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"He come down on his head on a chunk of mesquit wood, and he didn't show any designs toward getting up again. We laid him out in a tent, and he begun to look pretty dead. So Gideon Pease saddles up and burns the wind for old Doc Sleeper's residence in Dogtown, thirty miles away. "The doctor comes over and he investigates the patient.
We have their manuscript journal with us, and so the stream is comparatively well known. To-night we camp on the left bank in a mesquit thicket. The relief from danger and the joy of success are great.
A rattlesnake above a prairie dog's hole slid into the mesquit. A swift watched them from the top of a smooth rock, motionless so long as they could see. She loved it all, this immense, deserted world of space filled with its multitudinous dwellers. They unsaddled at Dead Cow Creek, hobbled the ponies, and ate supper. Norris seemed in no hurry to resaddle.
The child was asleep in his arms now, and he hastily dismounted, picketed his horse, and stole back a quarter of a mile, so that the neighing of his bronco might not betray his presence. Then he lay down in a dense mesquit thicket and waited for his foe. It seemed an eternity till the man appeared at the top of a rise fifty yards away. Hastily Anderson fired, and again.
As he toiled toward this refuge, not a living form appeared to dispute his sovereignty of the desert world. His feet sank deep in the sand, then trod lightly over vast stretches of short sun-burned mesquit, then again traversed hot shifting reaches of naked sand. The mountains seemed to recede as he advanced, and at times stifling dust and relentless heat threatened to overpower him.
"No," said Lahoma, "if leading is to be done, I'll do my part." She leaped lightly to the ground and seized her bridle. Side by side they slowly ventured from the trail into the invisible country on the left. They found themselves treading short dead mesquit that did not greatly obstruct their progress. "Keep going," Wilfred said, when she paused for breath.
Even without the burden of her weight, the sheer smooth wall rose insurmountable above him. He did the one thing left for him to do. Leaving her unconscious body in a sort of trough formed by the juncture of two strata, he lowered himself into the rushing stream, searched with his foot for a grip, and swung to the left into the niche formed by a mesquit bush growing from the rock.
A huddled mass lay motionless on the sand in the track of the avalanche. A long ragged breath whistled through the closed lips of the tenderfoot. He ran along the edge of the rock wall till he found a descent less sharp, lowered himself by means of jutting quartz and mesquit cropping out from the crevices, and so came through a little draw to the cañon.
Nor was this all. Behind the perpendicular arm, or spur, that ran out into the sea of mesquit, rose a low hill that was itself in the nature of an inner spur although, since it failed to reach the mountain, it might be regarded as a long flat island, surrounded by the calm green tide.
Here flourishes the mesquit tree, Prosopis juliflora, with a tale to tell well worth knowing. When a mesquit seems stunted, it is because its strength is withdrawn for the task of delving to find water; where a tree grows tall with goodly branches, it betokens success in reaching moisture close at hand.
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