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Updated: May 25, 2025
After riding a bit through the pines, the ground apparently dropped off in front of us out of sight, rising in a counter slope on the other side, in a great green wall from which sprang a hogback; only this time it was a razor-back, so sharp was its edge, up which back and forth ran the trail.
After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which might have discomforting consequences.
It evidently led from the saffron-tinted dump and gray buildings of a mine which showed on the side of a big, bald mountain to southward. At a point almost directly below the ridge where the man and horse stood, it crossed a small hogback and descended a steep slope between lines of jack pines, disappearing in the timber farther down.
"I'm goin' up to the hogback. He ain't had start enough to get up there yet on a horse, an' I'll beat him to it. It'll be daylight in about two hours, an' I'll be there till daylight. If you think you can do it, get out some of the men an' cover the trails to the mine on horses. He might try to get over that way.
"Well, if the movie people have as much trouble getting on the property as the sheriff and Mister Finch are having, they wouldn't get a very clear picture and the story would be limited to their own misfortunes. Up to now, old Hulls Barrow has stood 'em off with a gun. They don't want to kill him and they can't get possession. "Now this Bar-O ranch is just over the hogback, south of us.
At fourteen even the hardiest youth feels a slight shock when a bullet jars through his hat crown two inches above his hair. Devil's Tooth ridge, which gave the Lorrigan ranch its name, was really a narrow hogback with a huge rock spire at one end. Crudely it resembled a lower jaw bone with one lone tooth remaining.
"I 'spect they're hustlin' up to head me off at the hogback. They're figuring I'd try to go back the way I come in." He smiled grimly in the soft moonlight, and his gaze turned toward the east, where the stars glowed over the shadowy reaches of desert which he could not see, but the very thought of which stirred something in his soul. Then he pushed on up the trail toward the mine.
The mines manager winced and then frowned. "I gave him the money to carry to the mine," he confessed without flinching. "He came back with a story about being held up, and when he saw that I didn't believe him and intended to turn him back to you, he pulled a gun on me and made his get-away. He lit out through town for the road to the hogback and the pass over the mountains."
As he rode on now to the north he did not double and twist, for the Indian would know the old trail; but the tracks he had left behind him before he mounted to the ridge were as aimless as it was possible to make them. They did not strike out boldly up some hogback or canyon but at every fork and bend they turned this way and that, as if he were hopelessly lost.
The Willie Meena was a prophecy of what might be expected if a similar formation could be found, but it was no more than the throat of an extinct volcano, filled up with gold-bearing quartz. There was no fissure-vein, no great mother lode leading off through the country for miles; only a hogback of black quartz and then worlds and worlds of desert as barren as wash boulders could make it.
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