ass frequently the nest of a pair of
meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender weed. I
never caught them sitting except near night, but at midday they stood,
or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills, between
their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of them together with wings
spread and half lifted continued a spot of shade in a temperature that
constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to spare them a bit of canvas
for permanent shelter. There was a fence in that country shutting in a
cattle range, and along its fifteen miles of posts one could be sure of
finding a bird or two in every strip of shadow; sometimes the sparrow
and the hawk, with wings trailed and beaks parted drooping in the white
truce of noon.

If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in
the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there
and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None
other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The
rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the
spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once
inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that
you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and cattle-men,
will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing the land
and going back to it. For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest air
to be breathed anywhere in God's world. Some day the world will
understand that, and the little oases on the windy tops of hills will
harbor for healing its ailing, house-weary broods. There is promise
there of great wealth in ores and earths, which is no wealth by reason
of being so far removed from water and workable conditions, but men are
bewitched by it and tempted to try the impossible.

You should hear Salty Williams tell how he used to drive eighteen and
twenty-mule teams from the borax marsh to Mojave, ninety miles, with the
trail wagon full of water barrels. Hot days the mules would go so mad
for drink that the clank of the water bucket set them into an uproar of
hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of harness chains, while Salty
would sit on the high seat with the sun glare heavy in his eyes, dealing
out curses of pacification in a level, uninterested voice until the
clamor fell off from sheer exhaustion. There was a line of shallow
graves' along t