Yaqui left the gulch and clambered up over a jumble of weathered slides and traced a slow course along the base of the giant wall.  He looked up and seemed to select a point for ascent.  It was the last place in that mountainside where Gale would have thought climbing possible.  Before him the wall rose, leaning over him, shutting out the light, a dark mighty mountain mass.  Innumerable cracks and crevices and caves roughened the bulging sides of dark rock.

Yaqui tied one end of his lasso to the short, stout stick and, carefully disentangling the coils, he whirled the stick round and round and threw it almost over the first rim of the shelf, perhaps thirty feet up.  The stick did not lodge.  Yaqui tried again.  This time it caught in a crack.  He pulled hard.  Then, holding to the lasso, he walked up the steep slant, hand over hand on the rope.  When he reached the shelf he motioned for Gale to follow.  Gale found that method of scaling a wall both quick and easy.  Yaqui pulled up the lasso, and threw the stick aloft into another crack.  He climbed to another shelf, and Gale followed him.  The third effort brought them to a more rugged bench a hundred feet above the slides.  The Yaqui worked round to the left, and turned into a dark fissure.  Gale kept close to his heels.  They came out presently into lighter space, yet one that restricted any extended view.  Broken sections of cliff were on all sides.

Here the ascent became toil.  Gale could distance Yaqui going downhill; on the climb, however, he was hard put to it to keep the Indian in sight.  It was not a question of strength or lightness of foot.  These Gale had beyond the share of most men.  It was a matter of lung power, and the Yaqui’s life had been spent scaling the desert heights.  Moreover, the climbing was infinitely slow, tedious, dangerous.  On the way up several times Gale imagined he heard a dull roar of falling water.  The sound seemed to be under him, over him to this side and to that.  When he was certain he could locate the direction from which it came then he heard it no more until he had gone on.  Gradually he forgot it in the physical sensations of the climb.  He burned his hands and knees.  He grew hot and wet and winded.  His heart thumped so that it hurt, and there were instants when his sight was blurred.  When at last he had toiled to where the Yaqui sat awaiting him upon the rim of that great wall, it was none too soon.

Gale lay back and rested for a while without note of anything except the blue sky.  Then he sat up.  He was amazed to find that after that wonderful climb he was only a thousand feet or so above the valley.  Judged by the nature of his effort, he would have said he had climbed a mile.  The village lay beneath him, with its new adobe structures and tents and buildings in bright contrast with the older habitations.  He saw the green alfalfa fields, and Belding’s white horses, looking very small and motionless.  He pleased himself by imagining he could pick out Blanco Sol.  Then his gaze swept on to the river.