ning drink.
About the time the burrowers and all that feed upon them are addressing
themselves to sleep, great flocks pour down the trails with that
peculiar melting motion of moving quail, twittering, shoving, and
shouldering. They splatter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake out
small showers over their perfect coats, and melt away again into the
scrub, preening and pranking, with soft contented noises.

After the quail, sparrows and ground-inhabiting birds bathe with the
utmost frankness and a great deal of splutter; and here in the heart of
noon hawks resort, sitting panting, with wings aslant, and a truce to
all hostilities because of the heat. One summer there came a road-runner
up from the lower valley, peeking and prying, and he had never any
patience with the water baths of the sparrows. His own ablutions were
performed in the clean, hopeful dust of the chaparral; and whenever
he happened on their morning splatterings, he would depress his glossy
crest, slant his shining tail to the level of his body, until he looked
most like some bright venomous snake, daunting them with shrill abuse
and feint of battle. Then suddenly he would go tilting and balancing
down the gully in fine disdain, only to return in a day or two to make
sure the foolish bodies were still at it.

Out on the Ceriso about five miles, and wholly out of sight of it, near
where the immemorial foot trail goes up from Saline Flat toward Black
Mountain, is a water sign worth turning out of the trail to see. It is
a laid circle of stones large enough not to be disturbed by any ordinary
hap, with an opening flanked by two parallel rows of similar stones,
between which were an arrow placed, touching the opposite rim of the
circle, thus it would point as the crow flies to the spring. It is the
old, indubitable water mark of the Shoshones. One still finds it in the
desert ranges in Salt Wells and Mesquite valleys, and along the slopes
of Waban. On the other side of Ceriso, where the black rock begins,
about a mile from the spring, is the work of an older, forgotten people.
The rock hereabout is all volcanic, fracturing with a crystalline
whitish surface, but weathered outside to furnace blackness. Around
the spring, where must have been a gathering place of the tribes, it is
scored over with strange pictures and symbols that have no meaning to
the Indians of the present day; but out where the rock begins, there is
carved into the white heart of it a