The Steeps of Life

So, with set jaws and straining body, he urged Cæsar to a last supreme effort, and the great black creature responded gallantly. With head low to the ground, his muscles standing out like ropes upon his shoulders, his forelegs bent like grappling-hooks, his quarters tucked beneath him, he put his giant heart into the work. Step by step, inch by inch he gained, yawing and sliding, stumbling and floundering, making way where all way seemed impossible. Slowly they crept up, slowly, slowly they neared that coveted line. Buck was breathing hard. Cæsar was blowing and had thrown his mouth agape, a sign that beyond this he could make no further effort. Five yards--two yards. The jagged line seemed to come down to meet them. At last, with a final spring, the great horse trampled it under foot.

Buck heaved a sigh of relief.

"Gee!" he murmured. Then with the wide, black plain stretching before him, its limits lost in a strange mist, he flung out of the saddle.

He stared about him curiously. Devil's Hill was in no way new to him. Many a time he had visited its mysterious regions, but always had he approached it from the prospecting camp, or his own farm, both of which lay away on the northern side of it.

A wide plateau, nearly two miles in extent, stretched out before him. It was as flat as the proverbial board, with just one isolated rock towering upon its bosom. This was the chief object of interest now. Away in the distance he beheld its ghostly outline, almost lost in the ruddy atmosphere which, just now, seemed to envelop the whole of that Western world.