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To-night I'm going to find out what it is." Diablo was steeped in moonlight. For miles about the sea gleamed like a mirror. The grim mountains which guarded the shore were robed in saffron and checkered with black by the dark shadows of the towering peaks as they fell athwart the hillsides and mingled with the darkness which hugged the canyons.
The summers in the canyons were seething hot, the winters in the mountains perishingly cold, with apparently inexhaustible snow clouds circling forever about the rugged peaks snows in which many a good, honest laborer was lost until the eagles and vultures came with the April thaws, and wheeled slowly above the pulseless sleeper, if indeed the wolves and mountain lions had permitted him to lie thus long unmolested.
She went about it with the pathetic confidence of youth and ignorance. She rode up and down the canyons and over the higher, grassier ridges, to watch the cattle on their summer range and keep them from straying. She went with John Pringle after posts and helped him fence certain fertile slopes and hollows for winter grazing.
On the rounded shoulders and steep flanks of the foothills that form the sides of the canyon, the barley fields looked down upon the meadows; and, now and then, in the whirling landscape winding side canyons beautiful with live-oak and laurel, with greasewood and sage led the eye away toward the pine-fringed ridges of the Galenas while above, the higher snow-clad peaks and domes of the San Bernardinos still shone coldly against the blue.
We boarded a Concord coach with six snow-white horses to wheel us on a dead run over and around steep mountains and through dismal canyons, first on four wheels, then three, then two and occasionally one, keeping us constantly busy retaining our seats and fearing at every turn that we would be dashed into eternity; and yet, it was one of the most picturesque and thrilling rides one could take.
But the unfortunate result of this was to give further impulse to the now racing horses as they approached a point where the slope terminated in two diverging canyons. Mrs. Ashwood gave a sharp pull upon her bit. To her consternation the mustang stopped short almost instantly, planting his two fore feet rigidly in the dust and even sliding forward with the impetus.
In the first place, I'll so far illoomine your mind as to tell you that cattle, same as people an' speshully mountain cattle, where the winds an snows don't get to drive 'em an' drift 'em south lives all their lives in the same places, year after year; an' as you rides your ranges, you're allers meetin' up with the same old cattle in the same canyons. They never moves, once they selects a home.
We crossed through a pass, and on the 22d, after pursuing a winding and difficult road through canyons, succeeded in getting the whole train down to the Colorado a short distance below the mouth of the Dirty Devil. The Colorado was high, and swept along majestically. We found it had been up as far as the Canonita, and had almost washed away one of the oars.
It was his West that passed, unrolling there before the eye of his mind: the open, heat-scourged round of desert; the mesa, like a vast altar, shimmering purple in the royal sunset; the still, gigantic mountains, heaving into the sky from out the canyons; the strenuous, fierce life of isolated towns, lost and forgotten, down there, far off, below the horizon.
Instead of relying on the guides, Crawford had undertaken to strike through the canyons of the Cimarron by what appeared to him a more direct route, and in the deep gorges, filled as they were with snow, he had been floundering about for days without being able to extricate his command.
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