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Updated: June 3, 2025
Once more in the saddle, they rode on over a plain unchanged in character, still the same swells and dips, still the same lonesome yuccas and mesquite, with the occasional clumps of bunch grass. "Don't you think we have shaken them off?" asked Ned. "No," replied Obed. "They would scatter toward dawn and the one who picked up the trail would call the others with a whoop or a rifle shot."
He laid out the ground and made a road, set a plantation of pines, and adorned the bank of his boulevard with aloes and yuccas and eucalyptus in short, astonished his French neighbours by his perfection of taste and regardlessness of expense.
So it is that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young plants of Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuccas, cacti, low herbs, a thousand sorts, one finds journeying east from the coastwise hills. There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more room.
Strung out across the little field of malangas, yuccas, and sweet-potatoes were several hilarious Volunteers, their arms filled with loot from the cabin. Behind them strode an officer bearing Rosa struggling against his breast. Esteban did not pause; he drove his horse headlong through the soft red earth of the garden. His sudden appearance seemed briefly to paralyze the marauders.
A strong wind blew scorching from the south the next day; Johnson turned aside from the sagebrush country to avoid the worst sand, and bent north to a long half-circle, through a country of giant saguaro and clumped yuccas; once they passed over a neck of lava hillocks thinly drifted over with sand.
They were on the desert now in a forlorn little mining town located in a hollow between two mountain ranges and straggling over a vast area of barren, rocky hills, with not a tree in sight anywhere, except the ugly, uncompromising yuccas, and they could scarcely be dignified by the name of trees. Nothing but sagebrush, greasewood, mesquite and cactus; not even a sprill of grass!
Eastward he rode through tall mesquite thickets, over rolling hills where clumps of bear-grass grew among spiked yuccas and needle-pointed tufts of Spanish bayonet, and climbed the pass beyond. From its summit he looked down upon the wide reaches of the Sulphur Springs valley, level as a floor, as tawny as a lion's skin. Then he descended from the sky-lined pinnacles of granite to the plain.
The stampeding burro had not seen the Ford at all, but accepted the testimony of its leader that something was radically wrong with the trail ahead. His pack bumped against the yuccas as he went; after him lurched a large man, heavy to the point of fatness, yelling hoarse threats and incoherent objurgations.
Henry had spent the day in the barn; his canyon was a reality only when it was flooded with the light of its great lamp, when the yellow rocks cast purple shadows, and the resin was fairly cooking in the corkscrew cedars. The yuccas were in blossom now. Out of each clump of sharp bayonet leaves rose a tall stalk hung with greenish-white bells with thick, fleshy petals.
They had walked about a quarter of a mile when they reached a spot where yuccas and prickly desert plants of different varieties grew thickly. At the bottom of this desolate little valley was a pool on which the sunlight shone glitteringly. It was shallow and warm, and the color of rusty iron, but it was water.
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