eside him and achingly striven for the same forgetfulness, but
Tula relentlessly shook Miguel awake, got him on the burro, unerringly
designated the food bag in the dark, and started again in the lead.

"I reckon you're some sort of Indian devil," decided Kit, shouldering
the bag. "No mere mortal ever made this trail or kept it open."

Several times the towering walls suggested the bottom of a well, and
as another and another loomed up ahead, he gloomily prophesied an
ultimate wall, and the need of wings.

Then, just as the first faint light began in the eastern heavens, he
was aware that the uneven trail was going down and down, zig-zagging
into a ravine like a great gray bowl, and the bottom of it filled with
shadows of night.

The girl was staggering now with exhaustion though she would not
confess it. Once she fell, and he lifted her thinking she was hurt,
but she clung to him, shaking from weakness, but whispering, "_Pronto,
pronto!_"

"Sure!" he agreed, "all the swiftness the outfit can muster."

Curious odors came to him from the shadowy bowl, not exactly a
pleasing fragrance, yet he knew it--But his mind refused to work. As
the trail grew wider, and earth was under his feet instead of rock
slivers and round boulders, he discovered that he was leading the
burro, the grub sack over his shoulder, and with the other arm was
supporting the girl, who was evidently walking with closed eyes, able
to progress but not to guide herself.

Then there was the swish-swish of grasses about their feet and poor
Bunting snatched mouthfuls as all three staggered downward. The light
began to grow, and somewhere in the shadowy bowl there was the most
blest sound known in the desert, the gurgle of running water!

"We hear it--but we can't believe it--old Buntin'," muttered Kit
holding the burro from steady and stubborn attempts to break away,
"and you are just loco enough to think you smell it."

Then suddenly their feet struck rock again, not jagged or slippery
fragments, but solid paving, and a whiff of faint mist drifted across
his face in the gray of the first dawn, and the burro craned his neck
forward at the very edge of a black rock basin where warm vapor struck
the nostrils like a soporific.

The girl roused herself at a wordless exclamation from Rhodes, and
began automatically helping Miguel from the saddle, and stripping him
to the breechcloth.

Kit's amazement startled him out of his lethargy of exhaustion. It