For noise he cared nothing; the up-flung butte reared its rocky walls between him and his enemies; and he plunged on, all his energies centered on speed, regardless of the stings and the sweat which streamed down him, tinged with blood from the mass of smarting scratches. Malpais, cunningly hidden in the grass, pressed painfully against the worn, thin soles of his boots and hurt him cruelly as he slipped and floundered. He staggered and slipped more frequently now, and the pack on his back seemed to have trebled in weight; his breath came in great, sobbing gulps and the blood pulsed through his aching temples like hammer blows, while a hot, tight band seemed to encircle his parched throat; but he now was in sight of his goal. Beginning at a rock slide, a mass of treacherous broken rock and shale in which he sank to his ankles at every plunging step, a faint zigzag line wandered up the southern face of the butte. He did not know that it could be mastered, but he did not have time to gain the easier trail, up which he had led his horse. Struggling up the shale slope, slipping and floundering in the treacherous footing, he flung himself on the rock ledge which slanted sharply upward. Resting until his head cleared, he began a climb which ever after existed in his memory as a vague but horrible nightmare. Rattlesnakes basked in the sun, coiling swiftly and sounding their whirring alarm as he neared them; but blindly thrown rocks mashed them and sent them writhing over the edge to whirl to destruction in the valley below. Treacherous, rotten ledges crumbled as he put his weight on them, and he saved himself time and time again only by an intuitive leap nearly as dangerous as the peril he avoided. At many places the ledge disappeared, and it was only by desperate use of fingers and toes that he managed to pass the gaps, spread-eagled against the cliff while he moved an inch at a time, high above the yawning depths, to the beginning of a new ledge. Scrawny, hardy shrubs, living precariously in cracks and on ledges, and twisted roots found his grip upon them. At one place a flue-like crack in the wall, a "chimney," was the only way to proceed, and he climbed it, back and head against one side, knees and hands against the other, the strain making him faint and dizzy. Below him lay the tree-tops, dwarfed, a blur to his throbbing eyes. A ledge of rock upon which he momentarily rested his weight detached itself and plunged downward a sheer three hundred feet, crashing through the underbrush and scrub timber before it burst apart. On hands and knees he crossed a muddy spot, where a thin trickle of water, no wider than his thumb, spread out and made the ledge slippery before it was sucked in by the sun-baked rocks. A swarm of yellow-jackets, balancing daintily on the wet rock, attacked him viciously when he disturbed them. He struck at them blindly, instinctively shielding his eyes, and arose to his feet as he groped onward.