mmodation of life-sized men. Here we remained a day while we rode
the hills in search of Dinkey and Jenny, there pastured.

We found Jenny peaceful and inclined to be corralled. But Dinkey,
followed by a slavishly adoring brindle mule, declined to be rounded
up. We chased her up hill and down; along creek-beds and through the
spiky chaparral. Always she dodged craftily, warily, with forethought.
Always the brindled mule, wrapt in admiration at his companion's
cleverness, crashed along after. Finally we teased her into a narrow
canon. Wes and the Tenderfoot closed the upper end. I attempted to
slip by to the lower, but was discovered. Dinkey tore a frantic mile
down the side hill. Bullet, his nostrils wide, his ears back, raced
parallel in the boulder-strewn stream-bed, wonderful in his avoidance
of bad footing, precious in his selection of good, interested in the
game, indignant at the wayward Dinkey, profoundly contemptuous of the
besotted mule. At a bend in the canon interposed a steep bank. Up
this we scrambled, dirt and stones flying. I had just time to bend low
along the saddle when, with the ripping and tearing and scratching of
thorns, we burst blindly through a thicket. In the open space on the
farther side Bullet stopped, panting but triumphant. Dinkey,
surrounded at last, turned back toward camp with an air of utmost
indifference. The mule dropped his long ears and followed.

At camp we corralled Dinkey, but left her friend to shift for himself.
Then was lifted up his voice in mulish lamentations until, cursing, we
had to ride out bareback and drive him far into the hills and there
stone him into distant fear. Even as we departed up the trail the
following day the voice of his sorrow, diminishing like the echo of
grief, appealed uselessly to Dinkey's sympathy. For Dinkey, once
captured, seemed to have shrugged her shoulders and accepted inevitable
toil with a real though cynical philosophy.

The trail rose gradually by imperceptible gradations and occasional
climbs. We journeyed in the great canons. High chaparral flanked the
trail, occasional wide gray stretches of "old man" filled the air with
its pungent odor and with the calls of its quail. The crannies of the
rocks, the stretches of wide loose shale, the crumbling bottom earth
offered to the eye the dessicated beauties of creamy yucca, of yerba
buena, of the gaudy red paint-brushes, the Spanish bayonet; and to the
nostrils the hot dry pe