He showed Scotty the dog’s tooth-marks and then replaced the canteen where Scotty had picked it up. There the whole story written in the sand was clear. Here Blaze, wild with thirst, had lain down with the canteen under his paws and chewed at it until he had worried the spout solder loose.
“Dog heap thirsty! Got arrow back in mountains, me think,” declared Niltci.
“Back in the Pass? You’re right! That’s about five miles from here. I’m game to walk it and find out something. First, though, Niltci, we’ll climb up the other gap and trace Blaze out of it. He didn’t come out by the east gap, that’s sure. Sid may have been hunting in some crater to the east of us.”
They started up that long slope down which flowed the river of desert vegetation. Their own tracks of the afternoon were here, and Blaze’s, too. The certainty that he had simply followed them out that way and then turned to the south became stronger as they climbed up. It was settled as sure at the summit of the gap, where Blaze’s paw prints showed that he had made the turn around the crater just as they had.
Scotty and Niltci stood side by side, holding in Ruler who was whining eagerly now, crazy to go chasing the coyotes which were howling in the desert all around them. The blood-and-scent story of that one which Blaze had routed when he had attempted to bar his path had excited Ruler, and he had got into his doggy mind the idea that coyote was to be the night’s game. Otherwise this whole proceeding was still a mystery to him!
Around them under the stars brooded a black and silent land, dead as the surface of the moon, the wide, flat and parched plain of the lava fields stretching away for fifteen miles to the east. Near by rose the jagged edges of the Rainbow Range, ragged saw-teeth which would be red and purple in the daytime. Now that range was barely distinguishable under the faint light of the stars.
But, as they looked, suddenly a tiny point of fire shot up on the far horizon to the east. It was high enough among the lower stars to surely be on a mountain or crater of some sort, yet so tiny and far away as to be almost indistinguishable in the desert haze.
“There’s Sid!” shouted Scotty triumphantly, gripping Niltci’s buckskin-clad arm. “Now, how in the dickens did he ever get way over there? And if so, why did not Blaze come in by this gap?”
Niltci stared at the flickering point of light for some time without replying. At times it died down to a mere red coal, so small as to be lost to eyesight entirely. Again it would flare up and appear quite strong.
“Mexicanos!” declared the Navaho boy at length.