Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/97

Rh ended in steep cliffs at the foot of which ran the water they sought.

"How we're goin' to git down is more than I can tell ye for sure," he said. "But they'll likely be a gash of some sort we can negotiate.'

It was too hot for more than the briefest conversation. By common, unspoken consent they passed up the noontide meal and halt. Rest in that furnace glare was a mockery. Their animals plodded on with drooping heads and down-bent ears. Each man had a pebble in his mouth, endeavouring to promote a flow of saliva, but the sun seemed to have sucked all the moisture out of them. Healy suffered the most. He complained of pains at the back of his neck and Stone feared a sunstroke.

The stupendous escarpments of the Mogollon Mesa stared at them blankly without promise of any relief, pitiless in garish hues. The snow on the San Francisco Peaks, seventy miles away, showed in minarets of tantalization. The water in their canteens was brackish, alkaline and warm. Any bit of metal scorched and blistered the touch. Somewhere ahead ran a corridor of stone between the downfallen, waterbroken masses of the mesa and in this corridor flowed the Tonto. Promontory Butte loomed up in strata of red and yellow and orange with deep purple shadows defining its ledges and crevices. Each step, toward mid-afternoon, seemed to mark the limits of endurance, and the thought began to persist of what would befall them if they found no way down to the stream.