His desire to follow a trail so oddly blazed was indulged as quickly as born. The caress of one knee against saddle leather and the lightest lift of rein notified his tricolored steed. Polkadot sprang from the beaten path into an upward scramble over the rocks. The going would have advised the least astute of mountain goats to watch its step. But Dot was sure-footed from long practice over the boundary barriers of Hellroaring Valley. When the white blaze faded out—when the trees ceased to be circle-marked—neither man nor mount would have considered a stop. From appearances, no one ahorse had left that gorge before by that route; probably no one would again. On and up they moved, enticed by the mystery of what might or might not be lurking at the top. Across a flat bristling with rhododendrons and so small as to be accounted scarce more than a ledge, trotted the cow-pony; insinuated his way through a fringe of Forsythia brush just beginning to yellow; dug his shoe-prongs into the earth of a steep, but easier slope. Pape, looking back, could see through the tree tips a mountainous range of turreted peaks and flat-topped buttes, terminating on the north in a massive green copper dome. The height gained, he was interested by the discovery of an unroofed blockhouse of rough stone that literally perched upon a precipitous granite hump. Was it a relic of Indian war-path days? Had the flintlocks of pioneers spit defiance through the oblong loopholes inserted at intervals in its walls? He wondered. “You wouldn’t be homesick at all, Dot, if your imagination had the speed of your hoofs,” he leaned down to adjure his horse, after a habit formed on many a lonelier trail. “Can’t you just hear those old-fashioned pop-guns popping? No? Well, at least you can hear the dogwood yapping? Look around you, horse-alive! Don’t this scene remind you of home? Of course you’ve got to concentrate on things near at hand. But trust me, that’s the secret of living to-day—concentration. Look far afield and you’ll lose the illusion, just as you bark your shins when you mix gaits.” A shrill trill startled both; centered Pape’s attention on the brush that edged the mesa to his right. But the quail he suspected was too expert in the art of camouflage to betray its presence except by a repetition of his call, closer and more imperative than the first. “That bird-benedict must be sized like a sage hen to toot all that. Maybe he’s a Mormon and obliged to get noisy to assemble his wives.”