r horse to a walk on
the rising slopes and urging him a little with her spurred heels on the
levels. She did not let him lag--she could not, if she covered the
distance she had in her mind to cover.

Away over to the south--almost to Sinkhole Camp, in fact--was a ridge
that was climbable on horseback. Not every ridge in that country was,
and Mary V was not fond of walking in the sand on a hot day. The ridge
commanded a far view, and was said to be a metropolis among the snakes
that populated the region. Mary V had, very casually, mentioned to the
boys that some day she meant to get a good picture of a snake den. She
said "the girls" did not believe that snakes went in bunches and writhed
amicably together in their dens. She was going to prove it to them.

A perfectly logical quest it was therefore that led her toward that
ridge. You could not blame Mary V if the view from the top of it extended
to Sinkhole Camp and beyond. She had not made the view, remember, nor had
she advised the snakes to choose that ridge for their dens. She was not
even perfectly sure that they did choose it. The boys had told her that
Black Ridge was "full up" with snake dens, and she meant to see if they
told the truth.

Wherefore her horse Tango laboriously carried Mary V up the ridge and
kept his ears perked for the warning buzz of rattlers, and his eyes open
for a feasible line retreat in case he heard one. Tango knew just as well
as Mary V when they were in snake country. He had gone so far as to argue
the point of climbing that ridge, but as usual Mary V's argument was
stronger than Tango's, and he had yielded with an injured air that was
quite lost upon his rider. Mary V was thinking of something else.

They reached the top without having seen a single snake. Tango seemed
somewhat surprised at this, but Mary V was not. Mary V thought it was too
hot even for rattlesnakes, and as for the dearth of lizards--well she
supposed the snakes had eaten them all. She had let Tango stop often to
breathe, and whenever he did so she had looked south, scanning as much of
the lower level as she could see, which was not the proper way to go
about hunting snake dens, I assure you. But at the top she permitted
Tango to walk into the shade of a boulder that radiated heat like a stove
but was still preferable to the blistering sunlight, and there she left
him while she walked a little nearer the edge of the rimrock that topped
the ridge on its southern side