Almost before she realized it the ordeal was over and her horse was following its leader through a sparse grove of bull pine. The ascent was still rather sharp, and the way strewn with boulders, and fallen trees, but the awful precipice, with its sheer drop of many hundreds of feet to the black rocks below, no longer yawned at her stirrup's edge, and it was with a deep-drawn breath of relief that she allowed her eyes once again to travel out over the vast sweep of waste toward the west where the moon hung low and red above the distant rim of the bad lands. The summit of Antelope Butte was, as the horse-thief had said, an ideal camping place for any one who was "on the run." The edges of the little plateau, which was roughly circular in form, rose on every side to a height of thirty or forty feet, at some points in an easy slope, and at others in a sheer rise of rock wall. The surface of the little plane showed no trace of the black of the lava rock of the lower levels but was of the character of the open bench and covered with buffalo grass and bunch grass with here and there a sprinkling of prickly pears. The four dismounted and, in the last light of the moon, surveyed their surroundings. "You make camp, Bat," ordered the Texan, "while me an' Win hunt up the spring. He said it was on the east side where there was a lot of loose rock along the edge of the bull pine. We'll make the camp there, too, where the wood an' water will be handy." Skirting the plateau, Tex led the way toward a point where a few straggling pines showed gaunt and lean in the rapidly waning moonlight. "It ought to be somewheres around here," he said, as he stopped to examine the ground more closely. "He said you had to pile off the rocks 'til you come to the water an' then mud up a catch-basin." As he talked, the cowboy groped among the loose rocks on his hands and knees, pausing frequently to lay his ear to the ground. "Here she is!" he exclaimed at length. "I can hear her drip! Come on, Win, we'll build our well." Alice stood close beside her horse watching every move with intense interest. "Who would have thought to look for water there?" she exclaimed. "I knew we'd find it just as he said," answered the Texan gravely. "He was a good man, in his way--never run off no horses except from outfits that could afford to lose 'em. Why, they say, he could have got plumb away if he'd shot the posse man that run onto him over by the Mission. But he knew the man was a nester with a wife an' two kids, so he took a chance--an' the nester got him." "How could he?" cried the girl, "after----"