Sid looked cautiously all about him, finger on trigger and rifle ready. To the south the saw-tooth ridge rose high above him to yet loftier levels. All about him were jagged pinnacles, rough and craggy and full of hollows and rocky points which could not be seen around. To creep back down the mountains, somehow, and then fire three shots for help as soon as possible seemed to him the best plan. He hated to abandon Blaze while there was a spark of life left, but would it not be better for them to be separated anyhow, now? The dog might get away if he recovered even if Sid should be captured.
That arrow that had pierced Blaze had come from a rocky lair to the north of their position, just how far away he could not tell. The hiss of it had really been Sid’s first warning. Never again could he forget that sharp, ghostly whew! Making for a sheltering hollow which would be out of sight of the rocky lair, yet be open enough for him to see around him a short distance, Sid began to crawl down from the ridge. As yet he had hardly moved, but his heart was beating wildly. It seemed to him absolutely hopeless to get away from this mountain with he knew not how many hostile Indians all around him. The very idea that this desolate land was inhabited by even a small tribe seemed weird, uncanny. Not a track save their own had they seen so far. Even the old wagon ruts of the Hornaday expedition had long since been buried in the sands or washed out by the rains. It had been all new country, all virgin. If an Indian band lived here they could not be Papagoes, for the first one missing from the reservation would call out a troop of soldiers after him. Had Vasquez, then, already gotten up from Mexico with some Yaquis?
Sid thought of all possible solutions as he crept warily downhill, pausing before each craggy outcropping in his path before daring to pass it. Then a glimpse of something red which moved behind a bush below to the left caused him to stop and raise his rifle, and, while poised in the tense set of the aim, a sudden, almost noiseless, rush of feet behind him sent electric shocks all through him! There was no time to even lower the rifle and turn around. Subconsciously his leg muscles leapt out wildly. He had an expectant sensation of a knife entering his back—and then a thin band like a strap swept down and across his eyes and something tight gripped around his throat. Knees, and the heavy weight of a man on his back, bore him to earth. His arms sprawled out, dropping the rifle; his tongue shot out and out, gagging fiercely against that awful halter grip around his throat. Sid thought of the Thug strangling cloth in that last instant before an enormous drumming in his head gave way to blackness clouding over his eyes. Then came the heavy thump of the ground striking him, and unconsciousness....
It seemed but a very few minutes, the continuation of some terrible dream, when his eyes opened again. He was lying face downward where he had fallen, and his lungs were pumping and sucking air in great draughts, as if recovering from some endless and vague period of suffocation. Blood was trickling down his face and making a little pool on the rock, while a cut or a bruise, he could not say which, over his eyebrows smarted sharply.
Sid made a slight sound and attempted to turn over. Two grunts answered him. Immediately a strange Indian was at his side helping him turn over roughly, and he learned for the first time that his arms were pinioned behind. Sid looked up into the buck’s face. It was round, hawklike and stern, with narrow black eyes that had no pity. He recognized the type as Apache instantly. There was none of the stolidity of the Pima and the Papago in that face, nor of the regular-featured, straight-nosed Navaho, like Niltci, who resembled a copper-colored Englishman. This man looked more like some bird of prey, in the Roman hook of his nose and the craggy sternness of his mouth. The first word he uttered as he turned to his young companion confirmed Sid’s thought, for it was in the harsh Athapascan dialect of the Apache.
Between them they yanked the boy to his feet and started up the hill. Nothing further was said. They passed Blaze’s niche, the dog still lying on his side, a pathetic furry heap dominated by the arrow, and one of the Apaches pointed and let out a grunt. The other nodded. Evidently they considered him dead. They pushed Sid on down into the arroyo and crossed to where lay the ram. The older man then grunted a few words and at once set about paunching the game. The younger led on with Sid.
As they topped the rise of the next ridge, that same flat red rampart that Sid had noticed while stalking the ram burst on his view. But now it proved to be a really wonderful natural phenomenon. Fire, lava, a tremendous outpouring of the bowels of the earth had been at work here, no doubt during that period when the craters were formed and it had cast up that mighty red wall. Sid wished that Scotty, with his knowledge of geology, were with him now to study out the wonder of this vast red rampart before his eyes. The whole interior angle made by the bend of the mountains had been blown out here by lava explosion, the huge granite strata having been forced up on end like a pair of trap doors, making two enormous red ramparts, vertical-sided and running out from the rocky angle of the hills until their outer ends rose like towers. These terminated the red walls, a thousand feet from the ridge to the end of the lower gap where the lava had burst out. At that lower end the ramparts rose at least four hundred feet sheer from the granite slopes, and a great apron of black and scowling lava ran down from there at a steep slope, to lose itself under the sands far below. But the walls were of sheer granite, colored red by the fierce heat of that molten lava of ages ago.
Red Mesa! Red Mesa! Red Mesa!—The certainty of its being the lost mesa kept singing in Sid’s ears as they descended. No such geologic formation as this could exist anywhere around Pinacate and not have been discovered before. Those ancient Papagoes who had reported it to Fra Pedro of 1680 no doubt had called it a mesa by reason of its resemblance to the true mesa formation. But, unlike the mesas of the north which are formed by water scouring and erosion, the walls of this one had been cast up bodily by the explosive force of pent-up lava. Still, there was resemblance enough to have given the place its name, Red Mesa, Sid was certain.
The young Apache kept behind Sid as he prodded him on downward. There was no trail. His savage guide avoided choyas and chose the best possible routes for descent, that was all, while steadily the giant wall of Red Mesa frowned higher and nearer above them. Sid looked up as they approached the base of the west wall. Flat slabs of bare, smooth granite went up at a steep slope for perhaps a hundred feet. Above that the red wall rose sheer to fissured and turreted pinnacles three hundred feet above the top of that awful slope. Inaccessible from anywhere below was Red Mesa!
After more rocky descent they came around the great tower at the lower end. Mighty and majestic, like the belfry of some huge cathedral, it rose out of the depths of the valley. A great smooth slope of black lava, shiny and slippery as glass, formed a slanting apron here, spanning the gap from tower to tower. But what an apron! Like the face of a dam, it spread across from one wall to the other, closing a gap three hundred feet wide and itself at least four hundred feet up to its edge, the towers of the two walls rising for half their height above it still. Geologically it was an imposing instance of the unlimited power of Nature. When that mountain side had burst, the whole round world must have shaken like a leaf and all the marine creatures in the great seas to the north have been swept over by a tidal wave of unexampled proportions! The lava had flowed out and downward, cooling slowly until this dam—for a cataract of fire—had formed and remained as a grim witness to the stupendous natural event that had once taken place here.