till travel the
difficult roads. They look for safety to their armed horsemen; the
four and six horse stages look to the armed guard, the wayfarer must
look to his horse--and it should be a good one; the mountain rancher
to his rifle, the cattle thief to the moonless night, the bandit to
his wits, the gunman to his holster: these include practically all of
the people that travel the Spanish Sinks, except the Morgans and the
Mormons. The Mormons looked to the Morgans for safety; the Morgans to
themselves.

For many a year the Morgans have been almost overlords of the Music
Mountain country. They own, or have laid claim to, an extended
territory in the mountains, a Spanish grant. One of the first mountain
Morgans married a Spanish girl, and during the early days, when the
Morgans were not fighting some one out of court, they were fighting
some one in court on their endless and involved titles.

But whether they won domain in lawsuit or lost it, one pearl of their
holdings they never submitted to the jurisdiction of any tribunal
other than their own arms. Morgan's Gap opens south of Music Mountain,
less than ten miles west of Calabasas. It is a narrow valley where
valleys are more precious than water--for the mountain valley means
water--and this in a country where water is much more precious than
life. And some of the best of this land at the foot of Music Mountain
was the maternal inheritance of Nan Morgan.

At Calabasas the Thief River stage line maintains completely equipped
relay barns. They are over twenty miles from Sleepy Cat, but nearly
fifty the other way from Thief River. The unequal division is not due
to what was desirable when the route was laid out, but to the limit of
what man could do in the never-conquered desert. This supplies at
Calabasas a spring, to tempt the unwary traveller still farther within
its clutches. A large number of horses are kept at Calabasas, and the
barn crews are quartered there in a company barrack. Along the low
ridges and in the shallow depressions about Calabasas Spring there are
a very few widely separated shacks, once built by freighters and
occupied by squatter outlaws to be within reach of water. This gives
the vicinity something of the appearance of a poorly sustained
prairie-dog town. And except these shacks, there is nothing between
Calabasas, Thief River, and the mountains except sunshine and alkali.
I say nothing, meaning especially nothing, in the way of a human
habi