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“What’s he doing here?” McKay’s voice still held a note of suspicion, and he looked at him as if he were trying to place him.

Bowie Allison studied him the same way, saying nothing.

“Where’s Tudishishn? These gentlemen are waiting for him.”

“Tudishishn is ill with a demon in his stomach,” Peza-a answered. “He has asked me to substitute myself for him.” He spoke in Spanish, hesitantly, the way an Apache does.

McKay studied him for some time. Finally, he said, “Well… can he track?”

“He was with Tudishishn for a year. Tudishishn speaks highly of him.” Again I don’t know what made me say it. A hundred things were going through my head. What I said was true, but I saw it getting me into something. Mickey never looked directly at me. He kept watching McKay, with the faint smile on his mouth.

McKay seemed to hesitate, but then he said, “Well, come on. I don’t need a reference …long as he can track.”

They mounted and rode out.

McKay wanted prongbuck. Tudishishn had described where they would find the elusive herds and promised to show him all he could shoot. But they were many days away. McKay had said if he didn’t have time, he’d make time. He wanted good shooting.

Off and on during the first day he questioned Mickey Segundo closely to see what he knew about the herds.

“I have seen them many times. Their hide the color of sand, and black horns that reach into the air like bayonets of the soldiers. But they are far.”

McKay wasn’t concerned with distance. After a while he was satisfied that this Indian guide knew as much about tracking antelope as Tudishishn, and that’s what counted. Still, there was something about the young Apache….

“TOMORROW, WE begin the crossing of the malpais,” Mickey Segundo said. It was evening of the third day, as they made camp at Yucca Springs.

Bowie Allison looked at him quickly. “Tudishishn planned we’d follow the high country down and come out on the plain from the east.”

“What’s the matter with keeping a straight line,” McKay said. “Keeping to the hills is longer, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but that malpais is a blood-dryin’ furnace in the middle of August,” Bowie grumbled. “You got to be able to pinpoint the wells. And even if you find them, they might be dry.”

McKay looked at Peza-a for an answer.

“If Señor McKay wishes to ride for two additional days, that is for him to say. But we can carry our water with ease.” He went to his saddle pouch and drew out two collapsed, rubbery bags. “These, from the stomach of the horse, will hold much water. Tomorrow we fill canteens and these, and the water can be made to last five, six days. Even if the wells are dry, we have water.”

Bowie Allison grumbled under his breath, looking with distaste at the horse-intestine water sacks.

McKay rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He was thinking of prongbuck. Finally he said, “We’ll cut across the lava.”

Bowie Allison was right in his description of the malpais. It was a furnace, a crusted expanse of desert that stretched into another world. Saguaro and ocotillo stood nakedly sharp against the whiteness, and off in the distance were ghostly looming buttes, gigantic tombstones for the lava waste. Horses shuffled choking white dust, and the sun glare was a white blistering shock that screamed its brightness. Then the sun would drop suddenly, leaving a nothingness that could be felt. A life that had died a hundred million years ago.

McKay felt it and that night he spoke little.

The second day was a copy of the first, for the lava country remained monotonously the same. McKay grew more irritable as the day wore on, and time and again he would snap at Bowie Allison for his grumbling. The country worked at the nerves of the two white men, while Mickey Segundo watched them.

On the third day they passed two water holes. They could see the shallow crusted bottoms and the fissures that the tight sand had made cracking in the hot air. That night McKay said nothing.

In the morning there was a blue haze on the edge of the glare; they could feel the land beneath them begin to rise. Chaparral and patches of toboso