ok us finally into the
country of dry brown grasses, gray brush, waterless stony ravines, and
dust. Others had traveled that trail, headed the other way, and
evidently had not liked it. Empty bottles blazed the path. Somebody
had sacrificed a pack of playing-cards, which he had stuck on thorns
from time to time, each inscribed with a blasphemous comment on the
discomforts of such travel. After an apparently interminable interval
we crossed an irrigating ditch, where the horses were glad to water,
and so came to one of those green flowering lush California villages so
startlingly in contrast to their surroundings.

By this it was two o'clock and we had traveled on horseback since four.
A variety of circumstances learned at the village made it imperative
that both the Tenderfoot and myself should go out without the delay of
a single hour. This left Wes to bring the horses home, which was tough
on Wes, but he rose nobly to the occasion.

When the dust of our rustling cleared, we found we had acquired a team
of wild broncos, a buckboard, an elderly gentleman with a white goatee,
two bottles of beer, some crackers and some cheese. With these we hoped
to reach the railroad shortly after midnight.

The elevation was five thousand feet, the road dusty and hot, the
country uninteresting in sage-brush and alkali and rattlesnakes and
general dryness. Constantly we drove, checking off the landmarks in the
good old fashion. Our driver had immigrated from Maine the year
before, and by some chance had drifted straight to the arid regions.
He was vastly disgusted. At every particularly atrocious dust-hole or
unlovely cactus strip he spat into space and remarked in tones of
bottomless contempt:--

"BEAU-ti-ful Cal-if-or-nia!"

This was evidently intended as a quotation.

Towards sunset we ran up into rounded hills, where we got out at every
rise in order to ease the horses, and where we hurried the old
gentleman beyond the limits of his Easterner's caution at every descent.

It grew dark. Dimly the road showed gray in the twilight. We did not
know how far exactly we were to go, but imagined that sooner or later
we would top one of the small ridges to look across one of the broad
plateau plains to the lights of our station. You see we had forgotten,
in the midst of flatness, that we were still over five thousand feet
up. Then the road felt its way between two hills;--and the blackness
of night opened below us as well as