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Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke, Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla fruit, stem, and trunk though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human hand at the slightest touch."
The cholla is not a pleasant companion as all persons know who have had any experience with it. Its needles are not only very sharp, but also finely barbed, and they penetrate and cling fast like a burr the moment that they are touched. Cowboys profess to believe that the plant has some kind of sense as they say that it jumps and takes hold of its victim before it is touched.
Jack had told me of the curious cholla cactus, which is said to nod at the approach of human beings, and to deposit its barbed needles at their feet. Also I had heard stories of this deep, dark canon and things that had happened there.
Then Linda led the way past thorns and brush, past impenetrable beds of cholla, until they reached a huge barrel cactus that she had located with the glasses. Beside this bristling monstrous growth Linda paused, and reached for the axe, which Donald handed to her. She drew it lightly across the armor protecting the plant. "Short of Victrola needles?" she inquired.
But she closed her lips firmly and looked thoughtfully at the mite of water that remained to them. Then she held the canteen to DeWitt's lips. He pushed it away from him and in another moment or so he rose. Rhoda, fastening their hopes to another distant cholla, led the way on again. But she too was growing a little light-headed.
But after a few steps she found running impossible, for the slope was a wilderness of rock, thickly grown with cholla and yucca with here and there a thicker growth of cat's-claw. Almost at once her hands were torn and bleeding and she thought gratefully for the first time of her buckskin trousers which valiantly resisted all detaining thorns.
Anderson was in the small boat, rowing rapidly out to the vessel. Denton was running up the beach from one direction and Schwartz from the other. I slid and slipped down the bluff, getting pretty well stuck up with the cholla spines. At the beach we found Billy Simpson lying on his ace, shot through the back. We turned him over, but he was apparently dead.
This victory of the rebels filled the government with consternation, which became greater when the insurgents, on June 1, took the capital of the province of Chölla. It was now feared that they would soon be at the gates of Seoul. This insurrection of the Tong-Haks was the inciting cause of the war between China and Japan.
A pod of the fishhook-barbed cholla drove its points through his trousers into the flesh of his knee and, detaching itself from the stem, as is the detestable habit of this vegetable blood-seeker, clung there like a live thing of prey, from barbs which must later be removed delicately and separately with the cold steel.
"That's what you hear your father say. He's prejudiced." "And you're not, I suppose." "I'm more reasonable than he is." "Yes, you are," she flung back at him irritably. Open country lay before them. They had come out from a stretch of heavy underbrush. Catclaw had been snatching at their legs. Cholla had made the traveling bad for the horses.
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