Where is the Mexican conducting them? He has brought them into a
desert. Is the journey to end in their death? It looks like enough.

Some counsel killing him, and returning on their tracks. Not all; only
a minority. The majority cry "Onward!" with a thought beyond present
suffering. They must find the bones of Walt Wilder and bury them!
Brave men, true men, these Texan Rangers! Rough in outward appearance,
often rude in behaviour, they have hearts gentle as children. Of all
friends the most faithful, whether it be affection or pure
_camaraderie_. In this case a comrade has been killed--cruelly
murdered, and in a strange manner. Its very strangeness has maddened
them the more, while sharpening their desire to have a last look at his
remains, and give them Christian burial. Only the fainthearted talk of
retreating; the others do not think of it, and these are more than the
majority.

On, therefore, they ride across treeless, grassless tracks; along the
banks of streams, of whose bitter, saline waters they cannot drink, but
tantalising themselves and their animals. On, on!

Their perseverance is at length rewarded. Before their eyes looms up a
line of elevated land, apparently the profile of a mountain.

But no; it cannot be that.

Trending horizontally, without curvature, against the sky, they know it
is not a mountain, but a mesa--a table-land.

It is the Llano Estacado.

Drawing nearer, they get under the shadow of its beetling bluffs.

They see that these are rugged, with promontories projecting far out
over the plain, forming what Spanish Americans, in their expressive
phraseology, call _ceja_.

Into an embayment between two of the out-stretching spurs Barbato
conducts them.

Joyously they ride into it, like ships long storm-tossed entering a
haven of safety; for at the inner end of the concavity there is a cleft
in the precipitous wall, reaching from base to summit, out of which
issues a stream whose waters are sweet!

It is a branch of the Brazos River, along whose banks they have been
some time travelling, lower down finding its waters bitter as gall.
That was in its course through the selenite. Now they have reached the
sandstone it is clear as crystal, and to them sweeter than champagne.

"Up it lies our way," says the renegade guide, pointing to the portals
of the canon through which the stream debouched from the table to the
lower plain.

But for that night the Rangers care ho