re that this "narrow-gauge mule"
will be always with us. The ranchman would like nothing better than to
bid him a last fond but genuine farewell; but I should certainly miss
him.

The greasewood and thorn-bush grew in long, narrow patches. The ragweed
grew everywhere it pleased, affording grand cover for the quail. The
sagebrush occurred singly at spaced intervals, with tiny bare spaces
between across which the plumed little rascals scurried hurriedly. The
tumbleweed banked high wherever, in the mysterious dispensations of
Providence, a call for tumbleweed had made itself heard.

The tumbleweed is a curious vegetable. It grows and flourishes amain,
and becomes great even as a sagebrush, and puts forth its blossoms and
seeds, and finally turns brown and brittle. Just about as you would
conclude it has reached a respectable old age and should settle down by
its chimney corner, it decides to go travelling. The first breath of
wind that comes along snaps it off close to the ground. The next turns
it over. And then, inasmuch as the tumbleweed is roughly globular in
shape, some three or four feet in diameter, and exceedingly light in
structure, over and over it rolls across the plain! If the wind happens
to increase, the whole flock migrates, bounding merrily along at a good
rate of speed. Nothing more terrifying to the unaccustomed equine can be
imagined than thirty or forty of these formidable-looking monsters
charging down upon him, bouncing several feet from the surface of the
earth. The experienced horse treats them with the contempt such
light-minded senility deserves, and wades through their phantom attack
indifferent. After the breeze has died the debauched old tumbleweeds are
everywhere to be seen, piled up against brush, choking the ditches,
filling the roads. Their beautiful spherical shapes have been frayed out
so that they look sodden and weary and done up. But their seeds have
been scattered abroad over the land.

Wherever we found water, there we found ducks. The irrigating ditches
contained many bands of a dozen or fifteen; the overflow ponds had each
its little flock. The sky, too, was rarely empty of them; and the cries
of the snow geese and the calls of sandhill cranes were rarely still. I
remarked on this abundance.

"Ducks!" replied the Captain, wonderingly. "Why, you haven't _begun_ to
see ducks! Come with me."

Thereupon we turned sharp to the left. After ten minutes I made out from
a slight rise