S ROAD--
TAKE ANOTHER.

He grinned reminiscently. "I did last time. I took the back trail under
orders."

"Whose orders?" asked Ridley.

"Pete's, I reckon."

"If there's a story goes with that grin--" suggested Arthur.

"No story a-tall. I caught a fellow brandin' a calf below the canon. He
waved me around. Some curious to see who the guy was that didn't want to
say 'How?' to me, I followed him into Box."

That seemed to be the end of the yarn. At any rate, Jack stopped.

"Well, did you find out who he was?"

"No, but I found this sign, an' above it a rifle slantin' down at me,
an' back of the rifle a masked face. The fellow that owned the face
advised me about my health."

"What about it?"

"Why, that this rough country wasn't suited to my disposition,
temperament, an' general proclivities. So I p'inted back to where I had
come from."

"And you never satisfied your curiosity about who the rustler was?"

"Didn't I?" drawled Jack.

"Did you?"

"Mebbe I did. I'm not tellin' that yarn--not to-day."

The country was rougher and hillier. The trail they had been following
died away in the hills, but they crossed and recrossed others, made by
buffaloes, antelopes, and coyotes driven by the spur of their needs in
the years that had passed. Countless generations of desert life had come
and gone before even the Indians drifted in to live on the buffalo.

"Why is it that there's more warfare on the desert than there is back
East? The cactus has spines. The rattlesnake, the centipede, the Gila
monster, the tarantula, all carry poison. Even the toad has a horn.
Everywhere it is a fight to survive. The vegetation, as well as the
animal life, fights all the time against drought. It's a regular hell on
earth," Arthur concluded.

Jack eased himself in the saddle. "Looks kinda like Nature made the
desert an' grinned at life, much as to say, 'I defy you to live there,'
don't it? Sure there's warfare, but I reckon there's always war between
different forms of life. If there wasn't, the world would be rank with
all sorts of things crowdin' each other. The war would have to come then
after all. Me, I like it. I like the way life came back with an answer
to the challenge. It equipped itself with spines an' stings an' horns
an' tough hides because it had to have 'em. It developed pores an'
stomachs that could get along without much water. Who wants to live in a
land where you don't have to rus