tember fifteenth at two-thirty o'clock with such an
outfit as I had never had in all my many trips put together. We had a
string of saddle horses besides those the men rode. They were surely a
spirited bunch; and that first day it was indeed a job to keep them with
us. Out of sheer defiance with myself I started on Don Carlos. He was no
trouble, except that it took all my strength to hold him in. He tossed
his head, champed his bit, and pranced sideways along the streets of
Flagstaff, manifestly to show off his brand new black Mexican saddle,
with silver trappings and tapaderos. I was sure that he did not do that
to show me off. But Don liked to dance and prance along before a crowd,
a habit that he had acquired with the motion pictures.

Lee and Nielsen and George had their difficulties driving the free
horses. Takahashi rode a little buckskin Navajo mustang. An evidence of
how extremely short the Jap's legs were made itself plain in the fact
that stirrups could not be fixed so he could reach them with his feet.
When he used any support at all he stuck his feet through the straps
above the stirrups. How funny his squat, broad figure looked in a
saddle! Evidently he was not accustomed to horses. When I saw the
mustang roll the white of his eyes and glance back at Takahashi then I
knew something would happen sooner or later.

Nineteen miles on Don Carlos reduced me to a miserable aching specimen
of manhood. But what made me endure and go on and finish to camp was the
strange fact that the longer I rode the less my back pained. Other parts
of my anatomy, however, grew sorer as we progressed. Don Carlos pleased
me immensely, only I feared he was too much horse for me. A Mormon
friend of mine, an Indian trader, looked Don over in Flagstaff, and
pronounced him: "Shore one grand hoss!" This man had broken many wild
horses, and his compliment pleased me. All the same the nineteen miles
on Don hurt my vanity almost as much as my body.

We camped in a cedar pasture off the main road. This road was a new one
for us to take to our hunting grounds. I was too bunged up to help
Nielsen pitch our tent. In fact when I sat down I was anchored. Still I
could use my eyes, and that made life worth living. Sunset was a
gorgeous spectacle. The San Francisco Peaks were shrouded in purple
storm-clouds, and the west was all gold and silver, with low clouds
rimmed in red. This sunset ended in a great flare of dull magenta with a
background of