waste of crags and broken ridges.

On the edge of this devil's dooryard of bare rocks and no less dry and
sterile ravines Slade gave over the lead to the oldest of his Navahos. A
white man could have found his way only by blind chance through the maze
of twisted clefts that seamed the unscalable cliffs and crags.

Lennon soon lost all sense of direction. He realized that he could not
hope to find his way out of these worst of bad lands without a guide. He
must put off his plans to escape until the return to the trail. He began
to surmise that Cripple Sim's inability to relocate the lost lode may
not have been due altogether to his maiming by Apache arrows.

But this jagged waste that had kept the secret of the mine hidden for a
generation would offer an impassable barrier to any railway. Unless an
easier route could be found, the entire project was already proved
hopeless. Even a vein of solid copper could not be worked at a profit if
the metal had to be packed out on burros.

Yet there remained the chance of another route to the lode; and Lennon
was not minded to confide his disappointment to Slade. He spurred his
pony to keep pace with the others. The sooner the mine was relocated and
the party back at the trail, the sooner he could make his attempt to
escape. After Elsie had been freed from her dangerous prison in Dead
Hole he could take time to search for a feasible route to the mine.

Toward sundown the old Navaho led the party clear of the shattered rock
maze and up the side of a small mesa. From the table top Lennon saw the
mighty towers of Triple Butte startlingly close ahead. Slade reined in
to stare hard-eyed at the engineer.

"There's your butte," he rumbled. "Which side do we head?"

"North," replied Lennon, without a moment's hesitation.

Though he had been lost since leaving the trail, he clearly remembered
all the directions given by the old prospector as to the position of the
lode in relation to Triple Butte. From the top of the mesa practical
railway routes appeared to offer to the east and north of the great
butte.

Lennon studied the landscape until he noticed that the Navaho leader had
headed south of east instead of north. Certain that his reply to Slade
had been misunderstood, he spurred forward to explain that they were
veering away from the lost lode.

Slade rode on without a word of acknowledgment. The presence of the
Navahos made his contemptuous silence doubly galling. Lennon took i