ping
shuffle that eats up its forty miles a day--and rode on together like
brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the
painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the
river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon
which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the
shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never
returned again, the Indians of the valley have always looked with
superstitious dread.

Creede told the story carelessly, smiling at the pride of the Pimas
who refused to admit that the Apaches alone, devils and bad medicine
barred, could have conquered so many of their warriors. To the west in
a long fringe of green loomed the cottonwoods of Moroni, where the
hard-working Mormons had turned the Salagua from its course and
irrigated the fertile plain, and there on their barren reservation
dwelt the remnant of those warlike Pimas, the unrequited friends of
the white men, now held by them as of no account.

As he heard the history of its people--how the Apaches had wiped out
the Toltecs, and the white men had killed off the Apaches, and then,
after pushing aside the Pimas and the Mexicans, closed in a death
struggle for the mastery of the range--Hardy began to perceive the
grim humor of the land. He glanced across at his companion, tall,
stalwart, with mighty arms and legs and features rugged as a mountain
crag, and his heart leaped up within him at the thought of the battles
to come, battles in which sheepmen and cattlemen, defiant of the law,
would match their strength and cunning in a fight for the open range.

As they rode along mile after mile toward the north the road mounted
gently; hills rose up one by one out of the desert floor, crowned with
towering _sahuaros_, and in the dip of the pass ahead a mighty forest
of their misshapen stalks was thrust up like giant fingers against the
horizon. The trail wound in among them, where they rose like fluted
columns above the lesser cactus--great skin-covered tanks, gorged fat
with water too bitter to quench the fieriest thirst, yet guarded
jealously by poison-barbed spines. Gilded woodpeckers, with hearts red
as blood painted upon their breasts, dipped in uneven flight from
_sahuaro_ to _sahuaro_, dodged into holes of their own making, dug
deep into the solid flesh; sparrow hawks sailed forth from their
summits, with quick eyes turned to the earth for lizards