Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/29

Rh "Why the leanto?" asked Jackson. "Did you bach' up there?"

"For a bit. When I first came out. I was shy half a lung and most of my ambition and I healed up both at Lake of the Woods. Which way 'll we take now?"

They ran across no more strays and evening found them high up in the range among the pinion and cedars. The sunset over the mesa was hidden from them but the afterglow flamed and faded above their heads and the face of the scarred, bare battlements of the range was bright with the reflection of the gleaming west.

Lake of the Woods lay like a fire opal, holding as a mirror the shifting rose and violet of the sky. The trees came thickly down, close to its sloping beach and stabbed the water with their shadows. Back of it rose the splintered crags of Ghost Mountain, El Monte del Muerte, the Mount of Death, as the Mexicans and Indians called it; remote, inaccessible, a sheer wall of granite, ground smooth to glassiness by a thousand centuries of driving, sand-laden winds, planed, perhaps, by ancient glaciers; the grim summit notched with fantastic parapet and spire and turret, a brooding mass, bearing the ineffaceable placidity of infinite ages upon its brow.

"West is always goin' to be West," said Jackson, coming up from the lake with a lard pail of fresh water for supper after he had attended to the horses, while Sheridan prepared the meal, bacon and flour and coffee they had brought with them and trout that he had conjured from the lake with the