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Beyond that another, and yet another. Most of the boys had built in the coulees where was water. They did not care so much about the view over which Miss Allen had grown enthusiastic. He pulled up in a certain place near the brow of the hill, and looked down into the narrower gulch where huddled the shacks they had moved. He grinned at the sight.
As far as the eye could see on every side the moonlight revealed only black lava-rock, deep black shadows that marked the courses of dry coulees, and enormous mud-cracks and Antelope Butte. As the girl rode beside the cowboy she noticed that the cynical smile was gone from the clean-cut profile. For miles he did not speak. Antelope Butte was near, now. "I am thirsty," she said.
When a man has grown up in the habit of mounting a horse to travel any distance over three hundred yards, a walk of twenty undulating miles over a network of bald ridges and yawning coulées makes him think that a sulphur-and-brimstone hereafter can't possibly hold much discomfort that he hasn't sampled.
It is nothing to go down these coulees; one just lets one's self slide down; but it is more difficult to get up again; one has to scramble up by catching hold of the hanging branches of the trees, and sometimes on all fours, by sheer strength. A whole mortal hour passed, and he did not come; nothing moved in the brushwood. The captain's wife began to grow impatient. What could he be doing?
Every horse free on the range came into the coulees that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and down excitedly. Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes played. In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so thoroughly subdued. The sun came on, valiantly stripped bare, knowing what was to be.
The volcanic mountains, cinder cones, and coulees, the majestic plateaus and elaborate mesas, the sculptured buttes and canyon gorges, are all found here, but on a more stupendous scale.
They's some several thousan' square miles in which there's only seven water-holes that a man can drink out of, an' generally speakin' about five of them is dry. There's plenty of water-holes but they're poison. Some is gyp an' some is arsnic. Also these here bad lands ain't laid out on no general plan. The coulees run hell-west an' crossways at their littlest end an' wind up in a mud crack.
Three times she felt the heaving plunge and jar as the little horse skimmed over cut-bank coulees and washes which her own eyes could not see in the dripping velvet black. From the sounds below she knew they were well up on the flanks of the run and nearing the peak. The stampede seemed slowing. A long, wavering flash revealed Harris a dozen jumps ahead.
A clod of dirt plumbed down upon his shoulder, bringing with it a shower of finer particles. "Another blizzard!" he groaned, "and the worst we've had yet, by the sound." The wind shrieked down the chimney and sought the places where the chinking was loose. It howled up the coulees, putting the wolves themselves to shame.
The country people sell the wood; they send it down the ravines, which are called coulées, locally, and which lead down to the plain, and there they stack it into piles, which they sell thrice a year to the wood merchants. The spot where this market is held, is indicated by two small houses by the side of the high road, and which serve for public-houses.
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