Carmena met his proposal with a chuckle that brought a flush into Lennon's lean face. But her troubled eyes had cleared and there was a note of relief underlying her mirth.
"What's the matter with you, too, keeping under cover?" she rallied. "Besides, we don't go to the head of the valley. We slant up to the left through that notch in the ridge."
This banter, coupled with the assurance that the girl knew exactly what she was about, cooled Lennon's excitement. His high strung nerves relaxed.
"No need to remind you I'm a tenderfoot," he jibed at himself. "Coming up the cañon I've been shooting Apaches at every bend."
The mirth left Carmena's face. Her lips straightened in hard lines and her eyes flashed.
"It's no joke," she said. "I'm right glad you're steadying down. If we meet that bunch of bronchos, there's just one thing to do—shoot first. It'll be time enough to ask questions afterward. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly, Miss Farley. I have you to consider, and I presume no peaceful Indians come into these bad lands."
"Pimas and Moquis cut their hair square across the forehead. If you see any others, shoot—to kill!"
"I will," said Lennon, certain that he understood the cause of the girl's almost fierce insistence. He knew that the treatment of captured women by renegade Indians is a far worse fate than death.
Carmena took note of his set jaw, drew in a deep breath, and swung around to angle up the slope at the side of the cañon head. Half an hour of winding advance through the midst of the scraggly low-growing trees brought them to the notch in the rim-ridge. Below this break the mesa side pitched steeply into a great basin that was blotched with white alkali flats, wave-marked with sand dunes, and broken with jagged hills and skeleton-like ridges.