y, which Jones assured me was
exactly as their fathers had crossed the plains fifty years before, on
the trail to Utah.

All morning we made good time, and as we descended into the desert, the
air became warmer, the scrubby cedar growth began to fail, and the
bunches of sage were few and far between. I turned often to gaze back
at the San Francisco peaks. The snowcapped tips glistened and grew
higher, and stood out in startling relief. Some one said they could be
seen two hundred miles across the desert, and were a landmark and a
fascination to all travelers thitherward.

I never raised my eyes to the north that I did not draw my breath
quickly and grow chill with awe and bewilderment with the marvel of the
desert. The scaly red ground descended gradually; bare red knolls, like
waves, rolled away northward; black buttes reared their flat heads;
long ranges of sand flowed between them like streams, and all sloped
away to merge into gray, shadowy obscurity, into wild and desolate,
dreamy and misty nothingness.

"Do you see those white sand dunes there, more to the left?" asked
Emmett. "The Little Colorado runs in there. How far does it look to
you?"

"Thirty miles, perhaps," I replied, adding ten miles to my estimate.

"It's seventy-five. We'll get there day after to-morrow. If the snow in
the mountains has begun to melt, we'll have a time getting across."

That afternoon, a hot wind blew in my face, carrying fine sand that cut
and blinded. It filled my throat, sending me to the water cask till I
was ashamed. When I fell into my bed at night, I never turned. The next
day was hotter; the wind blew harder; the sand stung sharper.

About noon the following day, the horses whinnied, and the mules roused
out of their tardy gait. "They smell water," said Emmett. And despite
the heat, and the sand in my nostrils, I smelled it, too. The dogs,
poor foot-sore fellows, trotted on ahead down the trail. A few more
miles of hot sand and gravel and red stone brought us around a low mesa
to the Little Colorado.

It was a wide stream of swiftly running, reddish-muddy water. In the
channel, cut by floods, little streams trickled and meandered in all
directions. The main part of the river ran in close to the bank we were
on. The dogs lolled in the water; the horses and mules tried to run in,
but were restrained; the men drank, and bathed their faces. According
to my Flagstaff adviser, this was one of the two drinks I would get on