"You'll make a vaquero yet," approved Pete, "but come on, it's time for us to be up and getting. I only wish we hadn't scared J. H., whoever he is, out of ten years' growth, and we'd have been in the way of getting a hot breakfast."
"You wouldn't have wanted to have lighted a fire," cried Jack; "wouldn't the Mexicans have seen the smoke?"
"Wa'al, I guess you're right, kiddo," said Pete; "cold victuals are safe victuals in a fix like ours. Just the same, a slapjack and some frizzled bacon, with a cup of hot coffee, would appeal to yours truly right now."
"Don't talk of such things," laughed Jack; "we may be eating piñon leaves by sundown."
"And that's no childish dream," agreed Pete. "Now, let's saddle up Maud and be on our way."
A few minutes later, with Pete's heels drumming a tattoo on her bony sides, Maud was once more ambling over the trail, her one ear moving backward and forward as if some sort of clockwork contrivance was in it.
"Lot of waste of power there," observed the practical Pete. "Hitch that ear to a sewing machine or a corn sheller and you'd have any motor ever built beat a mile."
By a sort of mutual but unspoken agreement, neither of the two mentioned eating when the sun, by its height in the sky, showed that it was noon. Without a word, though, Jack, from his position behind the cantle, tightened up his belt a notch. Short rations were beginning to tell on him. Pete, however, seemed cheerful enough. He even hummed from time to time a few lines of that endless cow-puncher's song which begins:
"Lie quietly now cattle;
And please do not rattle;
Or else we will drill you
As sure as you're born."
Such good progress did they make, notwithstanding Maud's deliberate method of procedure, that by mid-afternoon they found themselves almost at the summit of the range, and in a narrow gorge formed by the closing in of the walls of the cañon. They had been following a sort of trail, which had once—so Pete guessed—been an Indian way. It was, however, overgrown almost continuously with brush, and they had been compelled to turn out a dozen times in every hundred yards. Now suddenly the path came to a stop altogether at a spot where, for a distance of twenty feet or more, the side of the cañon had slipped down. Nothing but a smooth shaly wall, impossible even for Maud's goatlike feet to attempt, lay between them and the resumption of the trail on the opposite side.