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Updated: May 10, 2025
Sometimes, during unusual winters, the heavens opened and spilled themselves, choking the narrow watercourses, washing out roads and destroying fields, changing the arid arroyos into raging river beds.
But to know them for the very truth! That was, indeed, the magic, and her mountains were towering citadels of the true Romance. Long before Bronson ventured to return to his mountain camp, Lorry was riding the hill trails again as spring loosened the upland snows and filled the cañons and arroyos with a red turbulence of waters bearing driftwood and dead leaves.
The hills were huge rolling hummocks of bare ground, covered only by wild oats. At long intervals, were isolated live oaks. In the canyons and arroyos, the chaparral and manzanita grew in dark olive-green thickets. The ground was honey-combed with gopher-holes, and the gophers themselves were everywhere.
The trails were numerous, but old and faint; and they had been made by cattle, not by men. They led in all directions but one north, south, and west; but not one, however faint, struck out towards the valley. "If I keep along the edge of the hills where these trails are," muttered the dentist, "I ought to find water up in the arroyos from time to time." At once he uttered an exclamation.
What water we got was to be had only by digging in the arroyos which traversed the centre of each valley longitudinally; and although this water always was muddy, and had a strongly alkaline taste, it is the only thing that I remember with pleasure in all that weary laud.
Out there before him, as the train rattled over culverts spanning the dry arroyos, or puffed gingerly up the grades toward the higher levels of the plains, were the hills, gray and brown in the foreground, blue as the blue sea farther on, then fringing into the sun-pinked radiance of the snowy range, forming the last barrier against a turquoise sky.
The country into which the outlaws had been driven was an ideal terrain for defense. The brush was thick and tall. Two wooded arroyos gashed the rim of the valley and ran down into the basin. An attack against determined men here was bound to prove costly. Billie knew that three men lay in the chaparral and he believed that one of them at least was wounded.
They descended into one little cañón after another, followed the course of numberless arroyos, and even dug where there seemed indications of moisture, all to no purpose. But at length McTeague's mule put his nose in the air and blew once or twice through his nostrils. "Smells it, the son of a gun!" exclaimed Cribbens.
We did the drive of twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy, drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry arroyos and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised to make sticks of the vehicle. It held good, however, and rattled out a sort of derisive snicker at every fresh attempt to shiver it.
"'Or ever the silver cord be loosed or the golden bowl be broken or the pitcher be broken at the fountain or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit to God who gave it." They stood in silence again. The wailing died into the distance. The sun touched to molten gold the heavy shadows of the mountain arroyos.
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