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The mesas are carved out of platforms of horizontal or nearly horizontal rocks by perennial or intermittent streams, and as the climate is exceedingly arid most of the streams flow only during seasons of rain, and for the greater part of the year they are dry arroyos. Many of the longer channels are dry for long periods. Some of them are opened only by floods that come ten or twenty years apart.

A little brown rabbit skipped around a bunch of catclaw and sat twitching his whiskers and looking humorously at Givens. The pony went on eating grass. It is well to be reasonably watchful when a Mexican lion sings soprano along the arroyos at sundown. The burden of his song may be that young calves and fat lambs are scarce, and that he has a carnivorous desire for your acquaintance.

Whether the canyon is accessible or not from the table-land above over against the several pueblos, by means of the arroyos which break through the walls and enter the canyon, does not appear from these reports; but it seems probable, Mr. Lieutenant Simpson, in his report, has furnished ground plans of five of these structures with measurements. Mr.

It was a wilted, shrivelled, heat-flayed, fire-blasted world of arid desolation; trenched by the dry arroyos; sifted by the hot winds fine as flour; with rings and belts and wavering layers of heat heat from the orange sun edged red by the Desert dust of the atmosphere heat from the wind off some white flamed furnace heat from the ochre shifting sands panting to the loom and writhe of the blue-flamed air, and over all a veil, was it blue or lilac or lavender? tinted as of rainbow mists.

"I think that when the Almighty made this country on the north side of the Brazos," said McCann the next morning at breakfast, "the Creator must have grown careless or else made it out of odds and ends. There's just a hundred and one of these dry arroyos that you can't see until you are right onto them. They wouldn't bother a man on horseback, but with a loaded wagon it's different.

Sodden with weariness, dazzled and muddled by the savage sun-glare, he followed, with eyes fixed, the rhythmically, monotonously moving feet of his leader, through an interminable desert of soft, clogging sand; a desert which dropped away into parched arroyos, and rose to scorched mesas whereon fierce cacti thrust at him with thorns and spikes; a desert dead and mummified in the dreadful heat; a lifeless Inferno wherein moved neither beast, bird nor insect.

It was the morning of the second day, after we had turned westward up the Canadian river. We were making but slow progress, as the trail we had to follow was intersected at frequent intervals with `arroyos' running into the river from the south.

The plain is watered by several arroyos, skirted with timber, generally the evergreen oak. We met this morning a Californian carreta, or travelling-cart, freighted with women and children, bound on a pleasure excursion. The carreta is the rudest specimen of the wheeled vehicle I have seen.

The train had left Limon Junction on its last, clattering, rushing leg of the journey across the plains, tearing on through a barren country of tumbleweed, of sagebrush, of prairie-dog villages and jagged arroyos toward the great, crumpled hills in the distance, hills which meant everything to Robert Fairchild.

He believed that the horseman he had seen earlier in the day might be the one, and he looked for him painstakingly, picking out all the draws, all the dry washes and arroyos of that vicinity. The man would keep under cover, of course, in making his getaway. He would not ride across a ridge if he could help it, any more than would Starr.