southward for sixty miles to Fort Selden,
there to begin the south work in a series of long zigzags across the
broad plain. This was the morrow after that day on which Charlie See
had ridden to Garfield.

The wagon was halfway home to Engle now; camped on the central
run-off of the desert drainage system, at the northmost of the
chain of shallow wet-weather lakes--known as Red Lakes--lying east
and south from Point of Rocks Hills. Elsewhere these had been
considerable hills; ten or fifteen miles square of steepish sugar
loaves, semi-independent, with wide straits of grassy plain winding
between; but here, dumped down in the center of the plain, they seemed
pathetically insignificant and paltry against the background of mighty
hill, Timber Mountain black in the west, San Andreas gleaming
monstrous against the rising sun.

Theoretically, the Jornada was fifty miles wide here; in reality it
was much wider; in seeming it was twice as wide. From Red Lakes as
a center you looked up an interminable dazzle of slope to the San
Andreas, up and up over a broken bench country to Timber Mountain, the
black base of it high above the level of Point o' Rocks at its highest
summit; and toward the north looked up and up and up again along a
smoother and gentler slope ending in a blank nothingness, against
which the eye strained vainly.

Johnny sipped another cup of coffee with the wranglers; he smoked a
cigarette; he put on fresh clothing from his bed; he took his gun from
his bed and buckled the belt loosely at his waist. His toilet
completed, he rolled his bed. By this time the wranglers had
breakfasted.

They piled the bed rolls high on the bed wagon and roped them tight
for safe riding; they harnessed and hitched the two small mules. The
night wrangler tied the reins to the dashboard and climbed to the top
of the stacked bedding.

"You see that these mules get started, will you, Pat? I'm going to
sleep. They'll tag along after the chuck wagon if you'll start 'em
once," said the night wrangler. Discipline did not allow the night
wrangler a name. He stretched out luxuriously, his broad hat over his
face.

Johnny and Pat--Pat was the horse wrangler--hitched the four mules to
the chuck wagon, after which Pat rounded up his scattered charges and
drove them down to the lake for water.

All this time the red-head cook had been stowing away his
housekeeping, exactly three times as fast as you would expect three
men to do it. A go