At last we came to the Arkansas River—­flat-banked, sand-bottomed, wide, wandering, impossible thing—­whose shallow waters followed aimlessly the line of least resistance, back and forth across its bed.  Rivers had meant something to me.  The big muddy Missouri for Independence and Fort Leavenworth, that its steamers might bring the soldiers, and my uncle’s goods to their places.  The little rivers that ran into the big ones, to feed their currents for down-stream service.  The creeks, that boys might wade and swim and fish, else Beverly would have lived unhappily all his days.  But here was a river that could neither fetch nor carry.  Nobody lived near it, and it had no deep waters like our beloved, ugly old Missouri.  I loved the level prairies, but I didn’t like that river, somehow.  I felt exposed on its blank, treeless borders, as if I stood naked and defenseless, with no haven of cover from the enemies of the savage plains.

The late afternoon was hot, the sky was dust-dimmed, the south wind feverish and strength-sapping.  At dawn we had sighted a peak against the western horizon.  We were approaching it now—­a single low butte, its front a sheer stone bluff facing southward toward the river, it lifted its head high above the silent plains; and to the north it stretched in a long gentle slope back to a lateral rim along the landscape.  The trail crept close about its base, as if it would cling lovingly to this one shadow-making thing amid all the open, blaring, sun-bound miles stretching out on either side of it.

As Beverly and I were riding in front of Mat’s wagon, of which we had elected ourselves the special guardians, Rex Krane came up alongside Bill Banney’s team in front of us.  The young men were no such hard-and-fast friends as Beverly and I. For some reason they had little to say to each other.

“Is that what you call Pike’s Peak, Bill?” Rex asked.

“No, the mountains are a month away.  That’s Pawnee Rock, and I’ll breathe a lot freer when we get out of sight of that infernal thing,” Bill replied.

“What’s its offense?” Rex inquired.

“It’s the peak of perdition, the bottomless pit turned inside out,” Bill declared.

“I don’t see the excuse for a rock sittin’ out here, sayin’ nothin’, bein’ called all manner of unpleasant names,” the young Bostonian insisted.

“Well, I reckon you’d find one mighty quick if you ever heard the soldiers at Fort Leavenworth talk about it once.  All the plainsmen dread it.  Jondo says more men have been killed right around this old stone Sphinx than any other one spot in North America, outside of battle-fields.”

“Happy thought!  Do their ghosts rise up and walk at midnight?  Tell me more,” Rex urged.

“Nobody walks.  Everybody runs.  There was a terrible Indian fight here once; the Pawnees in the king-row, and all the hosts of the Midianites, and Hivites, and Jebusites, Kiowa, Comanche, and Kaw, rag-tag and bobtail, trying to get ’em out.  I don’t know who won, but the citadel got christened Pawnee Rock.  It took a fountain filled with blood to do it, though.”