CHAPTER I
The Cactus Cross

Down an old trail in the Ghost Range in northwestern Mexico, just
across the Arizona border, a mounted prospector wound his way,
his horse carefully picking its steps among the broken granite
blocks which had tumbled upon the ancient path from the mountain
wall above. A burro followed, laden heavily with pack, bed-roll,
pick, frying-pan, and battered coffee-pot, yet stepping along
sure-footedly as the mountain-sheep that first formed the trail
ages ago, and whose petrified hoof-prints still remain to afford
footing for the scarcely larger hoofs of the pack-animal.

An awful stillness hung over the scene, that was broken only by
the click of hoofs of horse and burro upon the rocks, and the
clatter of the loose stones they dislodged that rolled and
skipped down the side. Not a breath of air was stirring, and the
sun blazed down from the zenith with such fierce and direct
radiation that the wayfarer needed not to observe the shadows to
note its exact position in the heavens. Singly among the broken
blocks, and in banks along the ledges, the cactus had burst under
the heat, as it were, into the spontaneous combustion of flowery
flame. To the traveler passing beside them their red blooms
blazed with the irritating superfluity of a torch-light
procession at noonday.

The trail leads down to a flat ledge which overlooks the desert,
and which is the observatory whither countless generations of
mountain-sheep have been wont to resort to survey the strange
world beneath them--with what purpose and what feelings, it