They rode some time in silence, Grant turning over in his mind this unthought-of possibility. Tenderfoot that he was--so he accused himself--he had noted the carbines slung in scabbards at each saddlehorn; noted with an unreading eye. So Benicia and all the others had provided against a contingency he had not even suspected. “Only thing I’m figgerin’ in this proposition,” he heard Bim saying, “is, will the Papagoes stick under fire? Papagoes are not strong for the knock-down-an’-drag-out stuff. An’, besides, you’re not a whole man yet.” “Whole enough to keep my end up,” Grant said shortly, knowing not why he resented any imputation of disability against him. “Oh, sure--sure!” the other hurriedly amended, and the subject died. Dawn spread a ghostly panorama before them. In the greeny-white light that heralds the sun’s first ruddiness the whole western horizon bulked with black masses of slag heaped in fantastic shapes. High above the lesser masses towered the two peaks of Pinacate, their summits yawning in wide craters. The horses’ hoofs struck sparks from lava aprons; the beasts had to pick their way carefully over traps and crevices. Ever and again grey arms of cactus struck out to rake the riders’ legs with claws of thorns. Waxing light filled in details of a phantom land, terrific in stark brutalities of scarp and battlement--a world just set aside from the baking-oven of the Potter and unadorned by a single brush stroke. The little company of horsemen threaded single file up a narrow gorge between the main peaks of the range. Walls of porphyry and slag the colour of furnace clinkers leaped to heights on either side which dwarfed the riders to the stature of weevils. The trail they followed was the path cut by the rushing waters of summer cloudbursts, which pack into the downpour of minutes’ duration all the water denied during months of drought; great blocks of fused glass and conglomerate wrenched from the canyon’s eaves by the fingers of these storms choked the way. Where capfuls of soil had been caught and held in some pocket the gaunt sticks of the _ocatilla_ splayed out against raw rock like cat’s whiskers. Low-lying _cholla_, that spined and vicious vegetable tarantula of the desert, seemed to grow from the very rock; all its nodules were frosty with close-set thorns. Over all dropped the veil of mystical morning radiance. The horses groaned as they had to choose, minute by minute, between barking their hocks on the knife-like corners of obsidian or taking the barbs of the _cholla_. The higher the ascent the savager grew the way. Grant, awed by this penetration into the very laboratory of earth, almost leaped from his saddle when a sharp clatter of small pebbles to his right broke the silence. His eyes jumped up the canyon wall to follow three dots of bounding dun-white against its sheer side--bighorn sheep skipping surely along no visible foothold.