“I'm able to say I don't know a thing about it. If no one can get into it, I should think that's about all, isn't it?” “Yes--you'd think so,” Honey agreed enigmatically, and began to talk of the racing that day, and of the dance, and of other dances and other races yet to come. Bud discussed these subjects for a while and then asked boldly, “When's Lew coming back?” “Lew?” Honey shot a swift glance at him. “Why?” She looked ahead at the forbidding, craggy hills toward which she had glanced when she spoke of Catrock. “Why, I don't know. How should I?” Bud saw that he had spoken unwisely. “I was thinking he'd maybe hate to miss another running match like to-day,” he explained guilelessly. “Everybody and his dog seemed to be there to-day, and everybody had money up. All,” he modified, “except the Muleshoe boys. I didn't see any of them.” “You won't,” Honey told him with some emphasis. “Uncle Dave and the Muleshoe are on the outs. They never come around except for mail and things from the store. And most always they send Hen. Uncle Dave and Dirk Tracy had an awful row last winter. It was next thing to a killing. So of course the outfits ain't on friendly terms.” This was more than Pop had gossiped to Bud, and since the whole thing was of no concern to him, and Honey plainly objected to talking about Marian's husband, he was quite ready to fix his interest once more upon the Sinks. He was surprised when they emerged from a cluster of small, sage-covered knolls, directly upon the edge of what at first sight seemed to be another dry river bed--sprawled wider, perhaps, with irregular arms thrust back into the less sterile land. They rode down a steep, rocky trail and came out into the Sinks. It was an odd, forbidding place, and the farther up the gravelly bottom they rode, the more forbidding it became. Bud thought that in the time when Indians were dangerous as she-bears the Sinks would not be a place where a man would want to ride. There were too many jutting crags, too many unsuspected, black holes that led back--no one knew just where. Honey led the way to an irregular circle of waterwashed cobbles and Bud peered down fifty feet to another dry, gravelly bottom seemingly a duplicate of the upper surface. She rode on past other caves, and let him look down into other holes. There were faint rumblings in some of these, but in none was there any water showing save in stagnant pools in the rock where the rain had fallen. “There's one cave I like to go into,” said Honey at last. “It's a little farther on, but we have time enough. There's a spring inside, and we can eat our sandwiches. It isn't dark-there are openings to the top, and lots of funny, winding passages. That,” she finished thrillingly, “is the place the Indians claim is haunted.”