The horses’ shoes clinked on its flinty surface; ghostly desert vegetation and tumbled masses of petrified lava bordered their trail. After several hours of careful riding came the huge cones of the craters, moving by like grim phantoms past them as slowly light began to dawn in the east. Ahead they saw spread out before them the jungled garden of the Pass, its green poles of saguarros standing silent sentinels all about in the dawn and the gray mountains hemming it in all around. “Now, fellers, we cayn’t take them hosses promiscuous up no mountains, an’ I ain’t goin’ to leave old Blazie, nohow!” declared Big John as he halted the train. “This white mustang’s about as easy to hide here as a Saskatchewan swan! Thar’s shore goin’ to be some perishin’ lil’ rodero when them spiggoty gents arrives in our midst! Two of us hev gotto stay with these hosses.” To hide them somewhere was the first thought of all. Big John’s puckered eyes searched the Pass for cover. Up ahead the mountains closed in to a narrow gap resembling a gunsight, a lone green saguarro upstanding in the center like a front sight in its V-notch. A small, bare rocky hillock to the right of the notch rose opposite a similar low spur terminating the range on their left. But down under the flanks of both of them they marked the high bushy green of mesquite. “A feller _might_ lay low in thar hoss an’ all,” declared Big John, sizing it up. Scotty did not answer. He was scanning the mountain sides which towered above them, mile on mile, shaggy and gray and covered with pale green desert growth to a high skyline above. Somewhere, over beyond that ridge maybe, Sid was in camp with the Apache. Either Hano or Ruler could lead him up there. But a peculiar telepathic influence kept whispering to him that all was not right with Sid, that he needed him _now_, was in some sort of danger or trouble. It might have been just his own imagination; it might have been the subtle mental bond between the two chums, but the impulse was there and it led him to decide on climbing up at once. “You take Niltci and the horses and go to the notch, John. If the Mexicans come in that way you can let them go by and then slip out through the gap and ride around the end of these mountains and join us. Meanwhile this Apache and I will climb up straight over the range to their camp. I have a hunch that it’s over that mountain somewhere. Here’s where we last saw Sid.” “Looks that way--’scusin’ that the Injun’d knife ye as soon as he got you alone up thar! I ain’t trustin’ no Injun. Crooked as a Mex. gambler’s deck, they be!” swore Big John emphatically.