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"Wonder how fast the cuss can run?" And Fadeaway swung his quirt. The stride quickened to the rhythmic beat of the cow-horse at top speed. The dog kept abreast without apparent effort. A half-mile beyond the ford the pace slackened as the pony took the hill across which the trail led to the open mesas.
The study of the archeology of Verde valley had gone far enough to show that the banks of the river were formerly the sites of many and populous pueblos, while the neighboring mesas from one end to another are riddled with cavate dwellings or crowned with stone buildings.
Nevertheless, now and then a genuine trailer from the heights, or cow-man from the mesas, does drop into town on some transient business and, with his peculiar speech and stride, remind the lazy town-loafers of the vigorous life going on far above them.
It twisted in and out among the rocks towards more broken country. "There may be a canyon leading South over there," he pointed. "Y' might try for a spring beneath that big rock. Looks green at the bottom." A mist as of primrose or fire tinged the lakes of quivering light lying on the ochre-colored mesas.
Each formation thus appears as a terrace, bounded on one side by a descending cliff carved out of the edges of its own strata and on the other by an ascending cliff carved out of the strata which overlie it. This is the more common form, although isolated mesas, bits of tableland completely engirdled by cliffs, are but little less common. The courses of the margins of the mesas are not regular.
These streams are also characterized by deep canyons and plateaus, and mesas abound on every hand. Between the Grand River and the White River, farther to the east, the Tavaputs Plateau is found. It begins at the foot of Gore's Pass Range and extends down between the rivers last mentioned to the very brink of Green River, which is in fact the upper Colorado.
Occasionally they came upon the stream, and found easier going along its gravel bars, till a bend threw them again into the meadows and mesas on either hand. Their course led them far up the big valley to another stream that entered from the right, bearing backward in a great bow towards the Yukon, and always there were dense clouds of mosquitoes above their heads.
She shuddered as she looked into the gathering darkness ahead, where those long, dark lines of mesas looked like barriers in the way. Then, suddenly, the Indian pointed ahead to the first mesa and uttered one word "Walpi!" So that was the Indian village to which she was bound? What was before her on the morrow? After eating a pretense of supper she lay down. The Indian had more firewater with him.
Looking in the direction indicated, over a long stretch of broken country, bordered on the west by an irregular range of sandstone mesas, I thought I saw a moving object near the foot of a rugged bluff, several miles distant; but before I could adjust my field-glass the object had turned the bluff and disappeared.
A hard ride down the cañon for five miles or more, then up a steep break and across cedar-dotted mesas, brought the party out to the Moqui trail shortly after mid-morning. Lennon frowned at the clear-marked trail. His plans as first made had been to cut and run for the railway the moment he should reach the main trail.
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