mile, under a sun that burned
our faces and through choking dust. The washes and stream-beds were
bleached and dry; the brush was sear and yellow and dust laden; the
mescal stalks seemed withered by hot blasts. Only the manzanita looked
fresh. That smooth red-branched and glistening green-leafed plant
of the desert apparently flourished without rain. On all sides the
evidences of extreme drought proved the year to be the dreaded _anno
seco_ of the Mexicans.

For ten hours we rode without a halt before there was any prominent
change in the weary up- and down-hill going, in the heat and dust and
brush-walled road. But about the middle of the afternoon we reached
the summit of the longest hill, from which we saw ahead of us a cut up
country, wild and rugged and beautiful, with pine-sloped canyon at our
feet. We heard the faint murmur of running water. Hot, dusty, wet with
sweat, and thirsty as sheep, we piled down that steep slope as fast
as we dared. Our horses did not need urging. At the bottom we plunged
into a swift stream of clear, cold water--granite water--to drink of
which, and to bathe hot heads and burning feet, was a joy only known
to the weary traveler of the desert. Romer yelled that the water was
like that at our home in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and he drank
till I thought he would burst, and then I had to hold him to keep him
from wallowing in it.

Here we entered a pine forest. Heat and dust stayed with us, and the
aches and pains likewise, but the worst of them lay behind. Every mile
grew shadier, clearer, cooler.

Nielsen happened to fall in and ride beside me for several miles,
as was often his wont. The drink of water stirred him to an Homeric
recital of one of his desert trips in Sonora, at the end of which,
almost dead of thirst, he had suddenly come upon such a stream as the
one we had just passed. Then he told me about his trips down the west
coast of Sonora, along the Gulf, where he traveled at night, at low
tide, so that by daytime his footprints would be washed out. This
was the land of the Seri Indians. Undoubtedly these Indians were
cannibals. I had read considerable about them, much of which ridiculed
the rumors of their cannibalistic traits. This of course had been of
exceeding interest to me, because some day I meant to go to the land
of the Seris. But not until 1918 did I get really authentic data
concerning them. Professor Bailey of the University of California told
me he had ye