CHAPTER I.
_"Little Next Door--her years are few-- Loves me, more than her elders do; Says, my wrinkles become me so; Marvels much at the tales I know.
Says, we shall marry when she is grown----"_ The little happy song stopped short.

John Wesley Pringle, at the mesa's last headland, drew rein to adjust his geography.

This was new country to him.
Close behind, Organ Mountain flung up a fantasy of spires, needle-sharp and bare and golden.

The long straight range--saw-toothed limestone save for this twenty-mile sheer upheaval of the Organ--stretched away to north and south against the unclouded sky, till distance turned the barren gray to blue-black, to blue, to misty haze; till the sharp, square-angled masses rounded to hillocks--to a blur--a wavy line--nothing.
More than a hundred miles to the north-west, two midget mountains wavered in the sky.

John Wesley nodded at their unforgotten shapes and pieced this vast landscape to the patchwork map in his head.