They were working up another tortuous ravine where not even Johnny Buffalo could always keep a straight line by the sun. In places the walls overhung the gulch in shelving, weather-worn cliffs of soft limestone. Bowlders washed down from the heights made slow going, because they were half the time climbing over or around some huge obstruction; and because of the rattlesnakes they must look well where a hand or a foot was laid. Johnny Buffalo was still in the lead; and Rawley, for all his youth and splendid stamina was not finding the Indian too slow a pacemaker. Indeed, he was perfectly satisfied when the dozen feet between them did not lengthen to fifteen or twenty. The mounting sun made the heat in that gully a terrific thing to endure. But the Indian did not lift the canteen to his mouth; nor did Rawley. Both had learned the foolishness of drinking too freely at the beginning of a journey. So, when Johnny Buffalo stopped suddenly in the act of passing around a jutting ledge, Rawley halted in his tracks and waited to see what was the reason. The Indian glanced back at him and crooked a forefinger. Rawley set one foot carefully between two rocks, planted the other as circumspectly, and so, without a sound, stole up to Johnny Buffalo’s side. Johnny waited until their shoulders touched then leaned forward and pointed. Up on the ridge a couple of hundred yards before them, a man moved crouching behind a bush, came into the open, bent lower and peered downward. His actions were stealthy; his whole manner inexpressibly furtive. His back was toward them, and the ridge itself hid the thing he was stalking. “He’s after a deer, maybe. Or a mountain sheep,” Rawley whispered, when the man laid a rifle across a rock and settled lower on his haunches. “Still, it is well that we see what he sees,” Johnny Buffalo whispered back. “We will stalk him as he stalks his kill.” The Indian squirmed his shoulder out of the strap sling that held his rifle in its case behind him. With seeming deliberation, yet with speed he uncased the weapon, worked the lever gently to make sure the gun was chamber loaded, and motioned Rawley to follow him. In the hills the old man had somehow slipped into the leadership, and now Rawley obeyed him without a word. They stole up the side of the gulch where the man on the ridge could not discover them without turning completely around; which would destroy his position beside the rock and risk the loss of a shot at his game. He seemed wholly absorbed in watching something on the farther side of the ridge, and it did not seem likely that he would hear them.