outh.

"Kells," grinned the giant; "your voice is froze, right now!"

And yet the men enjoyed the cold air. It had a tonic effect upon them;
they were energetic, eager, and always ravenously hungry. The cook
offered testimony on that subject, unsolicited.

"I never seen a bunch of mavericks that gobbled more grub than this here
outfit!" he stated on the second morning. "Or that swilled more coffee,"
he added. "Seems like all they come on this drive for is to eat!"

Toward the close of the second day corrugations began to appear in the
level. Little ridges and valleys broke the monotony of travel; rocks
began to dot the earth; the gray grass disappeared, the barren stretches
grew larger and more frequent, and the yucca and the lancelike octilla
began to appear here and there. The trend of the trail had been upward
all afternoon--gradual at first, hardly noticeable. But as the day drew
to a close the cattle mounted a slope, progressing more slowly, and the
horses hitched to the wagons began to strain in the harness.

The rise seemed to be endless--to have no visible terminus. For it went
up and up until it melted into the horizon; like the brow of a hill
against the sky. But when, after hours of difficult travel, herd and men
gained the summit, a broad, green-brown mesa lay before them.

The mesa was miles wide, and ran an interminable distance eastward.
Looking back over the way they had come, the men could see that the
level over which they had ridden for the past two days was in reality
the floor of a mighty valley. Far away into the west they could see a
break in the mesa--where it sloped down to merge into the plains near
Willets. The men knew that beyond that break ran the steel rails that
connected the town with Red Rock, their destination. But it was plain to
them that the rails must make a gigantic curve somewhere in the
invisible distance, or that they ran straight into a range of low
mountains that fringed the northern edge of the mesa.

Lawler enlightened the men at the camp fire that night.

"The railroad runs almost straight from Willets," he said. "There's a
tunnel through one of the mountains, and other tunnels east of it. And
there's a mountain gorge with plenty of water in it, where the railroad
runs on a shelving level blasted out of the wall. The mountains form a
barrier that keeps Willets and the Wolf River section blocked in that
direction. It's the same south of here, the only difference bein