"Tsoay shall go. He keeps silent before older warriors as is proper for the untried, but his thoughts fly free as do yours," Buck replied. "It is in him also, this need to see new places."
"There is this," Jil-Lee got to his feet, "—do not go so far, brother, that you may not easily find a way to return. This is a wide land, and within it we are but a handful of men alone——"
"That, too, I know." Travis thought he could read more than one kind of warning in Jil-Lee's words.
They were the second day away from the plateau camp, and climbing, when they chanced upon the pass Travis had hoped might exist. Before them lay an abrupt descent to what appeared to be open plains country cloaked in a dusky amber Travis now knew was the thick grass found in the southern valleys. Tsoay pointed with his chin.
"Wide land—good for horses, cattle, ranches...."
But all those lay far beyond the black space surrounding them. Travis wondered if there was any native animal which could serve man in place of the horse.
"Do we go down?" Tsoay asked.
From this point Travis could sight no break far out on the amber plain, no sign of any building or any disturbance of its smooth emptiness. Yet it drew him. "We go," he decided.
Close as it had looked from the pass, the plain was yet a day and a night, spent in careful watching by turns, ahead of them. It was midmorning of the second day that they left the foothill breaks, and the grass of the open country was waist high about them. Travis could see it rippling where the coyotes threaded ahead. Then he was conscious of a persistent buzzing, a noise which irritated faintly until he was compelled to trace it to its source.