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But up on the higher mesas there is a heady quality to the wind that blows fresh in your face. There is an Indian-summery haze like a thin veil over the farthest mountain ranges. Summer is with you yet; but somehow you feel that winter is coming. In a country all gray and dull yellow and brown, you find strange, beautiful tints no artist has yet prisoned with his paints.
We crawled up rugged mountain trails and skirted the rims of dizzy chasms; we wound through cañons, with only narrow streams for paths, between sheer walls of rock; we pitched our camp at the bases of great, red sand stone mesas, barren of life; we followed long, yellow ways over stretches of unending plain; we wandered in the painted-desert lands, where all the colors God has made bewilder with their beauty, in the barest, dreariest, most unlovely bit of unfinished world that our great continent holds; the lands forgotten, maybe, when, in Creation's busy week, the evening and the morning were the sixth day, and the Great Builder looked on His work and called it good.
This canyon is in soft, white sandstone, usually with vertical walls varying from 500 to 2,000 feet in height, and the river flows in a gentle winding way through all this stretch. To the east of this plateau region, with its mesas and buttes and its volcanic mountains, stand the southern Rocky Mountains, or Park Mountains, a system of north-and-south ranges.
Heretofore at loose ends with the world, the finding of Sinker, dying on the mesas, kindled within him righteous wrath against the circumstance rather than the individual slayer. His meandering thoughts and emotions became crystallized. His energies hardened to a set purpose. He was obsessed with a fanaticism akin to that of those who had burned witches and thanked their Maker for the opportunity.
Add to the danger of sheer rock declivity, an almost desert-forest growth dwarf juniper and cedar and giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off intruders and you can understand why some of the most magnificent specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here undisturbed by the hunter.
In spite of her evident invalidism, one could but wonder why she made so little effort to help herself. She sat droopingly on the rock, gazing from her foot to the far lavender line of the mesas. A tiny, impotent atom of life, she sat as if the eternal why which the desert hurls at one overwhelmed her, deprived her of hope, almost of sensation.
We left the main road there and swung off across the desert for the Hopi villages, built high on rocky mesas overlooking the surrounding country. It was delightful during the morning coolness, but all too soon the sun enveloped us. We met two or three Navajo men on their tough little ponies, but they were sullen and refused to answer my waves to them.
Below, there began to be an extraordinary view of the golden country with its orange mesas and its dark, purple rim of mountains. Millings was a tiny circle of square pebbles, something built up by children in their play. The awful impersonalities of sky and earth swept away its small human importance. Thatcher's larkspur-colored eyes absorbed serenity.
When Wayland dismounted to examine the marks, he stepped on a small cactus. They picked up a trail that led over rocky mesas and dipped suddenly into the deep dug-way of a dry gravel bed. The sand walls of the dead stream afforded shelter from the sun, and the two riders spurred their bronchos to a canter led by the pack mule.
"That's right. Keep a-goin'. It's your stunt this time." And Sundown waved his arm. The return of Sundown without the dog occasioned no suspicion on the Mexican's part. He most naturally thought, if he considered the fact at all, that the dog was hunting the mesas.
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