"He didn't lie to me. He judged I done him a good turn once. Over on the Marias, it was--an' he said: 'If you're ever on the run, hit for Antelope Butte.' Then he told me about the trail, an' the spring that you've got to dig for among the rocks. He's got a grub _cache_ there, too. He won't be needin' it, now." The cowboy glanced toward the west. "The moon ought to just about hold 'til we get to the top. He said you could ride all the way up." Without an instant's hesitation he headed his horse for a huge mass of rock fragments that lay at the base of an almost perpendicular wall. The others followed in single file. Bat bringing up the rear driving the pack-horse before him. Alice kept her horse close behind the Texan's which wormed and twisted in and out among the rock fragments that skirted the wall. For a quarter of a mile they proceeded with scarcely a perceptible rise and then the cowboy turned his horse into a deep fissure that slanted upward at a most precarious angle seemingly straight into the heart of the mountain. Just when it seemed that the trail must end in a blind pocket, the Texan swung into a cross fissure so narrow that the stirrups brushed either side. So dark was it between the towering rock walls that Alice could scarcely make out the cowboy's horse, although at no time was he more than ten or fifteen feet in advance. After innumerable windings the fissure led once more to the face of the mountain and Tex headed his horse out upon a ledge that had not been discernible from below. Alice gasped, and for a moment it seemed as though she could not go on. Spread out before her like a huge relief map were the ridges and black coulees of the bad lands, and directly below--hundreds of feet below--the gigantic rock fragments lay strewn along the base of the cliff like the abandoned blocks of a child. She closed her eyes and shuddered. A loose piece of rock on the narrow trail, a stumble, and--she could feel herself whirling down, down, down. It was the voice of the Texan--confident, firm, reassuring--that brought her once more to her senses. "It's all right. Just follow right along. Shut your eyes, or keep 'em to the wall. We're half-way up. It ain't so steep from here on, an' she widens toward the top. I'm dizzy-headed, too, in high places an' I shut mine. Just give the horse a loose rein an' he'll keep the trail. There ain't nowhere else for him to go." With a deadly fear in her heart, the girl fastened her eyes upon the cowboy's back and gave her horse his head. And as she rode she wondered at this man who unhesitatingly risked his life upon the word of a horse-thief.