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"Brent was sayin' he was short of hands," suggested Pete. "Which is correct. But there's that José who knows every foot of the dry-spot clean to the Ortez and he knows every hoss-thief in this sun-blasted country. Does he send José? No. He sends two white men, tellin' me that it is too big a deal to trust the Mexican with."
As Creede and Hardy rode out from Hidden Water, the earth lay dead beneath their horses' feet stark and naked, stripped to the rocks by the sheep. Even on Bronco Mesa the ground was shorn of its covering; the cloven hoofs of the sheep had passed over it like a scalping knife, tearing off the last sun-blasted fringe of grass.
More than once Peter had wondered why his master had so carefully explored this useless mass of upheaved rock at the end of Cragg's Ridge. They had never seen an animal or a blade of grass in all its gray, sun-blasted sterility. It was like a hostile thing, overhung with a half-dead, slow-beating something that was like the dying pulse of an evil thing.
Every time he came back to an opening through which he could see the wild ruggedness and colors and distances, his appreciation of their nature grew on him. Arizona from Yuma to the Little Colorado had been to him an endless waste of wind-scoured, sun-blasted barrenness. This black-forested rock-rimmed land of untrodden ways was a world that in itself would satisfy him.
Would the great desert river stop Wildfire in his flight? Slone doubted it. He surmounted the ridge, to find the canyon opening in a tremendous gap, and to see down, far down, a glittering, sun-blasted slope merging into a deep, black gulch where a red river swept and chafed and roared. Somehow the river was what he had expected to see.
It grew to be a roar, yet it seemed distant. Would the great desert river stop Wildfire in his flight? Slone doubted it. He surmounted the ridge, to find the cañon opening in a tremendous gap, and to see down, far down, a glittering, sun-blasted slope merging into a deep, black gulch where a red river swept and chafed and roared. Somehow the river was what he had expected to see.
More than once Peter had wondered why his master had so carefully explored this useless mass of upheaved rock at the end of Cragg's Ridge. They had never seen an animal or a blade of grass in all its gray, sun-blasted sterility. It was like a hostile thing, overhung with a half-dead, slow-beating something that was like the dying pulse of an evil thing.
"Cucumbers." "You're the sweetest liar for a thousand miles either side of the line. There isn't even the picture of a cucumber in this sun-blasted town." "Isn't, eh? Look here!" And the lank man pulled open a drawer in the desk. The collector fumbled among some papers and drew out a bulky seed catalogue, illustrated in glowing tints. "Oh, I'll buy," laughed the assistant.
So they travelled up this endless slope of fertile land, leaving all the kraals of the giant Umkulus behind them, and one morning at the dawn camped upon the edge of a terrible desert; a place of dry sands and sun-blasted rocks, that looked like the bottom of a drained ocean, where nothing lived save the fire lizards and certain venomous snakes that buried themselves in the sand, all except their heads, and only crawled out at night.
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