Until about noon the trail wound around great hills of rocks, and in and out of deep gulches and rocky defiles, and over high ridges of rock; and then, just as the sun was nearing the meridian, it entered a broad mountain-enclosed valley, some six or seven miles long by about two miles wide. Near the upper end of the valley a tall pinnacle of rocks shot up into the sky, like a church steeple, at the head of what looked like an almost precipitous mass of rocks that rose many hundreds of feet above the level of the valley. "See that rock?" and Dickson pointed triumphantly to the steeple-like rock at the head of the valley. "Shore, not bein' blind," Ham answered. "What might it be doin' thar?" and he grinned. "That rock," and Dickson paused to glance around the circle of faces that now surrounded him, "stands within half a mile of the Devil's Slide, which is the only way down into Lot's Canyon. Boys, we should be in Lot's Canyon in two hours!" "Hurrah!" yelled Thure. "Hurrah!" echoed Bud. "Come on," cried Mr. Conroyal. "The sooner we get there the better. Pedro, see if you can't liven up them pack-horses a little." "Si, si, senor," and Pedro began hurling volleys of Mexican oaths at the pack-horses and running from one to another of them, striking with his whip and urging with his voice, until the patient animals were moving as fast as the safety of their packs would permit. Pedro appeared to be in unusually good spirits that day. All the gloom of the day before had vanished with the dawning of the morning of the night of the hooting owl. In an hour and a half, so eagerly did they press forward, our little company had passed the steeple-like pinnacle of rocks; and in another fifteen minutes they had climbed to the top of a ridge of rocks, and were looking down a steep, narrow declivity, cut by the wonderous hand of nature, in a precipitous wall of solid rock that rose from the bottom of a canyon five hundred feet below them. The smooth floor of the declivity was not over a dozen feet wide and shot downward at an angle of about forty-five degrees. "Gosh! I don't wonder Stackpole called that Th' Devil's Slide," and Ham's eyes stared down the steep slope of the declivity. "Ain't thar no other way of gettin' down thar intew that thar canyon?" and he turned to Dickson. "Not that I know of," Dickson answered. "That was the way Stackpole and I went. It is not as difficult as it looks. The rock is not slippery, and, by being careful, a man can get down all right. But the horses! I don't know about them," and he glanced a little dubiously toward the six horses. "We'll have to use ropes on them," declared Mr. Conroyal. "Two men to a horse. Get out the ropes." In a few minutes five strong ropes had been secured from the packs, and preparations were immediately begun for helping the horses down the slide.