It was sharp and chilly in the dark before dawn when Big John roused out the camp next morning. “Now, fellers, we’ll water for the last time at Wall’s Well by sun-up, an’ then make a long pull through the gap in the Growlers, which-same brings us to Represa Tanks on the Camino del Diablo. You-all hev never been thar, an’ hev no idee what it’s like, but the Spaniards told the truth, fer once, when they named it the Road of the Devil. Thar’s always water in Represa, an’ from thare we kin work out to Cerro Colorado, the first of them extinct volcanoes. If Red Mesa’s twenty mile northeast of Pinacate, as that pottery slate says, you’ll see her from thar.” The horses, freshened and invigorated with grass feed and the cool of night, led off spiritedly, all four riding together in a bunch. In two hours more the sky began to lighten in the east and then a shaft of red sunlight struck into living fire the top of a mountain that rose ahead of them, solitary and shrouded like a monk--Montezuma’s Head. Sid held his breath in wonderment, to see the red bath of color spread down the flanks of that huge and imposing presence, widening and broadening its base with color, bringing out the vivid green posts of saguarros, the dark greens of creosote, and the white patches of barrel cactus wrapped in their dense mantles of thorns. They were in the heart of the giant cactus country now. The floor of the desert was dotted all over with them. Everywhere their weird candelabra shapes stood like sentinels, upholding bent and contorted arms, notes of bright green on a gray and pale green waste. As they rode nearer, Sid raised a shout of discovery. “First organ pipe cactus!” he whooped, pointing excitedly. “See it? Up yonder on the hill!” Out of a cleft in the rock rose a nest of what seemed to be tall and crooked green horns, bunched together like some coral growth of the depths of the sea. A queer plant, but all this country was filled with these dry-soil and water-storing species, and nature did queer things with them to make them able to survive. Under the towering ramparts of Montezuma’s Head the horses were watered and canteens were filled. The wide flat stretch of arboreal desert across to the Growlers lay before them. It would be twenty miles of riding in the hot sun. Extra bags of feed were bought and hung over the saddle bows before they started, and from a lone cowman, an old settler who had come here for peace and quiet, Big John borrowed a five-gallon canvas water bag.