head above the sea of low foothills that stretched away into the bad
lands to the southward. The sides of the valley flattened and became
ill-defined. Low ridges and sage-topped foothills broke up its
continuity, so that the little creek that started so bravely from the
mountains ended nowhere, its waters being sucked in by the parched and
thirsting alkali soil long before it reached the bad lands.

As his horse toiled ankle-deep in the soft whitish mud, Tex's eyes
roved over the broadened expanse of the valley. Everywhere were
evidences of the destructive force of the flood. Uprooted trees
scattered singly and in groups, high-flung masses of brush, hay, and
inextricably tangled barbed-wire from which dangled fence-posts marked
every bend of the creek bed. And on every hand the bodies of drowned
cattle dotted the valley.

"If I was Johnson," he mused, as his eyes swept the valley, "I'd head a
right smart of ranch hands down here heeled with a spade an' a sexton's
commission. These here late lamented dogies'll cost him somethin' in
damages." From force of habit the man read the brands of the dead
cattle as he rode slowly down the valley. "D bar C, that's old Dave
Cromley's steer. An' there's a T U, an' an I X cow, an' there's one of
Charlie Green's, an' a yearlin' of Jerry Keerful's, an' a
quarter-circle M,--that belongs over the other side, they don't need to
bother with that one, an' there's a----"

Suddenly he drew himself erect, and rising to stand in the stirrups,
gazed long and intently toward a spot a quarter of a mile below, where
a thin column of smoke curled over the crest of a low ridge. Abruptly
he lost interest in the brands of dead cattle and headed his horse at a
run toward a coulee, that gave between two sage covered foothills only
a short distance from the faint column of smoke. "That might be Bat,
an' then again it mightn't," he muttered. "It can't be the pilgrim
without Bat's along, 'cause he wouldn't have no dry matches. An' if
it's any one else--" he drew up sharply in the shelter of a thicket,
dismounted, and made his way on foot to the summit of the ridge.
Removing his hat, he thrust his head through a narrow opening between
two sage bushes, and peered into the hollow beyond. Beside a little
fire sat Bat and the pilgrim, the latter arrayed in a suit of underwear
much abbreviated as to arms and legs, while from the branches of a
broken tree-top drawn close beside the blaze depended a