We will if we get the chance." And so the matter
ended.

It was just as well that we returned to the ranch when we did, for we
found plenty of work ready to our hands, the first thing being the
hauling of fire-wood for the year. To procure this, it was not necessary
for us to go to the mountains: our supply was much nearer to hand. The
whole region round about us had been at some remote period the scene of
vigorous volcanic action. Both the First and Second Mesas were formed by
a series of lava-flows which had come down from Mount Lincoln, and
ending abruptly about eight miles from the mountains, had built up the
cliff which bounded the First Mesa on its eastern side. Then, later, but
still in a remote age, a great strip of this lava-bed, a mile wide and
ten or twelve miles long, north and south, had broken away and subsided
from the general level, forming what the geologists call, I believe, a
"fault," thus causing the "step-up" to the Second Mesa. The Second Mesa,
because the lava had been hotter perhaps, was distinguished from the
lower level by the presence of a number of little hills--"bubbles," they
were called, locally, and solidified bubbles of hot lava perhaps they
were. They were all sorts of sizes, from fifty to four hundred feet high
and from a hundred yards to half a mile in diameter. Viewed from a
distance, they looked smooth and even, like inverted bowls, though when
you came near them you found that their sides were rough and broken. I
had been to the top of a good many of them, and all of those I had
explored I had found to be depressed in the centre like little craters.
From some of them tiny streams of water ran down, helping to swell the
volume of our creek.

Most of these so-called "bubbles," especially the larger ones, were well
covered with pine-trees, and as there were three or four of them within
easy reach of the ranch, it was here that we used to get our fire-wood.

There was a good week's work in this, and after it was finished there
was more or less repairing of fences to be done, as there always is in
the fall, and the usual mending of sheds, stables and corrals.

The weather by this time had turned cold, and "the bottomless forty
rods" having been frozen solid enough to bear a load, Joe and I were
next put to work hauling oats down to the livery stable men in San Remo,
as well as up to Sulphide.

Before this task was accomplished the winter had set in in earnest. We
had had one or two