It was worth a pang or two, after all. He led the way to the southern tip of the plateau; no great distance—from edge to edge the tableland was no more than three hundred yards across. But it overlooked the Blood Flats from a great height, four hundred feet or more, I judged. Barreau sat down beside a choke-cherry clump, and rolled himself a cigarette. Ten paces beyond, the butte fell away sheer to the waste levels below.
“There is nothing that I have ever seen just like this,” he murmured. “And it is never twice alike. Watch that rise take fire from the sun. And the mountains over yonder; square-shouldered giants, tricked out in royal purple.”
The sun slid clear of the skyline, and a long shaft of light brushed over the unreckoned miles of grassland till it fell caressingly on our butte. Hollows and tiny threads of creeks nursed deep, black shadows that shrank and vanished as the sun-rays sought them out. Away beyond, to the west, the snow-tipped Rockies stood boldly out in their robe of misty blue. And as the yellow glare bathed the sea of land that ringed the lone pinnacle I saw why the Flats were so named.
Impassive, desolate, vast in its sweep, the plain took on a weird look at the sun’s kiss. Barren of tree or shrub so far as the eye could reach, naked even of shriveled blades of grass, when the last, least shadow was gone it spread before us like a painted floor; red to its outermost edges, a sullen dried-blood red. A strange colored soil, as if it were a huge bed of dull-glowing coals.
“Blood Flats! There is no incongruity in the name,” Barreau vouchsafed. “This is almost beautiful. Yet I have seen the sun strike it of a morning—and felt a foolish, oppressive dread. Just after a rain, I remember, once. Then it lay like a lake of blood. The light played on pools here and there, pools that glowed like great rubies. Fancy it! Ninety miles square of that blood-stained earth. A monster shambles, it has often seemed to me. It breeds strange thoughts when one faces it alone. Or take it on a day of lowering clouds. Then it almost voices a threat of evil. It is so void of life, so malevolent in its stillness. The psychology of environment is a curious thing. How is it that mere inanimate earth, a great magnitude of space, a certain color scheme, can affect a man so? Sometimes I wonder if we inherit past experiences from our primitive ancestors along with the color of our eyes or the cast of our features. Our surroundings work upon our emotions as the temperature affects a thermometer, and we cannot tell why. Even the hard-headed bull-whackers hate this stretch of country.”
He made himself another cigarette, and sat quiet for a time, staring off across the red waste.
“We may as well go back to camp,” he said, rising abruptly. “There is no sign of men, mounted, afoot, or otherwise, that I can see.”
Back by our saddles and pack layout, Barreau divided the blankets and showed me how to fold mine to make the most of them. Thankfully I bedded myself in a shaded place, but he, before following my example, unslung from his saddle the rifle he had procured of Montell. He looked it over, snapped the lever forward and back, slid another cartridge or two into the magazine. This done, he laid it by his blankets.
“I grudge the Police my two good nags, and my Winchester,” he remarked, as he drew off his boots. “What extra weapons Montell had were stowed in a wagon, and I had no time to hunt for them. So we will have to make shift with one rifle—for a while, at least. For that matter, unless we run foul of some young bucks prowling for a scalp, one gun will serve as well as two. If you elect to take a different trail, the best I can give you will be an ancient derringer and a scant number of cartridges. But I am inclined to think we will not part company, yet a while.”
He sat upon his blankets, regarding me with a measuring air; and I, from my comfortable position, answered drowsily: