nor any power that could have
lawfully restrained him, kept on in the old usage, to save his honor and
the word of his vanished kin. He had seen his children's children in the
borders of the Paiutes, but loved best his own miles of sand and
rainbow-painted hills. Professedly he had not seen them since the
beginning of his hostage; but every year about the end of the rains and
before the strength of the sun had come upon us from the south, the
medicine-man went apart on the mountains to gather herbs, and when he
came again I knew by the new fortitude of his countenance and the new
color of his reminiscences that he had been alone and unspied upon in
Shoshone Land.

To reach that country from the campoodie, one goes south and south,
within hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and
south by east over a high rolling district, miles and miles of sage and
nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills,--old red
cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs,
and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black
rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible
thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings
carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do
not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in
a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone Land.

South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded
with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the
Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken ranges, narrow
valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line,
east and east, and no man knows the end of it.

It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf, nesting
place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that
live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the
mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It
grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long
winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the
lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the
mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift,
where it seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining
often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak. In Shoshone Land one digs
f