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Nor was there any new thing in hospitality. The last bacon and bread had been set upon the table; baled hay and grain, hauled in by day's works from the alfalfa fields of Moroni and the Salagua, had been fed to the famished horses of the very men who had sheeped off the grass; the same blanket had been shared, sometimes, alas, with men who were "crumby."
Whether the bridges went out or held, the grass and browse would shoot up like beanstalks in to-morrow's magic sunshine; and even if the Rio Salagua blocked their passage, or the shearers' tents were beaten into the mud, there would still be feed, and feed was everything. But while the rain was worth a thousand dollars a minute to the country at large, trade languished in the Hotel Bender.
He rode up the river gloomily, searching the southern wilderness with frowning, bloodshot eyes, and once more, far to the east where the jagged cliffs of the Superstitions sweep down to the gorge of the Salagua and Hell's Hip Pocket bars the river's sweep, he saw that vague, impalpable haze a smoke, a dust, a veil of the lightest skein, stirred idly by some wandering wind, perhaps, or marking the trail of sheep.
The Salagua was long in flood that Spring. Day after day, while the sheep wandered uneasily along its banks rearing up to strip the last remnants of browse from the tips of willows and burro bushes, it rolled ponderously forth from its black-walled gorge and flowed past the crossing, deep and strong, sucking evenly into the turbid whirlpool that waited for its prey.
That year the Salagua left all bounds and swept my fine fields of standing corn away, but we did not regret it beyond reason for the grass came up on the mesas high as a horse's belly, and my cattle and those of my friend Don Luís, the good father of Jeff, here, spread out across the plains as far as the eye could see, and every cow raised her calf. But look!
The trail to Hidden Water leads up the Salagua, alternately climbing the hard mesa and losing itself in the shifting sand of the river bottom until, a mile or two below the mouth of the box cañon, it swings in to the edge of the water.
"He says he's mighty glad I steered the sheep away, but there is something funny going on back in Washington; some combine of the sheep and lumber interests has got in and blocked the whole Forest Reserve business and there won't be any Salagua Forest Reserve this year. So I guess my job of sheep-wrangler is going to hold; at least the judge asked me to stay with it until Fall."
What a river it was now, this unbridled Salagua which had been their moat and rampart for so many years! Its waters flowed thin and impotent over the rapids, lying in clear pools against the base of the black cliffs, and the current that had uprooted trees like feathers was turned aside by a snag.
For three miles or more it spreads out between striated cliffs where hawks and eagles make their nests; then once more it closes in, the creek plunges down a narrow gorge and disappears, writhing tortuously on its way to the Salagua whose fire-blasted walls rise in huge bulwarks against the south, dwarfing the near-by cliffs into nothingness by their majestic height.
But the Salagua is no purling brook, dignified by a bigger name; it is not even a succession of mill ponds like the dammed-up streams of the East: in its own name the Salagua is a Rio, broad and swift, with a current that clutches treacherously at a horse's legs and roars over the brink of stony reefs in a long, fretful line of rapids.
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