Without a pay day from that gypo man!
“I didn’t just make that up. Whoever did I don’t savvy. But I guess he was nuts about Wing o’ the Crow like I am. And, say, when a plug tells the truth right out like I do, he sure is nuts, ain’t he? Oh, well, at the worst I’m a ramblin’ kid. Now, I’ll say this is some desert—what, ol’-timer?”
The Falcon looked and gloried in the sight.
Away to the east appeared a hazy line of irregular calico buttes. To the south and west the pine-studded ridges of the mountains rose. Between them, level as a dance floor and covered sparsely with yucca palms, bronze greasewood, sage, and innumerable dry lakes, lay the colorful desert baking in the sun. Now and then a lone coyote stood staring, then slunk away mysteriously through the low growth. Tecolote, the wise-eyed little desert owl, perched himself on the dirt heap beside his hole in the ground and scolded at them, brave as a lion. Lean jack rabbits hopped away indifferently through the avenues of the greasewood. Halfaman pointed ahead with the long whip that he never seemed to need for another purpose.
“I think we’re makin’ for the saddle in that range o’ buttes,” he said. “That’s where the ole road comes through and hits the desert—our old road, boy. I think Squawtooth Ranch is about in there. That’s where we’re gonta camp, I hear. Boy, boy! Pass me that ole water bag. Make haste or I die! ‘And Phinehas begat Abishua!’”
Higher and higher mounted the yellow dust cloud. On and on into the mocking desert forged the wagon train, a long, winding snake whose joints were men and teams and vehicles—a mere worm wriggling slowly over a yellow carpet in the banquet hall of the gods.
Evening on the desert, with the mountains casting their long shadows athwart the rapidly cooling land. Three black specks, far apart, but drawing together slowly at a converging point between them and the squat adobe house at Squawtooth, with its sheltering cottonwoods and its oasis of green alfalfa set like an emerald in a sheet of yellow brass.
The three black specks grow larger and larger—two galloping horses, the one a pinto, the other a bay, and a mouse-colored pack burro—the California chuck wagon. A girl rides the pinto, a boy the bay, the burro trotting ahead of the latter. The boy and girl wave their hands at each other and gallop on. The ponies neigh greetings; the burro adds his mournful “Aw-ee-aw!” Two of the specks now become one. Side by side in the cow pony trot, Manzanita and Martin Canby ride home together from a day on the desert, the burro, with Martin’s camp outfit, trotting ahead.
Manzanita was colored almost as brown as the stumpy trunk of the beautiful shrub after which her mother had named her. Her hair was chestnut. She usually wore it in two girlish braids that reached to the bottom of her saddle skirts. Her eyes were hazel. With the possible exception of the waxen plume of the Spanish bayonet, there was nothing prettier nor more graceful on the desert; and the hill-billies and desert rats of the male persuasion would not have admitted the exception. One thing certain, the plume of the Spanish bayonet was far more dignified than its animate beauty rival. She rode with the ease of an amazon in her silver-mounted man’s saddle—a prize won at a rodeo for horsewomanship—and carried a holstered Colt .38 on a .45 frame for company. She wore a man’s hat with a rattlesnake band, an olive drab shirt, fringed leather chaps, and riding boots.
Martin Canby was just a freckle-faced, chapped, spurred, sombreroed kid of the desert—live as an eel, all grins, good nature, and backwardness. He was three years younger than Manzanita.