Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/70

52 shapes of stone, wind-carven, sand-lathed; crouching monsters, sphinxes, grotesque statues on great pedestals, sentinels of the terraces. Among them loomed branched cacti, like mammoth candelabra, with the ashes of dead fire in their sockets.

A frightful sound suddenly filled all the place with hideous, wailing clamor. To Sheridan it seemed the wail of a woman in frightful agony of soul and body, magnified by resounding echoes. They had mounted again, for the horses were better able to pick a path in that light. The mare reared, shied, fought at the bit while Sheridan tried to soothe her, too much occupied with her plunges to grip a pistol, as his instinct prompted. The roan, too, tried to bolt but Jackson brought him up.

"Mountain lion," he shouted to Sheridan. "Way up on the cliff!"

Sheridan had heard their weird cries before and always his blood had run a little cold at their eerie quality, resounding in a canyon of the foothills. But this had been close and the character of the place had emphasized it. Even after Jackson spoke he could not laugh at himself. But his turn came.

They were traveling a trail that the horses had discovered and had reached the third of the terraced pitches, the way winding amid the monoliths and giant cacti. The rift funneled as they mounted and a strong wind blew intermittently, bred, Sheridan fancied, from the battling temperatures of the still warm cliffs that had absorbed the sun all day and the cold, descending air of the night. The puma had given no further outcry. Doubtless it had