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The terrain consisted mostly of thick slime mixed with petrified branches, but it changed little by little near four o'clock in the afternoon; it grew rockier and seemed to be strewn with pudding stones and a basaltic gravel called "tuff," together with bits of lava and sulfurous obsidian.
Now, A'll take a nip of his outer circle and try your blue blazing Desert." "It'll be blue all right, sir! You'll know it when you come to it by the shadows being blue instead of black." And always, the trail had grown rockier, the forests more scattered, the trees scantier and dwarfed, till the way led from clump to clump of scrub pinon amid red buttes and sand hummocks.
"We felt purty bad about that, an' knowin' those fellers as we did made us feel worse. They sure didn't deserve shootin'. Then Lem Fisher, who always was handy with his memory, happens t' think of a canyon 'bout three mile away, with a bridge over it. Sort o' like that place at the water tank, where them boys was strung up this mornin', only deeper, an' th' stream under it swifter an' rockier.
They had not quite ended, but in a few minutes more they had reached the beginning of the pass proper. Before them lay a grassy boggy slope curling gently upwards between higher rockier slopes. A little stream plashed softly adown it, through a perfect wilderness of flowers, and without one word the tired travellers threw themselves beside it for rest and refreshment.
After threading hills for hours they came out upon a wide, rolling basin prettily diversified by low spurs of the encircling mountains and bluish green with the long grasses known as pin and grama. A few deer and antelopes, bounding across the rockier places, were an aggravation to starving men who could not follow them. "Why don't we catch some o' thim flyin' crachurs?" demanded Sweeny.
Sometimes I had to light a match to make sure of the way, and thus the ridiculous descent was made with those girls in high spirits behind. Indeed, the darker, rockier, steeper it got, the more they shrieked from pure joy but I was anything than happy. It was dangerous. I didn't know the cliffs and high rocks we might skirt and an unlucky guidance might land us in the creek-bed far down.
Instead of returning to the city on Monday, Daylight rented the butcher's horse for another day and crossed the bed of the valley to its eastern hills to look at the mine. It was dryer and rockier here than where he had been the day before, and the ascending slopes supported mainly chaparral, scrubby and dense and impossible to penetrate on horseback.
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