hem, winter
humped their backs with cold and arched up their bellies with famine,
but they were a breed schooled through generations for this fight
against nature. In this junk-shop of the world, rattlesnakes were
rulers of the soil. Overhead the buzzards, ominous black specks
pendant against the white-hot sky, ruled the air.

It seemed impossible that human beings could live in this
rock-wilderness. If so, they must be to other men what the lean, hardy
cattle of the hills are to the corn-fed stabled beeves of the States.

Over the shoulder of a hill came a whistling which might have been
attributed to the wind, had not this day been deathly calm. It was fit
music for such a scene, for it seemed neither of heaven nor earth,
but the soul of the great god Pan come back to earth to charm those
nameless rocks with his wild, sweet piping. It changed to harmonious
phrases loosely connected. Such might be the exultant improvisations
of a master violinist.

A great wolf, or a dog as tall and rough coated as a wolf, trotted
around the hillside. He paused with one foot lifted and lolling,
crimson tongue, as he scanned the distance and then turned to look
back in the direction from which he had come. The weird music changed
to whistled notes as liquid as a flute. The sound drew closer. A
horseman rode out on the shoulder and checked his mount. One could not
choose him at first glance as a type of those who fight nature in a
region where the thermometer moves through a scale of a hundred and
sixty degrees in the year to an accompaniment of cold-stabbing winds
and sweltering suns. A thin, handsome face with large brown eyes and
black hair, a body tall but rather slenderly made--he might have been
a descendant of some ancient family of Norman nobility; but could such
proud gentry be found riding the desert in a tall-crowned sombrero
with chaps on his legs and a red bandana handkerchief knotted around
his throat? That first glance made the rider seem strangely out of
place in such surroundings. One might even smile at the contrast, but
at the second glance the smile would fade, and at the third, it would
be replaced with a stare of interest. It was impossible to tell why
one respected this man, but after a time there grew a suspicion of
unknown strength in this lone rider, strength like that of a machine
which is stopped but only needs a spark of fire to plunge it into
irresistible action. Strangely enough, the youthful figure seem