he gazed across the desert dawn.

"Queer way y'r mountains here keep shiftin' an' mufflin' an' meltin'
their lines! They're here one minute about a mile away, then as you
look, they've a trick of movin' back! That dust against the sky line
is about ten miles off as A make it in this high rare air; an' they're
goin' mighty slow! We've played 'em out."

"Yes; but they have played us out! Let us get off and have breakfast.
If that small wren coming out of the cactus could speak, it might tell
us where to find water."

They had camped one noon hour at a Desert pool beneath a cottonwood,
where the putrid carcass of a dead ox polluted air and water. The
Ranger whittled the cottonwood branches for a small chip fire, and he
boiled enough water to fill the skin bag for the next day's travel; but
a high wind was blowing, restless, nagging, gusty, pelting ash dust in
their eyes, and not to lose the trail, they had pressed on through the
sweltering heat of mid-day. Wayland's muscles had begun to feel
hardened to the dryness of knotted whip cords. His skin had bronzed
swarthy as an Indian's. He was beginning to rejoice in the vast
spacious relentless Desert with its fierce struggle of life against
death; the cactus, the greasewood, the brittle sage brush, all matching
themselves against the heat-death. Was there a thing, beast or bush,
not armed with the fangs of protection and onslaught? Wayland looked
at his leather coat. It had been jagged to tatters by thorn and spine.
Silent, too; the struggle was silent and insidious and crafty as death.
Who could guess where the water-pools lay beneath the dry gravel beds;
or why the cactus fortified its storage of moisture in bristling spear
points; the greasewood and pinon with thorns and resin; the sage brush
with a dull gray varnish that imprisoned evaporation? The very crust
above the earth of ash and silt conspired to hide the trail of wolf and
cougar; and wolf and cougar, wren and condor, masked in colors that hid
their presence. Twice Wayland had almost stumbled on a wolf sitting
motionless, gray as the ash, watching the horsemen pass; pass where?
Was it down the Long Trail where the tracks all point one way? Yet the
fierceness, the craft, the relentless cruelty of the silent struggle
matched his own mood. He felt the stimulus of the high dry sun-fused
tireless air. He began to understand why the Desert prophets of the
East, who camped on sand plains rimmed round a