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Way out and beyond rolled the floor of the basin, green and vast, like a ridged sea of pines, to the bold black Mazatzals so hauntingly beckoning from the distance. Copple spoke now and then, but I wanted to be silent. How wild and wonderful this place in the early morning! But I had not long to meditate and revel in beauty and wildness.
"Southeast y'u see the Sierra Anchas," said the girl pointing. "That notch in the range is the pass where sheep are driven to Phoenix an' Maricopa. Those big rough mountains to the south are the Mazatzals. Round to the west is the Four Peaks Range. An' y'u're standin' on the Rim."
There's two or three packs of lofers, an' in winter time they are hell to deal with. Lions thick as bees, an' shore bad when the snow's on. Bears will kill a cow now an' then. An' whenever an' old silvertip comes mozyin' across from the Mazatzals he kills stock. I'm in with half a dozen cattlemen. We all work together, an' the whole outfit cain't keep these vermints down.
South ranged the upheaved and wild Mazatzals. Everywhere beneath me, for leagues and leagues extended the timbered hills of green, the gray outcroppings of rocks, the red bluffs, the golden patches of grassy valleys, lost in the canyons. All these swept away in a vast billowy ocean of wilderness to become dim in the purple of distance. And the sun was setting in a blaze of gold.
Under me yawned a dark-green, smoky-canyoned, rippling basin of timber and red rocks leading away to the mountain ranges of the Four Peaks and Mazatzals.
Isbel was sitting on an upheaved section of the Rim, in a comfortable position from which he could watch the openings in the forest and gaze as well across the west curve of the Basin to the Mazatzals. He had composed himself to wait. He was clad in a buckskin suit, rather new, and it certainly showed off to advantage, compared with the ragged and soiled apparel Ellen remembered.
"We could pack over to the Mazatzals an' live thar till this blows over." "Thank y'u, Uncle John. Y'u're kind and good. But I'll stay with my father. His troubles are mine." "Ahuh! ... Wal, I might hev reckoned so.... Ellen, how do you stand on this hyar sheep an' cattle question?" "I think what's fair for one is fair for another. I don't like sheep as much as I like cattle.
His own father had been in the first party of adventurous pioneers who had traveled up from the south to cross over the Reno Pass of the Mazatzals into the Basin. "Newcomers from outside get impressions of the Tonto accordin' to the first settlers they meet," declared Blaisdell. "An' shore it's my belief these first impressions never change, just so strong they are!
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