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Spikes of all sorts and sizes bristle everywhere and admonish the tenderfoot to beware. Guarded by an impenetrable armor of prickly mail they defy encroachment and successfully repel all attempts at undue familiarity. To be torn by a cat-claw thorn or impaled on a stout dagger leaf of one of these plants would not only mean painful laceration but, perhaps, serious or even fatal injury.
In trying to get through in the direction that Dave had gone, we tried to make a short cut in order to gain time, but soon found our way completely blocked by immense boulders and dense thickets of cat-claw bushes, which is a variety of mesquite covered with strong, sharp, curved thorns.
In the thick brush it would be hard to handle noiselessly and the snapping of a twig might mean the difference between life and death. The sheriff slipped into the tangle of cat-claw, prickly pear, and mesquite, vanishing into the gloom from the sight of Goodheart. On the back of an envelope Dumont had drawn for him a rough map of the valley.
Anyhow, I consoled myself for hours of misery by laying that flattering unction to my soul. If I had liked, I could have unravelled the whole tangle for Sir Lionel's still puzzled mind; but if I had done so, I should have been returning cat-claw for cat-claw; so I pretended to be "lost in it, my lord"; and, indeed, it was true that I couldn't understand why the Tyndals had failed me.
When this occurs the bench or terrace, being formed of rich alluvium, soon becomes covered with grass, and later with mesquite and “cat-claw” bushes, interspersed with such cottonwood trees as may have survived the period when the terrace was but little above the river level.
Jack Goodheart followed the gun-barrel road into a desert green and beautiful with vegetation. Now he passed a blooming azalea or a yucca with clustering bellflowers. The prickly pear and the cat-claw clutched at his chaps. The arrowweed and the soapweed were everywhere, as was also the stunted creosote.
Yellow with dust, unshaven, mud caked in his hair, hands torn by the cat-claw, Homer Webb was red-eyed from lack of sleep and from the irritation of the alkali powder. This young rider had broken the first law of the cowpuncher, to be on the job in time of trouble and to stay there as long as he could back a horse.
Mesquite and cat-claw and ironwood, tough as woven wire and barbed at every joint, these were all that were left except cactus and the armored sahuaros. In desperation he piled brush beneath clumps of fuzzy chollas, the thorniest cactus that grows, and burned off the resinous spines; but the silky bundles of stickers still lurked beneath the ashes, and the cattle that ate them died in agony.
The tops of the boots were tight-fitting and the peg-bottomed trousers were drawn snugly over them. Odin learned later that what had appeared to be green moss out there on the weathered plain was a kind of thistle with cat-claw thorns. Each man wore a heavy black belt about his waist.
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