e heart of
the mountain. Just when it seemed that the trail must end in a blind
pocket, the Texan swung into a cross fissure so narrow that the
stirrups brushed either side. So dark was it between the towering rock
walls that Alice could scarcely make out the cowboy's horse, although
at no time was he more than ten or fifteen feet in advance. After
innumerable windings the fissure led once more to the face of the
mountain and Tex headed his horse out upon a ledge that had not been
discernible from below. Alice gasped, and for a moment it seemed as
though she could not go on. Spread out before her like a huge relief
map were the ridges and black coulees of the bad lands, and directly
below--hundreds of feet below--the gigantic rock fragments lay strewn
along the base of the cliff like the abandoned blocks of a child. She
closed her eyes and shuddered. A loose piece of rock on the narrow
trail, a stumble, and--she could feel herself whirling down, down,
down. It was the voice of the Texan--confident, firm, reassuring--that
brought her once more to her senses.

"It's all right. Just follow right along. Shut your eyes, or keep 'em
to the wall. We're half-way up. It ain't so steep from here on, an'
she widens toward the top. I'm dizzy-headed, too, in high places an' I
shut mine. Just give the horse a loose rein an' he'll keep the trail.
There ain't nowhere else for him to go."

With a deadly fear in her heart, the girl fastened her eyes upon the
cowboy's back and gave her horse his head. And as she rode she
wondered at this man who unhesitatingly risked his life upon the word
of a horse-thief.

Almost before she realized it the ordeal was over and her horse was
following its leader through a sparse grove of bull pine. The ascent
was still rather sharp, and the way strewn with boulders, and fallen
trees, but the awful precipice, with its sheer drop of many hundreds of
feet to the black rocks below, no longer yawned at her stirrup's edge,
and it was with a deep-drawn breath of relief that she allowed her eyes
once again to travel out over the vast sweep of waste toward the west
where the moon hung low and red above the distant rim of the bad lands.

The summit of Antelope Butte was, as the horse-thief had said, an ideal
camping place for any one who was "on the run." The edges of the
little plateau, which was roughly circular in form, rose on every side
to a height of thirty or forty feet, at some points i