ch as that. He took out the face in the handkerchief,
and gave it a curious, defiant smile. She had said waiting would be
long. She should have him quickly. And he was going to know about that
visitor at the cabin, the steeple-hatted man he saw in his visions. So
Maricopa drew behind him, small, clear-grouped in the unheated morning,
and the sun found the united man and his mules moving into the desert.

By the well in the bottom of the Santa Cruz River he met with cattle and
little late-born calves trying to trot. Their mothers, the foreman
explained, had not milk enough for them, nor the cursed country food or
water for the mothers. They could not chew cactus. These animals had
been driven here to feed and fatten inexpensively, and get quick money
for the owner. But, instead, half of them had died, and the men were
driving the rest to new pastures--as many, that is, as could still
walk. Genesmere knew, the foreman supposed, that this well was the last
for more than a hundred miles? Funny to call a thing like that Santa
Cruz a river! Well, it was an Arizona river; all right enough, no doubt,
somewhere a thousand feet or so underground. Pity you weren't a
prairie-dog that eats sand when he gets a thirst on him. Got any
tobacco? Good-bye.

Think of any valleys that you know between high mountains. Such was
southern Arizona once--before we came. Then fill up your valleys with
sand until the mountains show no feet or shoulders, but become as men
buried to the neck. That is what makes separate islands of their
protruding peaks, and that is why water slinks from the surface whenever
it can and flows useless underneath, entombed in the original valley.
This is Arizona now--since the pterodactyls have gone. In such a place
the traveller turns mariner, only, instead of the stars, he studies the
water-wells, shaping his course by these. Not sea-gulls, but ravens, fly
over this waste, seeking their meal. Some were in front of Genesmere
now, settled black in the recent trail of the cattle. He did not much
care that the last well was gone by, for he was broken in by long travel
to the water of the 'dobe-holes that people rely upon through this
journey. These 'dobe-holes are occasional wallows in clayey spots, and
men and cattle know each one. The cattle, of course, roll in them, and
they become worn into circular hollows, their edges tramped into muck,
and surrounded by a thicket belt of mesquite. The water is not good, but
will s