f a midnight sky. And the
mountain was roaring.

Softened by the distance, the deep, grumbling bass sang thunderingly
through and above the other noises of the night, as if old Sentinel
itself were voicing its remonstrance against this disturbance of its
age-long rest.

The grumbling died to a clatter of falling boulders a hundred yards
away at the mountain's base, and Connell's eyes discerned a puff of
vaporous gray, a cloud of wind-blown dust, high up on the mountain's
flank.

"Holy cats!" said Garry explosively, "what a slide! That must have
ripped the old boy wide open."

His eyes followed the white scar far up on the mountainside, followed
it down to the last loosened stones that had crashed among the date
palms of Miramar ranch. "I don't just like the idea of the whole
mountain moving in on me," he told himself; "I'll have to go up and
look at that to-morrow."

* * * * *

It was afternoon of the following day when Garry rolled blankets and
food into a snug pack and prepared for the ascent. "Guess likely I'll
sleep out to-night," he mused and looked at the pistol he held in his
hand.

"I don't want that thing slapping against me," he argued; "too darned
hot! And there's nothing to use a gun on up on Sentinel.... Oh, well!"
He threw the holster upon his bunk and dropped the automatic into the
pack he was rolling. "I'll take it along. Might meet up with a
rattler."

He brushed the sandy hair from his wet forehead and straightened to
his full six feet of slender height before he slipped the straps of
his pack about his shoulders. And a broad grin made pleasant lines
about his gray eyes as he realized the boyish curiosity that was
driving him to a stiff climb in the heat of the day.

There was no real trail up the thousand-foot slope of Sentinel
Mountain. Prospectors had been over it, doubtless, in earlier days,
but in all of Garry's twenty-one years no one besides himself had ever
made the ascent.

There was nothing in all that solitary, desolate peak to call them;
nothing, for that matter, to beckon Garry, except the hot desert days,
the cool breath of evening and the glory of nights when the stars hung
low over all the miles of sand and sagebrush that reached far out to
the rippling sand-dunes shimmering in the distance. Nothing, that is,
but the "feel" of the desert--and young Garry Connell was desert-born
and bred.

He stopped once and dropped his pack while he moppe