Before them a lavender haze of dust blended desert and sky. The pinto kept straight ahead and, after an hour or more of choking, silent progress, suddenly cactus and maguey became strange new shrubs, an upheaval of distorted rocks appeared, and they were treading their way among bowlders that grew bigger and bigger. They were in a little canyon. Its floor was sometimes a stream bed and the coarse-grained sand made heavy going. The horses were plodding, the riders dazed with heat and a shimmer of light brighter than any they had ever known. At length Paintbrush came to a stop in the cool blue shadow of a high rock cliff. He lifted up his head and sniffed with distended nostrils. Looking up Raquel saw that the rock was strangely smooth, like lava, and porous looking. There were curious hollows and holes, and small caves in it. She slipped from the back of the little wild horse and instinctively, trustfully, shakily went over to the largest of the holes. It was a natural wall fountain, and within it was cool, clear, sweet water. Twelve inches of it in a wide basin! The horses were waiting obediently, deferentially. Raquel pulled Georgie away from the water and made him lie down between drinks, while she bathed his head and face. Later on, while the horses grazed on the tufts of sweet grass growing in the crevices of the rock she searched up the _canoncito_ and found plenty of ripened tunas on which birds were already feasting. She knocked the strawberry-red pear to the ground with a stick to avoid those murderous little needles with which the cactus covers even its fruit, and rolled them into her handkerchief. Georgie was weak but much restored, and grinned cheerfully as he devoured the twelfth prickly pear. “But somehow my stomach craves solids, Sis,” he admitted. “Little likelihood of solids, my lad.” Raquel was spreading her blanket for the night. They slept, and woke, and slept again, through the warm night. The air was light as a feather, dry, sweet, cool enough. It was uneasiness, hunger and fatigue that made them restless. Dawn seemed long in coming, and shortly after they were making their way again up the canyon. _Some_ habitation _must_ be found. One cannot live forever on cactus fruit. Then, rounding a corner of the strange porous rock, that made the landscape appear like some other planet, they came upon a thread of blue smoke and a delicious smell of cooking food. There perched on the side of a rock was a tiny house of branches and a little Mexican woman boiling coffee on a small fire before her door and baking tortillas on a sheet of iron over the coals. She was patting more flat corn cakes between her hands as she tended her cooking. “_Buenos dias, Señora._” They cantered up beneath her little house. “Good day,” she replied incuriously, quite as if strangers dropped down upon her for breakfast just at any time. She did not look up, but went straight on with what she was doing.