Venters rode on and on, not losing in the interest of his wide surroundings any of his caution or keen search for tracks or sight of living thing.

If there ever had been a trail here, he could not find it.

He rode through sage and clumps of pinon trees and grassy plots where long-petaled purple lilies bloomed.

He rode through a dark constriction of the pass no wider than the lane in the grove at Cottonwoods.

And he came out into a great amphitheater into which jutted huge towering corners of a confluences of intersecting canyons.
Venters sat his horse, and, with a rider's eye, studied this wild cross-cut of huge stone gullies.