Sandy had only once crossed the Pass of the Goats and that was years before. There had been washouts since then. Several times they were forced to dismount and lead the nervous beasts, Sandy doing the coaxing, helping Molly over the difficult places. He rode a mare named Goldie and the girl a bay with a white blaze that Sandy had chosen for the mountain work and which had been brought to them at the lava strip. The mare halted, neck stretched out, turning it to look inquiringly at her master. A sharp incline lay ahead, the path little better than one made by the goats for which the pass was named. Behind, Molly's mount followed suit, blowing at the dust. Sandy patted the mare's neck and dismounted. "It's late, ain't it?" asked Molly. "Will we miss that train?" "There's others," answered Sandy. "Or, if there ain't any mo' ter-night, we'll hire us a car an' keep movin'. Yo're sure game, Molly;" he added admiringly, "you must be clean tuckered out." She shook her head with an attempt at a smile. "I'll be glad when we start goin' down, fer a change," she admitted, looking into the gloomy trough of the canyon through which the night wind soughed. "I'll tighten up yore cinches," said Sandy. "Worst of the climb's jest ahead. Then we start to drop down t'other side. You don't have to git off. Trail's bound to be better once we git atop the mesa and start down. Mesa's right narrer, as I remember. T'other side's away from the weather. There's a canyon with oak trees an' a stream of water." He tugged at the leathers, his knee against the bay's ribs as she grunted. "You ain't much furtheh to go, li'l' hawss," he chatted on. "Downhill all the way soon an' then a drink to wash out yore mouth an' the best feed in Caroca fo' the pair of you." "Gits dark mighty quick up here," said the girl. A great cloud was ballooning above them, like a dirigible that had lost buoyancy and was bumping along the mesa ridge. Its belly was black, its western side ruddy in the sunset. Sandy viewed it apprehensively. In superficial survey the mesa seemed much like the stranded carcass of a mastodonic creature left behind when the waters departed from these inland seas. A hard skeleton of igneous rock, with clayey soil for flesh, riven and seamed and pitted, crumbling and dusty in the sun, ever disintegrating with wind and water and frost. Under a rain the trail was slimy as a whale's back. The cloud was soggy with moisture. Bursting, it would send torrents roaring down every ravine, wash out weathered masses of earth, sweep all before it as it gathered forces and rushed out on the desert, leaving the main canyons carved a little richer, the surface of the soil on the sink a little deeper, against the time when men should control these storm waters or bring the precious fluid up from underground reservoirs and make the desert blossom like the rose.