“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 62 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 63 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 verse from the Bible that he had learned at his mother’s knee many years before:
“Crying, Peace, Peace, when there is no peace.”
But he put it aside lightly, as a man should, for if one followed every vagrant fancy and intuition, taking account of signs and omens, he would slue and waver in his course like a toy boat in a mill pond, which after great labor and adventure comes, in the end, to nothing.