B. M. Bower

“ No artist would ever have dared to mix those barbaric colors, even for a desert sunset; and if he had dared his hand must have lacked the cunning of the Master Painter who daily wrought his magic here on these wild hills where men so seldom ventured.
Abington looked down a sheer wall of rock to a deep basin where grass grew and a round pool of water held like a mirror the rose-tinted reflection of the cloud straight overhead. One steep trail led down the farther hillside to the pool and as he gazed a mountain sheep went bounding up that trail. ”

“ WITHOUT any clear purpose Abington started down the ridge, looking for some break in the cliff that separated him from the basin by a scant two hundred feet. He had no doubt that Bill Jonathan was done for; the automatic was a wicked weapon; the range was short.
When in the dusk he came slipping and sliding down an old sheep trail long since abandoned for a more favored path, however, there was no wounded man to be seen in the little basin. Like a shot quail that flutters for a moment among the bushes and is lost, the man somehow had managed to crawl away and disappear. ”

“ He emerged at last on a narrow ridge that stood like the crest of a huge, petrified wave between the peak he was leaving and another not quite so high. Intuitively he identified it as the ridge he had dubbed the rooster's comb—and knew that if he were right he must have come a long way underground. For the cave where he and Bill had spent the night together and from which he had started on his subterranean journey was considerably more than half a mile from the ridge where he had seen the light. ”