When he awoke, a bar of sunshine which at first he mistook for an outcropping of Spanish gold, glowed against the granite wall of his mountain-top retreat. He rose in leisurely fashion--henceforth there would be plenty of time, years of it, running to waste with useless days. After eating and partaking sparingly of the brackish water of the keg, he nailed together two long sideboards of the dismembered wagon; and having secured these end to end, he fastened in parallel strips to the surface short sticks as steps to his ladder. This finished, he made a rope-ladder. The ladder of boards was for use in leaving the cave; the rope-ladder, which he meant to hide under some boulder near the crevice, could be used in making the descent. The formless mass of inchoate debris, the result of his toilsome journeys of the night before, was left as it had fallen--there would be time enough to sort all that, a hundred times. At present, he would venture forth with the sole object of examining his surroundings. "This suits me exactly," he muttered, with a good-humored chuckle; "just doing one thing at a time, and being everlasting slow about doing that." Fastening the rope-ladder about his waist, he scaled the boards, and on reaching the top, cast them down. First, he looked all about, but no living creature was in sight. "This is just to my hand," he said aloud, seeking a suitable hiding-place for the rope-ladder; "I always did despise company." Stowing away the rope-ladder in a secure fissure between two giant blocks of granite, each the size of a large two-story house, he crossed to the first ridge, and looked out over the prairie, to triumph over the vacant spot where the covered wagon had stood fifteen hours before. "No telling what a man can do," he exclaimed admiringly, "that is to say, if his name is Brick Willock." His eyes wandered to the mound of stones built over the woman's grave. His prayer recurred to his mind. "Well, God," he said, looking up at the cloudless sky, "I guess you're doing it!" After this expression of faith, he turned about and set forth to traverse the mountain range. Passing the ridge which he already looked upon as home, he crossed other ridges of varying height, and at the end of a mile reached the southern limit of the mountain. Like the northern side the southern elevation was nearly four hundred feet, as if the granite sea had dashed upward in fiercest waves, in a last futile attempt to inundate the plain. The southern wall was precipitous, and Willock, looking down the cedar-studded declivity, could gaze directly on the verdant levels that came to the very foot.