I have said no man knows where his mind will run in moments of peril.  As we left our ponies and clambered up and up in hope of safety somewhere, the face of the rocks cut and carved by the rude stone tools of a race long perished, seemed to hold groups of living things staring at us and pointing the way.  And there was no end to these crude pictographs.  Over and over and over—­the human hand, the track of the little road-runner bird, the plumed serpent coiled or in waving line, the human form with the square body and round head, with staring circles for eyes and mouth, and straight-line limbs.

We were fleeing for safety through the sacred aisles of a people God had made; and when they served His purpose no longer, they had perished.  I did not think of them so that morning.  I thought only of some hiding-place, some inaccessible point where nothing could reach the girl I must protect.  But these crawling serpents, cut in the rock surfaces, crawled on and on.  These human hands, poor detached hands, were lifted up in mute token of what had gone before.  These two-eyed, one-mouthed circles on heads fast to body-boxes, from which waved tentacle limbs, jigged by us, to give place to other coiled or crawling serpents and their companion carvings, with the track of the swift road-runner skipping by us everywhere.

At last, with bleeding hands and torn clothing, we stood on a level rock like a tiny mesa set out from the high summit of the cliff.

Eloise sat down at my feet as I looked back eagerly over the precipitous way we had come, and watched the band of Mexicans less rapidly swarming up the same steep, devious trail.

Three hundred feet below us lay the plain with the thin current of the San Christobal River sparkling here and there in the sunlight.  The black spot on the trail that scarcely moved must be Beverly and Little Blue Flower with Sister Anita.  No, there was only the Indian girl there, and something moving in and out of the shadow near them.  I could not see for the intervening rocks.

“Gail!  Gail!  You will not let them take you.  You will not leave me,” Eloise moaned.

And I was one against a dozen.  I stooped to where she sat and gently lifted her limp white hand, saying: 

“Eloise, I was on a rock like this a night and a day alone on the prairie.  I could not move nor cry out.  But something inside told me to ’hold fast’—­the old law of the trail.  You must do that with me now.”

A shout broke over the valley and the rocks about us seemed suddenly to grow men, as if every pictograph of the old stone age had become a sentient thing, a being with a Mexican dress, and the soul of a devil.  Just across a narrow chasm, a little below us, Ferdinand Ramero stood in all the insolence of a conqueror, with a smile that showed his white teeth, and in his steely eyes was the glitter of a snake about to spring.