For some moments they gazed in silence.  Before them, bathed in a pale amethyst haze that thickened to purple at the far-off edge of the world, lay the bad lands resplendent under the hot glare of the sun in vivid red and black and pink colouring of the lava rock.  Everywhere the eye met the flash and shimmer of mica fragments that sparkled like the facets of a million diamonds, while to the northward the Bear Paws reared cool and green, with the grass of the higher levels reaching almost to the timber line.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” breathed the girl.  “Why do people stay cooped up in the cities, when out here there is—­this?” Endicott’s eyes met hers, and in their depths she perceived a newly awakened fire.  She was conscious of a strange glow at her heart—­a mighty gladness welled up within her, permeating her whole being.  “He has awakened,” her brain repeated over and over again, “he has——­”

The voice of the Texan fell upon her ears softly as from a distance, and she turned her eyes to the boyish faced cow-puncher who viewed life lightly and who, she had learned, was the thorough master of his wilderness, and very much a man.

“I love it too,” he was saying.  “This bad land best of all.  What with the sheep, an’ the nesters, the range country must go.  But barbed-wire can never change this,” his arm swept the vast plain before him.  “I suppose God foreseen what the country was comin’ to,” he speculated, “an’ just naturally stuck up His ‘keep off’ sign on places here an’ there—­the Sahara Desert, an’ Death Valley, an’ the bad lands.  He wanted somethin’ left like He made it.  Yonder’s the Little Rockies, an’ them big black buttes to the south are the Judith, an’ you can see—­way beyond the Judith—­if you look close—­the Big Snowy Mountains.  They’re more than a hundred miles away.”

The cowboy ceased speaking suddenly.  And Alice, following his gaze, made out far to the north-eastward a moving speck.  The Texan crouched and motioned the others into the shelter of a rock.  “Wish I had a pair of glasses,” he muttered, with his eyes on the moving dot.

“What is it?” asked the girl.

“Rider of some kind.  Maybe the I X round-up is workin’ the south slope.  An’ maybe it’s just a horse-thief.  But it mightn’t be either.  Guess I’ll just throw the hull on that cayuse of mine an’ siyou down and see.  He’s five or six miles off yet, an’ I’ve got plenty of time to slip down there.  Glad the trail’s on the west side.  You two stay up here, but you got to be awful careful not to show yourselves.  Folks down below look awful little from here, but if they’ve got glasses you’d loom up plenty big, an’ posse men’s apt to pack glasses.”  The two followed him to camp and a few moments later watched him ride off at a gallop and disappear in the scrub that concealed the mouth of the precipitous trail.

Hardly had he passed from sight than Bat rose and, walking to his saddle, uncoiled his rope.