"Hurrah!" echoed Bud.
"Come on," cried Mr. Conroyal. "The sooner we get there the better. Pedro, see if you can't liven up them pack-horses a little."
"Si, si, señor," and Pedro began hurling volleys of Mexican oaths at the pack-horses and running from one to another of them, striking with his whip and urging with his voice, until the patient animals were moving as fast as the safety of their packs would permit.
Pedro appeared to be in unusually good spirits that day. All the gloom of the day before had vanished with the dawning of the morning of the night of the hooting owl.
In an hour and a half, so eagerly did they press forward, our little company had passed the steeple-like pinnacle of rocks; and in another fifteen minutes they had climbed to the top of a ridge of rocks, and were looking down a steep, narrow declivity, cut by the wonderous hand of nature, in a precipitous wall of solid rock that rose from the bottom of a canyon five hundred feet below them. The smooth floor of the declivity was not over a dozen feet wide and shot downward at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
"Gosh! I don't wonder Stackpole called that Th' Devil's Slide," and Ham's eyes stared down the steep slope of the declivity. "Ain't thar no other way of gettin' down thar intew that thar canyon?" and he turned to Dickson.
"Not that I know of," Dickson answered. "That was the way Stackpole and I went. It is not as difficult as it looks. The rock is not slippery, and, by being careful, a man can get down all right. But the horses! I don't know about them," and he glanced a little dubiously toward the six horses.
"We'll have to use ropes on them," declared Mr. Conroyal. "Two men to a horse. Get out the ropes."
In a few minutes five strong ropes had been secured from the packs, and preparations were immediately begun for helping the horses down the slide.
There were ten men in the company, including Pedro, and this enabled them to start all the pack-horses at the same time down the declivity. The method of procedure was simple. The middle of a strong rope some thirty feet long was placed under the neck of a horse and across the breast and fastened there, so that it could not slip down. Then two men took hold of the rope, one at each end, and, by walking a little behind and on opposite sides of the horse, they were in position to hold back the animal, should he start to slide or get to going too fast. In this way and with very little trouble, for the footing down the declivity was much better than they expected it would be, they soon had the six horses safely down the Devil's Slide.