he is----"

"Sleeping beyond belief! good medicine sleep, I hope."

She nodded her head comprehendingly, for she had done the impossible
and had triumphed. She looked at the sack of food he held.

"There is one place for fire, and other water is there. Come, it is to
you."

She struck off across the sun-bathed little grass plot to a jumble of
rock where a cool spring emerged, ran only a few rods, and sank again
out of sight. The shattered rock was as a sponge, so completely was
the water sucked downward again. Marks of burro's hoofs were there.

"Baby Buntin' been prospecting while we wallowed in the dope bath,"
said Kit.

"Maybe so, maybe not," uttered the Indian child, if such she could be
called after the super-woman initiative of that forbidding trail. She
was down on her knees peering at the tracks in the one little wet spot
below the spring.

"Two," she said enigmatically. "That is good, much good. It will be
meat."

Then she saw him pulling dry grasses and breaking branches of scrub
growth for a fire, and she stood up and motioned him to follow. They
were in a narrow, deep ravine separated from the main one by the
miniature plain of lush grass, a green cradle of rest in the heart of
the gray hills. She went as directly upward as the broken rock would
permit, and suddenly he followed her into a blackened cave formed by a
great granite slab thrusting itself upwards and enduring through the
ages when the broken rock had shattered down to form an opposite wall.
And the cloud bursts of the desert had swept through, and washed the
sands clear, leaving a high black roof slanting upwards to the
summit.

Tula moved ahead into the far shadows. He could see that beyond her
somewhere a ray of light filtered blue, but he halted at the entrance,
puzzled at the black roof where all the rock of the mountain was gray
and white except where mineral streaks were of reds and russets and
moldy greens. Then he put his hand up and touched the roof and
understood. Soot from ancient fires was discernible on his hand,
flakes of it fell to the floor, dry and black, scaling off under
pressure. The scales were thick and very old, like blackened moss. He
had seen blackened rock like that in other volcanic regions, but this
was different.

"It is here," said Tula, and he followed the voice through a darker
shadowed bit of the way, then through the ray of light, and then----

The first thing he saw was the raised hearth of a rath