第16章

Our little meadow was beautifully named Madulce,[1]

and was just below the highest point of this section of the Coast Range.The air drank fresh with the cool of elevation.We went out to shoot supper;and so found ourselves on a little knoll fronting the brown-hazed east.As we stood there, enjoying the breeze after our climb, a great wave of hot air swept by us, filling our lungs with heat, scorching our faces as the breath of a furnace.Thus was brought to our minds what, in the excitement of a new country, we had forgotten,--that we were at last on the eastern slope, and that before us waited the Inferno of the desert.

[1] In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced.

That evening we lay in the sweet ripe grasses of Madulce, and talked of it.Wes had been across it once before and did not possess much optimism with which to comfort us.

"It's hot, just plain hot," said he, "and that's all there is about it.And there's mighty little water, and what there is is sickish and a long ways apart.

And the sun is strong enough to roast potatoes in.""Why not travel at night?" we asked.

"No place to sleep under daytimes," explained Wes."It's better to keep traveling and then get a chance for a little sleep in the cool of the night."We saw the reasonableness of that.

"Of course we'll start early, and take a long nooning, and travel late.We won't get such a lot of sleep.""How long is it going to take us?"

Wes calculated.

"About eight days," he said soberly.

The next morning we descended from Madulce abruptly by a dirt trail, almost perpendicular until we slid into a canon of sage-brush and quail, of mescale cactus and the fierce dry heat of sun-baked shale.

"Is it any hotter than this on the desert?" we inquired.

Wes looked on us with pity.

"This is plumb arctic," said he.

Near noon we came to a little cattle ranch situated in a flat surrounded by red dikes and buttes after the manner of Arizona.Here we unpacked, early as it was, for through the dry countries one has to apportion his day's journeys by the water to be had.If we went farther to-day, then to-morrow night would find us in a dry camp.

The horses scampered down the flat to search out alfilaria.We roosted under a slanting shed,--where were stock saddles, silver-mounted bits and spurs, rawhide riatas, branding-irons, and all the lumber of the cattle business,--and hung out our tongues and gasped for breath and earnestly desired the sun to go down or a breeze to come up.The breeze shortly did so.It was a hot breeze, and availed merely to cover us with dust, to swirl the stable-yard into our faces.Great swarms of flies buzzed and lit and stung.

Wes, disgusted, went over to where a solitary cow-puncher was engaged in shoeing a horse.Shortly we saw Wes pressed into service to hold the horse's hoof.He raised a pathetic face to us, the big round drops chasing each other down it as fast as rain.We grinned and felt better.

The fierce perpendicular rays of the sun beat down.

The air under the shed grew stuffier and more oppressive, but it was the only patch of shade in all that pink and red furnace of a little valley.The Tenderfoot discovered a pair of horse-clippers, and, becoming slightly foolish with the heat, insisted on our barbering his head.We told him it was cooler with hair than without; and that the flies and sun would be offered thus a beautiful opportunity, but without avail.So we clipped him,--leaving, however, a beautiful long scalp-lock in the middle of his crown.He looked like High-low-kickapoo-waterpot, chief of the Wam-wams.After a while he discovered it, and was unhappy.

Shortly the riders began to come in, jingling up to the shed, with a rattle of spurs and bit-chains.There they unsaddled their horses, after which, with great unanimity, they soused their heads in the horse-trough.