

“But how will we find him?” asked the Colonel uneasily. “If it’s the Canyon, we’ve got a mighty lot of room to pick him up in. At Monument Canyon, you say, John? Well, I’m going out to-morrow. I can’t feel as easy as you do about him, John. Major Hinchman can’t get away for the trip, I’m sorry to say, so it’ll be just you and Scotty and myself,—and Sid when we find him. Get together all the horses and dog gear you need, and this afternoon we’ll go over the grub.”

It was early next morning when their little cavalcade, preceded by the four dogs, trotted out from the hospitable gates of Hinchman’s ranch and followed the left bank of the river. Colonel Colvin led the line on his big roan, with the bulging pockets of his cavalry saddle secured by their leather yoke over the cantle hook, and above that hung his bed roll and tarp in a long, low bundle. After him came four pack animals, with the water cans in their panniers, now filled with oats, to be used later on the desert, crossing to Grand Canyon. The grub and duffel bags were piled across the saddle trees under tarps, with the diamond hitch thrown over them. Big John brought up the rear, with Scotty as outrider. The way led up some of the roughest bad lands Scotty had ever seen until it reached the rim of a high plateau to the east. The horses labored and grunted; even the dogs stopped now and then with panting tongues, and once or twice the pack animals tried to roll over in protest. But once on the plateau they found themselves in a typical open stand of western yellow pine, the tall, well-formed trees standing far apart from each other, gigantic and imposing spires of dark green. The floor of the plateau was flat and covered with sparse bayeta grass.

Presently the horses broke into a run of their own accord, even the pack animals bobbing along in an enthusiastic burst of speed. Far under the distant tree trunks Ruler and his three pups galloped tirelessly, noses down, snuffing old scents, heels flying, ears flapping, the pups now and then giving tongue as they struck recent jack rabbit or deer sign.

Scotty and Colonel Colvin galloped hard after them, heading off the pups from all trails with slashing quirt and bellowed command, for it was essential to get them rabbit and deer proof before going over to the lion country of the Grand Canyon. Mile after mile of this exhilarating open forest riding kept up. Twice during the morning deeper and thicker banks of trees showed up ahead, where small canyons intervened, with dense growths of spruce rising out of them. Or, there would be a hazy void ahead and they would find themselves on the brink of a vast chasm, where some tributary to Red Valley would cut its gigantic ravine through the belted forest of the plateau. Then Big John would lead the train in detours of miles to the eastward around the head of it. This way was much longer and more circuitous than Sid’s route down Red Valley, but it served the double purpose of striking Canyon Cheyo far up near its head and reaching at the same time Neyani’s hogan, which lay to the eastward of it, for Colonel Colvin had agreed to look up Neyani and see what could be done about the Medicine Panther for Major Hinchman.

It was four in the afternoon when Big John at length turned west and the pack train began to descend the head slope of a ravine which led down in steep declivities into the Canyon Cheyo floor hundreds of feet below.

“We ought to name this ravine ‘Yellow Canyon,’ all right, sir!” said Scotty to the Colonel as they dismounted and led their horses down the almost perpendicular slopes. “Look at those buttes—all of yellow clay, and worn as smooth as cakes of soap! See how the trees manage to grow, out of every crack and cranny and all their trunks turn up the cliff faces!”