“Arter him!—up thet draw!” barked Big John, jumping for the ravine as the patter of quick hoofs died away over the ridge. Sid swarmed up the rocky talus while Big John leaped in giant strides along the flanks of the ravine. It seemed to Sid that a quick climb to a jutting shoulder above him would give him a shot, especially if the deer stopped to look back after his first fright was over. The loose soil rolled and slid under his feet; high above him towered the red wall of the butte, vertical and unscalable. When he at length turned to look around, he was high on the roof of the desert, its tumbled ridges stretching away to the south for limitless miles. Down below was the curving bend of the river and across it the low, square, ’dobe fort of Hinchman’s. Then he turned his back to it all and began to reconnoiter cautiously over the ridge. As he raised his head, the wag of a white flag told him that the deer had seen him, too. He was a large buck, an eight-pointer at least, and he was galloping up a vast arroyo that cleft into the heart of the mountains. Sid raised his rifle and opened fire at long range.
“Spang! Spang! Spang!” whipped out the sharp reports, as fast as he could work the lever.
“Whoop-ee! Burn ’im! Set fire to ’im!” roared Big John’s voice in the ravine, and then he burst out of the head of it, looking for the buck.
Sid saw his bullets strike rock in red spurts of dust. The ringing reports of Big John’s rifle now added their clamor to the din. Far off up the canyon the buck stumbled and fell; got up and went on again, and then leaped high in the air with all four feet and came down on his side.
“That got him!” yelled Big John. “I don’t know which one of us ’twas. Come on down, son,—’twon’t be no pyjama party gittin’ him out of thar, old settler!”
While Big John was paunching the buck, Sid climbed up to the head of the canyon, led on by an irresistible desire to see what might be on the other side of the top of the world. The ledges of broken and wind-scoured rock gradually gave place to shelves with vertical faces, up which he could find crevices or breaks which could be climbed. The blue margin of the sky was not far above him, now. Scaling the last bastions of the ridge, he found himself perched up on a sharp knife-edge, seemingly only a little below the white clouds overhead. The dry desert winds sang in the peaks around him and caressed him with soft, invisible fingers. He felt somehow brother to it all, as his eyes roved around the horizon. To the north stretched the flat plain of the desert, broken with sheer walled mesas and ragged outcroppings of rock ridges. To the east rose a high-walled plateau, covered with the dark green of arid-country evergreens,—cedar, pinyon and juniper. It ran for miles and miles northward, and in between him and it a purple void told of the chasm of some valley flowing north.
It was through that plateau of pine timber that their route north to the Canyon Cheyo would lie, and somewhere, cut deep in the plateau, would be that valley of the ancient cliff dwellers that they all wished to see. As Sid studied the huge panorama an overwhelming desire for solitude came over him. He wanted to be alone, to take for himself the Indian boy’s three days of trial and to face life and his future for a time with wide open eyes, alone and uncounseled. Like them, he wanted to ask questions of life and learn what it all was going to mean for him. Here, in this empty land, he could face Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the raw essentials of life, and let his own soul choose his destiny.
The Indians, he knew, encouraged this impulse in boys of his age. Then it was that they went alone into the mountains, to fast and pray to the Great Mystery, and to come back to the tribe with the beginnings of wisdom deep planted in them. The whites stifled this desire for solitude, attempted to guide their boy’s every step, and more than often hopelessly muddled his whole life in advance for him. Sid would have none of that! Never once had the old Colonel so much as hinted to him what he was to be and do, in this his life that stretched before him. His boy was free to face it in the only way it could be faced, alone. Sid wanted to think it out by himself, to be away from the very sight of people, to have these great solitudes for his counselors for at least a few days. He climbed back down the canyon and rejoined Big John, turning over the desire in his mind. He did not realize that the Desert had taken hold of his soul with its grip of the infinite,—as it has done to the mind of man since countless ages,—but, true to instinct, he was following its silent beckoning.
“John, I’m thinking of doing a little pasear up into the mountains for a day or so,—by myself,” he announced, as the cowman looked up from cleaning his gory hands with a few drops from his canteen.
Big John looked him over quizzically.