“Maybe you’ll make them out,” said August.  “I can’t, and I’ve watched those dust-clouds for hours.  George can’t decide, either.”

Hare, looking at Snap, was attracted by the eyes from which his father and brothers expected so much.  If ever a human being had the eyes of a hawk Snap Naab had them.  The little brown flecks danced in clear pale yellow.  Evidently Snap had not located the perplexing dust-clouds, for his glance drifted.  Suddenly the remarkable vibration of his pupils ceased, and his glance grew fixed, steely, certain.

“That’s a bunch of wild mustangs,” he said.

Hare gazed till his eyes hurt, but could see neither clouds of dust nor moving objects.  No more was said.  The sons wheeled their mustangs and rode to the fore; August Naab reseated himself and took up the reins; the ascent proceeded.

But it proceeded leisurely, with more frequent rests.  At the end of an hour the horses toiled over the last rise to the summit and entered a level forest of cedars; in another hour they were descending gradually.

“Here we are at the tanks,” said Naab.

Hare saw that they had come up with the other wagons.  George Naab was leading a team down a rocky declivity to a pool of yellow water.  The other boys were unharnessing and unsaddling.

“About three,” said Naab, looking at the sun.  “We’re in good time.  Jack, get out and stretch yourself.  We camp here.  There’s the Coconina Trail where the Navajos go in after deer.”

It was not a pretty spot, this little rock-strewn glade where the white hard trail forked with the road.  The yellow water with its green scum made Hare sick.  The horses drank with loud gulps.  Naab and his sons drank of it.  The women filled a pail and portioned it out in basins and washed their faces and hands with evident pleasure.  Dave Naab whistled as he wielded an axe vigorously on a cedar.  It came home to Hare that the tension of the past night and morning had relaxed.  Whether to attribute that fact to the distance from White Sage or to the arrival at the water-hole he could not determine.  But the certainty was shown in August’s cheerful talk to the horses as he slipped bags of grain over their noses, and in the subdued laughter of the women.  Hare sent up an unspoken thanksgiving that these good Mormons had apparently escaped from the dangers incurred for his sake.  He sat with his back to a cedar and watched the kindling of fires, the deft manipulating of biscuit dough in a basin, and the steaming of pots.  The generous meal was spread on a canvas cloth, around which men and women sat cross-legged, after the fashion of Indians.  Hare found it hard to adapt his long legs to the posture, and he wondered how these men, whose legs were longer than his, could sit so easily.  It was the crown of a cheerful dinner after hours of anxiety and abstinence to have Snap Naab speak civilly to him, and to see him bow his head meekly as his father asked the blessing.  Snap ate as though he had utterly forgotten that he had recently killed a man; to hear the others talk to him one would suppose that they had forgotten it also.