“Won’t be no movie scrap, nohow!” growled Big John back from where he and Niltci were breaking trail. “The real thing don’t pan out that way. Ride, fellers! All tarnation won’t stop these horses from drinkin’ up the pond when we git thar, an’ we gotto make time so’s to let ’em do it. You, Blaze,” he stormed at the big Airedale loping along beside him, “I gotto turn ye loose, now, spite of thorns ketchin’ yore coat. Cayn’t take no more chances with this leader.” Big John hauled up the huge furry Airedale on his saddle as he rode, unsnapped the leash and let him drop again. Twice before during the race the white mustang and Blaze had run on different sides of the same bush--with almost disastrous results but he had been still more afraid of thorns catching and holding the woolly-coated Airedale. Ruler had no such danger. The big hound loped along easily beside Sid’s pinto and his sleek sides passed the thorns like silk. In half an hour more of twisting and turning through the arboreal desert seven miles of the distance had been covered. They still maintained perhaps two miles of lead over the Papagoes, in spite of the furious urgings and gesticulations of their leader in the striped serapé. Big John glanced a sardonic eye back at him occasionally. “Greaser--I’d plumb dote on stoppin’ a leetle lead with ye!” the boys heard him mutter through his clenched teeth, as he galloped along. “But them good old days is gone forever, now. We gotto put up a tin-horn game on ye instead.” Just what the hoax was going to be neither Sid nor Scotty could conjecture, but they knew Big John’s resourcefulness of old. They rode on silently, wondering, nursing the horses around the surprising twists and turns that Niltci ahead saw fit to make, usually to avoid great beds of bristly choyas. Both the mare and the pinto were breathing heavily now, and snorting in labored wheezes through their foaming nostrils. The pace was beginning to tell! The ’dobe houses loomed up not two miles off, but behind them came that tireless knot of Papago riders, light and lithe, and they could keep this up all day! Then came a yelp of pain from Blaze. The Airedale, in leaping to avoid a spiky choya, had slammed full into a bushy acacia whose incurved cat claw spines showed no intention of letting go again. Doglike, he stopped still, waiting for his master to extricate him and not trying to tear himself loose. Big John let out a round oath and flung himself from the white horse while the rest all stopped. “Get out yore .405 and let her talk, Scotty,” he barked, “she can outrange anything they’ve got, an’ this-yer dawg’s goin’ to make us take time out.”