CHAPTER XIV

ON ANTELOPE BUTTE

After the departure of Bat it was a very silent little cavalcade that made its way down the valley.  Tex, with the lead-horse in tow, rode ahead, his attention fixed on the trail, and the others followed, single file.

Alice’s eyes strayed from the backs of her two companions to the mountains that rolled upward from the little valley, their massive peaks and buttresses converted by the wizardry of moonlight into a fairyland of wondrous grandeur.  The cool night air was fragrant with the breath of growing things, and the feel of her horse beneath her caused the red blood to surge through her veins.

“Oh, it’s grand!” she whispered, “the mountains, and the moonlight, and the spring.  I love it all—­and yet—­” She frowned at the jarring note that crept in, to mar the fulness of her joy.  “It’s the most wonderful adventure I ever had—­and romantic.  And it’s real, and I ought to be enjoying it more than I ever enjoyed anything in all my life.  But, I’m not, and it’s all because—­I don’t see why he had to go and drink!” The soft sound of the horses’ feet in the mud changed to a series of sharp clicks as their iron shoes encountered the bare rocks of the floor of the canyon whose precipitous rock walls towered far above, shutting off the flood of moonlight and plunging the trail into darkness.  The figures of the two men were hardly discernible, and the girl started nervously as her horse splashed into the water of the creek that foamed noisily over the canyon floor.  She shivered slightly in the wind that sucked chill through the winding passage, although back there in the moonlight the night had been still.  Gradually the canyon widened.  Its walls grew lower and slanted from the perpendicular.  Moonlight illumined the wider bends and flashed in silver scintillations from the broken waters of the creek.  The click of the horses’ feet again gave place to the softer trampling of mud, and the valley once more spread before them, broader now, and flanked by an endless succession of foothills.

Bat appeared mysteriously from nowhere, and after a whispered colloquy with Tex, led off toward the west, leaving the valley behind and winding into the maze of foothills.  A few miles farther on they came again into the valley and Alice saw that the creek had dwindled into a succession of shallow pools between which flowed a tiny trickle of the water.  On and on they rode, following the shallow valley.  Lush grass overran the pools and clogged the feeble trickle of the creek.  Farther on, even the green patches disappeared and white alkali soil showed between the gnarled sage bushes.  Gradually the aspect of the country changed.  High, grass-covered foothills gave place to sharp pinnacles of black lava rock, the sides of the valley once more drew together, low, and broken into ugly cutbanks of dirty grey.  Sagebrush and prickly pears furnished the only vegetation, and the rough, broken surface of the country took on a starved, gaunt appearance.