Clara gave one look, and then drew her hat over her eyes with a shudder, not wishing to see more.  Aunt Maria, heroic and constant as she was or tried to be, almost lost faith in Coronado and glanced at him suspiciously.  Thurstane, sitting bolt upright in his saddle, stared straight before him with a grim frown, meanwhile thinking of Clara.  Coronado’s eyes were filmy and incomprehensible; he was planning, querying, fearing, almost trembling; when he gave the word to advance, it was without looking up.  There was a general feeling that here before them lay a fate which could only be met blindfold.

Now came a long descent, avoiding precipices and impracticable slopes, winding from one stony foot-hill to another, until the party reached what had seemed a plain.  It was a plain because it was amid mountains; a plain consisting of rolls, ridges, ravines, and gullies; a plain with hardly an acre of level land.  All day they journeyed through its savage interstices and struggled with its monstrosities of trap and sandstone.  Twice they halted in narrow valleys, where a little loam had collected and a little moisture had been retained, affording meagre sustenance to some thin grass and scattered bushes.  The animals browsed, but there was nothing for them to drink, and all began to suffer with thirst.

It was seven in the evening, and the sun had already gone down behind the sullen barrier of a gigantic plateau, when they reached the mouth of the canon which had once contained a river, and discovered by the merest accident that it still treasured a shallow pool of stagnant water.  The fevered mules plunged in headlong and drank greedily; the riders were perforce obliged to slake their thirst after them.  There was a hastily eaten supper, and then came the only luxury or even comfort of the day, the sound and delicious sleep of great weariness.

Repose, however, was not for all, inasmuch as Thurstane had reorganized his system of guard duty, and seven of the party had to stand sentry.  It was Coronado’s tour; he had chosen to take his watch at the start; there would be three nights on this stretch, and the first would be the easiest.  He was tired, for he had been fourteen hours in the saddle, although the distance covered was only forty miles.  But much as he craved rest, he kept awake until midnight, now walking up and down, and now smoking his eternal cigarito.

There was a vast deal to remember, to plan, to hope for, to dread, and to hate.  Once he sat down beside the unconscious Thurstane, and meditated shooting him through the head as he lay, and so making an end of that obstacle.  But he immediately put this idea aside as a frenzy, generated by the fever of fatigue and sleeplessness.  A dozen times he was assaulted by a lazy or cowardly temptation to give up the chances of the desert, push back to the Bernalillo route, leave everything to fortune, and take disappointment meekly if it should come.  When the noon of night arrived, he had decided upon nothing but to blunder ahead by sheer force of momentum, as if he had been a rolling bowlder instead of a clever, resolute Garcia Coronado.