Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
They began now to search for timber, looking especially for some clump of trees that also inclosed water. They did not anticipate any great difficulty in regard to the water, as the winter season and the heavy rains had filled the dry creek beds, and had sent torrents down the arroyos.
It had been raining frequently during the month, in quite unusual volume; the arroyos were pretty brooks, the sides of the divides wept, and there were wide, soft places on the prairies; the flocks went very lame from the excessive dampness, and riding was a splashing and spattering business; but the oldest inhabitant dropped no hint suggestive of the veritable meteorological coup which was quietly preparing.
Little by little, the tumbled hills drew nearer, and the red-sand dust of the road-bed gave place to broken lava. Patches of gray, sun-dried mountain grass appeared on the passing hill slopes, and in the arroyos trickling threads of water glistened, or, if the water were hidden, there were at least paths of damp sand to hint at the blessed moisture underneath.
As it was, he rode over tracks and traces and bits of sinister evidence here and there, and because the fence did not lie flat on the ground, and because many horses were scattered in the creek bottom and the draws and dry arroyos, he returned to camp satisfied that all was well on the Sinkhole range.
Our way proceeded across the grass flat, through the opening of the narrow cañon, and so on back into the interior by way of the bed through which flowed the sulphur stream. The country was badly eroded. Most of the time we marched between perpendicular clay banks about forty feet high. These were occasionally broken by smaller tributary arroyos of the same sort.
It is a bold chronicler who will undertake the description of a Texas night in the early spring. An inventory must suffice. The ranch rested upon the summit of a lenient slope. The ambient prairie, diversified by arroyos and murky patches of brush and pear, lay around us like a darkened bowl at the bottom of which we reposed as dregs. Like a turquoise cover the sky pinned us there.
Occasionally a low hill loomed out of the darkness, the shadows deepening around it; now and then the buckboard passed through a draw, the wheels sinking hub-deep in the loose sand. Several dry arroyos crossed the trail, but with a knowledge that seemed almost marvelous Norton cleverly avoided these pitfalls.
Black dots, dozens of them, were moving from ledge to ledge, pausing here and there to ply pick and shovel. Now and then from some one of the dry arroyos came the echoes of a surface shot; dynamite cartridges thrust into the earth to clear away the drift to bed-rock. Ford called his companion's attention to the activities.
Steadily they traveled, up dark arroyos bristling with mesquite, across little valleys leading into timbered stretches through which broken limbs and uprooted trees made progress almost impossible, following always untrodden ways that appalled with their lonely desolation. By dusk they were up in the headwaters of the creeks. The resilient muscles of the girl had lost their spring.
Carolyn June thrilled at the bigness of it all as they swept quickly past the irrigated district close to the town and sped out on the open unfenced range. For miles the country was level with here and there arroyos cross-sectioning into the river valley. Long stretches with the barest undulations made driving a joy and the winding road was a natural speedway.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking