“Wal, young woman, before you go to ridin’ off alone you want to get your eyes corrected to Western distance.  Now, what’d you call them black things off there on the slope?”

“Horsemen.  No, cattle,” replied Madeline, doubtfully.

“Nope.  Jest plain, every-day cactus.  An’ over hyar—­look down the valley.  Somethin’ of a pretty forest, ain’t thet?” he asked, pointing.

Madeline saw a beautiful forest in the center of the valley toward the south.

“Wal, Miss Majesty, thet’s jest this deceivin’ air.  There’s no forest.  It’s a mirage.”

“Indeed!  How beautiful it is!” Madeline strained her gaze on the dark blot, and it seemed to float in the atmosphere, to have no clearly defined margins, to waver and shimmer, and then it faded and vanished.

The mountains dropped down again behind the horizon, and presently the road began once more to slope up.  The horses slowed to a walk.  There was a mile of rolling ridge, and then came the foothills.  The road ascended through winding valleys.  Trees and brush and rocks began to appear in the dry ravines.  There was no water, yet all along the sandy washes were indications of floods at some periods.  The heat and the dust stifled Madeline, and she had already become tired.  Still she looked with all her eyes and saw birds, and beautiful quail with crests, and rabbits, and once she saw a deer.

“Miss Majesty,” said Stillwell, “in the early days the Indians made this country a bad one to live in.  I reckon you never heerd much about them times.  Surely you was hardly born then.  I’ll hev to tell you some day how I fought Comanches in the Panhandle--thet was northern Texas—­an’ I had some mighty hair-raisin’ scares in this country with Apaches.”

He told her about Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, the most savage and bloodthirsty tribe that ever made life a horror for the pioneer.  Cochise befriended the whites once; but he was the victim of that friendliness, and he became the most implacable of foes.  Then, Geronimo, another Apache chief, had, as late as 1885, gone on the war-path, and had left a bloody trail down the New Mexico and Arizona line almost to the border.  Lone ranchmen and cowboys had been killed, and mothers had shot their children and then themselves at the approach of the Apache.  The name Apache curdled the blood of any woman of the Southwest in those days.

Madeline shuddered, and was glad when the old frontiersman changed the subject and began to talk of the settling of that country by the Spaniards, the legends of lost gold-mines handed down to the Mexicans, and strange stories of heroism and mystery and religion.  The Mexicans had not advanced much in spite of the spread of civilization to the Southwest.  They were still superstitious, and believed the legends of treasures hidden in the walls of their missions, and that unseen hands rolled rocks down the gullies upon the heads of prospectors who dared to hunt for the lost mines of the padres.