-fringed
and crag-spired.

"Wal, Miss Majesty, now we're gettin' somewhere," said Stillwell,
cracking his whip. "Ten miles across this valley an' we'll be in the
foothills where the Apaches used to run."

"Ten miles!" exclaimed Madeline. "It looks no more than half a mile to
me."

"Wal, young woman, before you go to ridin' off alone you want to get
your eyes corrected to Western distance. Now, what'd you call them black
things off there on the slope?"

"Horsemen. No, cattle," replied Madeline, doubtfully.

"Nope. Jest plain, every-day cactus. An' over hyar--look down the
valley. Somethin' of a pretty forest, ain't thet?" he asked, pointing.

Madeline saw a beautiful forest in the center of the valley toward the
south.

"Wal, Miss Majesty, thet's jest this deceivin' air. There's no forest.
It's a mirage."

"Indeed! How beautiful it is!" Madeline strained her gaze on the dark
blot, and it seemed to float in the atmosphere, to have no clearly
defined margins, to waver and shimmer, and then it faded and vanished.

The mountains dropped down again behind the horizon, and presently the
road began once more to slope up. The horses slowed to a walk. There was
a mile of rolling ridge, and then came the foothills. The road ascended
through winding valleys. Trees and brush and rocks began to appear in
the dry ravines. There was no water, yet all along the sandy washes were
indications of floods at some periods. The heat and the dust stifled
Madeline, and she had already become tired. Still she looked with all
her eyes and saw birds, and beautiful quail with crests, and rabbits,
and once she saw a deer.

"Miss Majesty," said Stillwell, "in the early days the Indians made this
country a bad one to live in. I reckon you never heerd much about them
times. Surely you was hardly born then. I'll hev to tell you some day
how I fought Comanches in the Panhandle--thet was northern Texas--an' I
had some mighty hair-raisin' scares in this country with Apaches."

He told her about Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, the most
savage and bloodthirsty tribe that ever made life a horror for the
pioneer. Cochise befriended the whites once; but he was the victim of
that friendliness, and he became the most implacable of foes. Then,
Geronimo, another Apache chief, had, as late as 1885, gone on the
war-path, and had left a bloody trail down the New Mexico and Arizona
line almost to the border. Lone ranchmen and cowboys had been kil