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Only the strange, silent life that, through long years, the desert had taught to endure its hardships was there the lizard, horned- toad, lean jack-rabbit, gaunt coyote, and their kind. Only the hard growth that the ages had evolved dotted the floor of the Basin in the near distance the salt-bush and greasewood, with here and there clumps of mesquite.
When they found it they unpacked, gave drink to the tired burros, and turned them loose. Dead mesquite served for the campfire. While the strange twilight deepened into weird night they sat propped against stones, with eyes on the dying embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the sand with the light of white stars on their dark faces.
It was near sundown, and far across the earth's floor, which looked somewhat like a wonderful mosaic of opals and jade at this hour, a Mexican goatherd was driving his flock. That was the only sign of life to be seen or felt, if you except the noise of locusts in the mesquite near by and the spasmodic progress of a horned toad in the sand outside Sylvia's gate.
We had gone there and bought rattling outfits of good clothes, and were resting from our labours among the nabobs. We must have been killed in that mesquite thicket, for I can make an affidavit that we didn't surrender. Now I propose to tell why it is easy to hold up a train, and, then, why no one should ever do it. In the first place, the attacking party has all the advantage.
Back from the water hole fifty yards was a stretch of curly mesquite grass supper for his horse and bed for himself. Givens staked his horse, and spread out his saddle blankets to dry. He sat down with his back against a tree and rolled a cigarette. From somewhere in the dense timber along the river came a sudden, rageful, shivering wail.
Now the Verde River was not a very good substitute for the sea, and the thick water filled our ears and mouths, but it gave us a little half hour in the day when we could experience a feeling of being cool, and we found it worth while to take the trouble. Thick clumps of mesquite trees furnished us with dressing-rooms. We were all young, and youth requires so little with which to make merry.
From the door of the store could be seen the irregular, sloping stretch of prairie to the south, with its reaches of light-green, billowy mesquite flats in the lower places, and its rises crowned with nearly black masses of short chaparral. Through the mesquite flat wound the ranch road that, five miles away, flowed into the old government trail to San Antonio.
The Rio Grande, jaundiced, erratic as an invalid, wrings its saffron blood from the clay bluffs and gravel cañons of the hill country, but near its estuary winds quietly through a low coastal plain which the very impurities of that blood have richened. Here the river's banks are smothered in thickets of huisache, ebony, mesquite, oak, and alamo.
After leaving Holcomb, Yeager walked down to the river-bed, followed the bank for a couple of hundred yards, and crept forward on all fours through the alfalfa pasture to the barb-wire fence that paralleled the road at some distance. He crawled beneath the lowest wire and moved through the mesquite to a point from which he could see the building where Farrar and Threewit were held prisoners.
Had there been any doubt on this point, it would have been dissipated by a repetition of the signals that seemed almost continually passing between the besieging Comanches. Captain Shirril noticed that the sounds came from the direction of the mesquite bush, as though most of them had gathered there apparently for consultation, and were calling in the other members of their party.
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