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The night was fine and clear; outlined against the sky were the stalks of countless sotol-plants standing slim and bare, like the upright lances of an army at rest; ahead the road meandered across a mesa, covered with grama grass and black, formless blots of shrubbery. Father O'Malley groaned and shifted his weight.

There are no steep hills, but the road aims directly for its objective point, taking the visitor through growths of pinion, from which the Indians gather the delicious pine nuts, juniper, from the crushed berries of which they make a sweet and refreshing drink, and over levels where rich grama grass grows side by side with the cactus, the amole and the yucca, brightened and vivified by the Indian paintbrush, sunflowers, lupines and scores of other gorgeously colored flowers.

After threading hills for hours they came out upon a wide, rolling basin prettily diversified by low spurs of the encircling mountains and bluish green with the long grasses known as pin and grama. A few deer and antelopes, bounding across the rockier places, were an aggravation to starving men who could not follow them. "Why don't we catch some o' thim flyin' crachurs?" demanded Sweeny.

On the west side of the Arkansas River, and between that stream and the Rocky Mountains, there are three distinct species of grass found. The first is the short, curly variety, on which the buffalo are said to feed, from which fact it takes its name. The second kind is the Grama grass, which is, I believe, indigenous to only this section of America. Its stalk grows to the height of about one foot.

To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and grama, the former, the homely gray-leaved plant of our Eastern goose-stuffing, grown into a dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as thick as a man's body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash-tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews.

This broken country, covered with pine and cedar, and clothed with bunch grass and grama, makes a capital tramping-ground, especially in winter, when rabbits, mountain grouse and sage-hens are numerous enough to make it worth while to shoulder a gun. The way to reach the ridges is to take the road to the Garden of the Gods, and follow it till the Quarry Road is reached.

Perhaps some grim, hard-riding Spaniard made his last ride here; weary at last of war, turned his dead face back to Spain and the pleasant valleys of his childhood. We have a glimpse of him, small in the mighty silence; his faithful few about him, with fearful backward glances; a gray sea of waving grama breaking at their feet; the great mountains looking down on them.

We take off the packs from the animals, and let them nibble away at the rich grama and gallinas grasses that flourish here after the summer rains. Comfortable and contented after our meal, we lie on our backs under the shelter of a juniper or a friendly cottonwood, or in the shade of an immense block fallen from some cracked wall above.

Tall wild rice and wild rye grow on the flood-plain and by the streams where the tall buttercups shine like bits of gold and the blackbirds have their home; bushy blue stem on the prairies and in the open woods where the golden squaw weed and the wild geranium make charming patterns of yellow and pink and purple and some of the painted cup left over from May still glows like spots of scarlet rain; tall grama grass on the dry prairies and gravelly knolls, whitened by the small spurge and yellowed by the creeping cinquefoil; nodding fescue in the sterile soils where the robin's plantain and the sheep sorrel have succeeded the early everlasting; satin grasses in the moist soil of the open woodlands where the fine white flowers of the Canada anemone blow, and slough grass in the marshy meadows where the white-crossed flowers of the sharp spring are fading, and the woolly stem of the bitter boneset is lengthening; reed grass and floating manna grass in the swamps where the broad arrow leaves of the sagittaria fringe the shore and the floating leaves and fragrant blossoms of the water lilies adorn the pond.

Beneath their feet the grass grew long and matted, shot here and there with the blue and gold of flowers, like the rich meadows of the East; and clustering along the hillsides, great bunches of grama grass waved their plumes proudly, the last remnant of all that world of feed which had clothed the land like a garment before the days of the sheep.