At last, after two hours of sweating labor, Dell pulled Silver Heels to a halt under the brow of a steep hill.
“Going to rest and breathe the bronks?” asked the scout.
“Nary, pard,” answered Dell, with an easy return to the colloquialism of the West; “we’re close to the end of our trail, and that’s why we’re rounded up. Squaw Rock is just over the rise. I thought perhaps you might like to reconnoiter before we shacked down on the place.”
“That’s the sensible thing to do, of course. Cayuse will look after the horses while you and I climb the slope.”
Leaving the boy below with the mounts, the scout and the girl crawled up the sun-baked rise to the crest, and peered over.
What the scout saw was a circular, cactus-covered plain. In the midst of the plain arose a boulder about the size of a two-story house.
But it was not the shape of a two-story house. On the contrary, from the angle at which the scout and the girl viewed it, the boulder had the contour of a woman’s head and shoulders, with the shoulders blanketed.
To all seeming, the rock was the upper part of some gigantic statue, embedded in the sand from the shoulders down.
In the shadow of the rock stood a horse, head down and listlessly panting with the heat. Closer to the base of the rock a man half sat and half reclined. He was smoking a pipe and gazing out across the plain. Evidently this was the man they wanted, and he was alone.
The scout and the girl slipped downward on the slope for a hurried consultation.