As the girl rode beside the cowboy she noticed that the cynical smile was gone from the clean-cut profile.  For miles he did not speak.  Antelope Butte was near, now.

“I am thirsty,” she said.  A gauntleted hand fumbled for a moment with the slicker behind the cantle, and extended a flask.

“It’s water.  I figured someone would get thirsty.”

The girl drank from the flask and returned it:  “If there are posses out won’t they watch the water-holes?  You said there are only a few in the bad lands.”

“Yes, they’ll watch the water-holes.  That’s why we’re goin’ to camp on Antelope Butte—­right up on top of it.”

“But, how will we get water?”

“It’s there.”

“Have you been up there?” The girl glanced upward.  They were already ascending the first slope, and the huge mass of the detached mountain towered above them in a series of unscaleable precipices.

“No.  But the water’s there.  The top of the Butte hollows out like a saucer, an’ in the bowl there’s a little sunk spring.  No one much ever goes up there.  There’s a little scragglin’ timber, an’ the trail—­it’s an old game trail—­is hard to find if you don’t know where to look for it.  A horse-thief told me about it.”

“A horse-thief!  Surely, you are not risking all our lives on the word of a horse-thief!”

“Yes.  He was a pretty good fellow.  They killed him, afterwards, over near the Mission.  He was runnin’ off a bunch of Flourey horses.”

“But a man who would steal would lie!”

“He didn’t lie to me.  He judged I done him a good turn once.  Over on the Marias, it was—­an’ he said:  ’If you’re ever on the run, hit for Antelope Butte.’  Then he told me about the trail, an’ the spring that you’ve got to dig for among the rocks.  He’s got a grub cache there, too.  He won’t be needin’ it, now.”  The cowboy glanced toward the west.  “The moon ought to just about hold ’til we get to the top.  He said you could ride all the way up.”  Without an instant’s hesitation he headed his horse for a huge mass of rock fragments that lay at the base of an almost perpendicular wall.  The others followed in single file.  Bat bringing up the rear driving the pack-horse before him.  Alice kept her horse close behind the Texan’s which wormed and twisted in and out among the rock fragments that skirted the wall.  For a quarter of a mile they proceeded with scarcely a perceptible rise and then the cowboy turned his horse into a deep fissure that slanted upward at a most precarious angle seemingly straight into the heart of the mountain.  Just when it seemed that the trail must end in a blind pocket, the Texan swung into a cross fissure so narrow that the stirrups brushed either side.  So dark was it between the towering rock walls that Alice could scarcely make out the cowboy’s horse, although at no time was he more than ten or fifteen feet in advance.  After innumerable windings the fissure