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The girl stood before him slender and straight. She was pale to the lips. Her breath came fast and ragged as if she had been running. Abruptly she shot her challenge at him. "Who are you?" "Water," he gasped. One swift, searching look the girl gave him, then "Wait!" she ordered, and was off into the mesquit on the run. Three minutes later the tenderfoot heard her galloping through the brush.
In the way she sped through the mesquit, evading the clutch of the cholla by supple dips to right and left, there was a kind of pantherine litheness. At the summit she waited for the horse to clamber up the shale after her. "Get down in your collar, you Buckskin," she urged, and when the pony was again beside her petted the animal with little love pats on the nose.
Her unexpected appearance and grace and type of beauty, so different from that of the woman who occupied his thoughts, thrilled him for the moment as he listened to the soft, muffled hoof-beats of her horse which grew fainter and fainter until all was silence, save for the sighing of the wind among the mesquit and manzanita bushes that grew about them. All trace of her was gone.
Scattered over the plain were dusters of mesquit and in the low sags where moisture was near the surface patches of thorns. Carolyn June loved the width and breadth of the great range, strange and new to her. Here was freedom sweeping as the winds of heaven. Dimly, on the southern horizon she could see the blue outline of Sentinel Mountain standing alone out on the plain.
Sing Pete stepped from the door and beat a tattoo on the iron triangle suspended by a piece of wire from the lowest branch of a mesquit tree at the corner of the house, announcing by the metallic clamor that the work of the day was finished and supper was ready and waiting.
They stood on one leg, chewed mesquit twigs and circumlocuted, for they hated to hurt his feelings. Bud foresaw their business, and made it easy for them. Bigger risks and larger profits was what they wanted. The suggestion of Piggy's about holding up a train had fired their imagination and increased their admiration for the dash and boldness of the instigator.
For hours they wandered in mesquit, dragged themselves through cactus, crossed washes, and climbed hills. "This will never do. We'd better give it up till daylight. We're not getting anywhere," the sheriff suggested. They did as he advised. As soon as a faint gray sifted into the sky they were on the move again.
"I expect the boys hadn't better touch the sheriff's calves, now you and him are so thick." "We're thick, are we?" Leroy's indolent eyes narrowed slightly as they rested on him. "Ain't you? It sure seemed that way to me when I looked out of that mesquit wash just above Eldorado Springs and seen you and him eating together like brothers and laughing to beat the band.
Below them stretched the plain, fold on fold to the blue horizon edge. Close at hand clumps of cactus, thickets of mesquit, together with the huddled adobe buildings of the ranch, made up the details of a scene possible only in the sunburnt territory. The palpitating heat quivered above the hot brown sand.
The landscape presented fitting and faithful accessories. Chaparral, mesquit, and pear were distributed in just proportions. A Spanish dagger-plant, with its waxen blossoms in a creamy aggregation as large as a water-bucket, contributed floral beauty and variety.
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