“Two hundred dollars,” whispered Coronado.

“You said that befo’,” croaked Texas.  “Go it some better.”

“Four hundred.”

“Stranger,” said Texas, after debating his chances, “it’s a big thing.  But I’ll do it for that.”

Coronado walked away, hurried up his muleteers, exchanged a word with Mrs. Stanley, and finally returned to Thurstane.  His thin, dry, dusky fingers trembled a little, but he looked his man steadily in the face, while he tendered him another cigarito.

“Who is your hunter?” asked the officer.  “I must say he is a devilish bad-looking fellow.”

“He is one of the best hunters Garcia ever had,” replied the Mexican.  “He is one of your own people.  You ought to like him.”

Further journeying brought with it topographical adventures.  The country into which they were penetrating is one of the most remarkable in the world for its physical peculiarities.  Its scenery bears about the same relation to the scenery of earth in general, that a skeleton’s head or a grotesque mask bears to the countenance of living humanity.  In no other portion of our planet is nature so unnatural, so fanciful and extravagant, and seemingly the production of caprice, as on the great central plateau of North America.

They had left far behind the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, and had placed between it and them the barren, sullen piles of the Jemez mountains.  No more long sweeps of grassy plain or slope; they were amid the debris of rocks which hedge in the upper heights of the great plateau; they were struggling through it like a forlorn hope through chevaux-de-frise.  The morning sun came upon them over treeless ridges of sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid.  The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins.  It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works had been shattered by thunderbolts.

Many heights were truncated mounds of rock, resembling gigantic platforms with ruinous sides, such as are known in this Western land as mesas or buttes.  They were Nature’s enormous mockery of the most ambitious architecture of man, the pyramids of Egypt and the platform of Baalbek.  Terrace above terrace of shattered wall; escarpments which had been displaced as if by the explosion of some incredible mine; ramparts which were here high and regular, and there gaping in mighty fissures, or suddenly altogether lacking; long sweeps of stairway, winding dizzily upwards, only to close in an impossible leap:  there was no end to the fantastic outlines and the suggestions of destruction.