Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/71

Rh scented its chief enemy and deemed discretion the better part of its uncertain valor.

Jackson pointed to a sphinxlike head of sandstone, set on a snaky pillar, its profile startlingly realistic. A hole had been turned clean through a sand-drilled eye. And, as it towered above them, through that socket gleamed a star.

"There's yore ghosts," said Jackson. "Enough to scare any Injun. I'm glad I ain't alone, myself," he deprecated candidly. "I might git a notion to go back. My Gawd! What's that?"

This time the horses did not start and it was Sheridan who divined the cause. The wind, whistling through the orifice it had made, produced a sound that was uncanny in its semblance of a human sigh, or moan.

"It's the soul of some ghost that has lost its bearings. Red," and then Sheridan explained.

"Humph! No wonder the old Injun didn't want to guide 'em up here. If it wasn't for Vasquez' whisky, that crowd 'ud never come by here. But that stuff 'ud give a chap nerve enough to ask the devil in hell for a water chaser. The gels must have gone up in the daytime. I wonder if that lion's scared 'em?"

They passed the whistling monument and toiled up the steep trail to where the chasm closed in. On the rim they stopped involuntarily at the wonder of the scene. They seemed to look across the floor of a crater, its lava long crumbled to fertile soil, circled by jagged cliffs. The moon bathed a segment of the western wall. Grass grew thick as a mat, there were