It was black night and cold when Sid awoke again. The others slept around him. A distant coyote raised his piercing cry, soft and plaintive in the vast solitude; the blurred forms of the horses dotted the little swale in front of their camp. Then came the false dawn of the moon, and Big John awoke and nudged Niltci, whom he had elected assistant horse wrangler, and they began silently to pack the animals. The sight of them at work was too much for Sid; he awoke his father and Scotty, for at least they could attend to the saddle horses and help break camp. They were nearly ready to mount when an enormous red moon rose slowly over the mesas to the east. Higher and higher it soared, becoming smaller, rounder and more silvery as it quitted the haze over the desert. Then, in a splendor of white light, clear as daylight and pricking out the buttes in staring porcelain and inky shadows, the pack train headed west. It was all weirdly beautiful; color was there none, but of sharp contrast, of strangely rugged and distorted rock formations, of vague and ghostly desert distances there was such a play as to place one in imagination in some selenitic valley of the moon. The afternoon of the third day found the pack train climbing down the frightful escarpments of a high red butte that abutted on the Colorado. There had been no adventure, no sandstorm, no thirst torture, no accident; but all were weary, the men silent, the dogs limping painfully, the horses plodding on persistently. A ringing whoop from Big John and the roar and rumble of waters announced the sighting of the famous Red River. Out of the gray ramparts of Cataract Canyon it swept, to flood past them in boiling riffles, majestic and purposeful in its headlong drive for the sea--the river that has more to show for its labors than any other river in the whole world.