I hurried along their trail, and as the daylight got stronger and the sun began to peep over the hills, I could make out, about a couple of miles from me, a bunch of cattle feeding. I knew this was the bunch I was trailing, and already some of the other boys had seen them also and were hurrying toward them. But, between me and the cattle was, I knew, a dangerous crack. It was some six feet wide and ten deep, and probably half a mile long. If Tom had ridden into that he was either dead or badly hurt. As I neared the crack my heart sank, for I saw the trail would strike it fairly about the widest place, and my worst fears were realized when I reached it, for there lying under a dozen head of dead and dying steers was poor Tom. The trail told the whole story. He had almost turned them when they reached the crack, and he had ridden into it sideways or diagonally, and some twenty steers had followed, crushing him and his horse to death, and killing about a dozen of them. The balance were wandering about in the bottom of the crack trying to get out, but its sides were precipitous everywhere. Drawing my six-shooter, I fired two shots, and rode my pony in circles from left to right, which in cowboy and frontier sign language means, "Come to me." The boys quickly rode over to where I was, and we, with great work, managed to get his body out from under his horse and up on top. He still held his pearl-handled Colts in his hand, every chamber empty, and his hat was hanging round his neck by the leather string. Tenderly we laid his body across a saddle, lashed it on with a rope, and taking the boy thus dismounted up behind me, we led the horse with its sad burden back to camp. I think death, when it strikes among them, always affects rough men more than it does men of finer sensibilities and breeding. They get over it more quickly, but for the time the former seem to be fairly overwhelmed with the mystery of death, and seem dazed and helpless, where the latter would not for a moment lose their heads. But Jack quickly pulled himself together. It was fifty miles to the nearest town. With our heavy mess-wagon and slow team over a sandy road, it would take two days to get the body there. Packing it on a horse in that hot Arizona sun was out of the question, and so we decided to bury him right there. Tom had no relatives in Arizona, nor any nearer friends than us rough "punchers," so that no wrong would be done any one by burying him there. [Illustration: "_Some pre-historic people had carved hieroglyphics on it_"]