e sides of the mountains with eyes as keen as an eagle's;
then, on the top of the last roll, he halted and threw his hand out
grandly at the panorama which lay before them.

"There she lays," he said, as if delivering a funeral oration, "as
good a cow country as God ever made--and now even the jack rabbits
have left it. D'ye see that big mesa down there?" he continued,
pointing to a broad stretch of level land, dotted here and there with
giant cactus, which extended along the river. "I've seen a thousand
head of cattle, fat as butter, feedin' where you see them _sahuaros_,
and now look at it!"

He threw out his hand again in passionate appeal, and Hardy saw that
the mesa was empty.

"There was grass a foot high," cried Creede in a hushed, sustained
voice, as if he saw it again, "and flowers. Me and my brothers and
sisters used to run out there about now and pick all kinds, big
yaller poppies and daisies, and these here little pansies--and
ferget-me-nots. God! I wish I could ferget 'em--but I've been
fightin' these sheep so long and gittin' so mean and ugly them flowers
wouldn't mean no more to me now than a bunch of jimson weeds and
stink squashes. But hell, what's the use?" He threw out his hands once
more, palms up, and dropped them limply.

"That's old Pablo Moreno's place down there," he said, falling back
abruptly into his old way. "We'll stop there overnight--I want to help
git that wagon across the river when Rafael comes in bymeby, and we'll
go up by trail in the mornin'."

Once more he fell into his brooding silence, looking up at the naked
hills from habit, for there were no cattle there. And Rufus Hardy,
quick to understand, gazed also at the arid slopes, where once the
grama had waved like tawny hair in the soft winds and the cattle of
Jeff Creede's father had stood knee-high in flowers.

Now at last the secret of Arizona-the-Lawless and Arizona-the-Desert
lay before him: the feed was there for those who could take it, and
the sheep were taking it all. It was government land, only there was
no government; anybody's land, to strip, to lay waste, to desolate, to
hog for and fight over forever--and no law of right; only this, that
the best fighter won. Thoughts came up into his mind, as thoughts will
in the silence of the desert; memories of other times and places, a
word here, a scene there, having no relation to the matter in hand;
and then one flashed up like the premonitions of the superstitious--a