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Not that he feared poison for himself, but coyotes writhing in convulsions and frothing at the mouth had always filled him with a terrible dread. It was an epidemic of this sort which had driven him to leave the sagebrush land of the coyotes for the heavily timbered country of the wolves. The memory of it lingered with him now. Would he find these stricken, demented creatures there?
The last gate was shut by the Virginian, who looked back at the pleasant trees of the ranch, and then followed on in single file across the alkali of No Man's Land. No cloud was in the sky. The desert's grim noon shone sombrely on flat and hill. The sagebrush was dull like zinc. Thick heat rose near at hand from the caked alkali, and pale heat shrouded the distant peaks. There were five horses.
The battle lasted about fifteen minutes, and when it was over we counted the dead Indians and found the number to be nineteen, but there were twenty-one horses, so we were confident that two Indians either escaped or fell in the sagebrush where we could not find them. We gathered up the horses and ropes that belonged to the Indians.
A chimbly and a few rails, if the mule-skinners hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid of fuel; sagebrush and grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the grass-seeds into the next county."
A pinto cayuse rampant; a longhorn steer regardant; two sad-eyed, unbranded calves couchant one in each corner of the shield to kind of balance her up; gules, several clumps of something representing sagebrush; and possibly a rattlesnake coiled beneath the sagebrush and described as "repellent" and holding in his open jaws a streaming motto reading, "I'm a-comin'."
There might be only a few dugouts, some dingy tents and a building or so of undressed pine, but each hamlet felt in itself the possibilities of a city, and had its spaces in the glaring sands or the dead sagebrush which it called "the Square" and "Main Street" and possibly "the park."
The foothills caught the color, and the violets became purple and then red; the sand dunes caught it, and their gray-browns were overlaid with crimson; the flats too caught it, and the sagebrush bending low, and the grass quivering in the wind were touched with some reflection of that far-reaching hue.
Then after another advance and face about she concluded by blowing him a kiss off the palm of her hand, with which performance she did actually start for home, weaving her way through the sagebrush and going farther and farther off. "What a pretty little witch she is!" thought Lee; and he, too, made his way from the spot. Dave's hot, harassed face greeted him at the door. "Where is she?
"Play for them, Jed," counseled Caleb Price, when that hardy youth, leaving his shrunken herd, came in for his lunch that day at the ford. "Yes, but keep that fiddle in the shade, Jed, or the sun certainly will pop it open." Jed's mother, her apron full of broken bits of sagebrush, turned to see that her admonishment was heeded before she began her midday coffee fire.
What a transformation irrigation makes in the dry and desert-like valleys of the West! Land which under Nature's treatment supports only a scanty growth of sagebrush or greasewood, and over which a few half-starved cattle have roamed, becomes, when irrigated, covered with green fields and neat homes, while sleek, well-fed herds graze upon the rich alfalfa.
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