“I reckon you’ll have ter set sort o’ light in the saddle, Mister,” he said at the mounting; and then, apparently as an after-thought: “By gollies, I wouldn’t have you fall over ag’inst me f’r a farm in God’s country, stranger! Ef you was to live round here, we’d call you Samson, and take up a c’lection fer the pore, sufferin’ Philistines. We shore would.”
Sprague laughed good-naturedly as he followed Starbuck’s lead toward the river. He was well used to being joked about his size, and there were times when he rather encouraged the joke. Big men are popularly supposed to be more or less helpless, physically, and Sprague was enough of a humorist to enjoy the upsetting, now and then, of the popular tradition. In his college days he had held the record for the heavy lift and the broad jump; there was no man of his class who could stand up to him with the gloves or on the wrestling-mat; and in the foot-ball field he was at once the strongest “back” and the fastest man on the team—a combination rare enough to be miraculous.
“You say you want to follow the river?” said Starbuck, when they had struck in between the precipitous hills among which the green flood of the Timanyoni made its way toward the canyon portal.
“Yes, if it is at all practicable. I’d like to get some idea of the lay of the land between this and the camp on the Mesquite.”
“I’m anticipatin’ that you’ll get the idea, good and plenty,” agreed the superintendent’s brother-in-law dryly; and during the three-hour jaunt that followed, the prediction was amply confirmed. There was no trail, and for the greater part of the way the river flowed between rocky hogbacks, with only the narrowest of bowlder-strewn margins on either hand.
Time and again they were forced to dismount and to lead the horses around or over the natural obstructions; and once they were obliged to leave the river valley entirely, climbing and descending again by a circuitous route among the rugged hills.
It was late in the forenoon when they came finally into the region of upper basins, and, turning to the eastward, threaded a dry arroyo which brought them out upon the level-bottomed valley known as the Mesquite Mesa. It was not a mesa in the proper meaning of the term; it was rather a vast flat wash brought down from the hills by the sluicing of many floods. Here and there its sun-baked surface was cut and gashed by dry gullies all pointing toward the river, and each bearing silent witness to the manner in which the mesa had been formed.
At a point well within this shut-in moraine, Sprague dismounted, tossed his bridle reins to Starbuck, and went to examine the soil in the various gullies. Each dry ditch afforded a perfect cross-section of the different strata, from the thin layer of sandy top-soil to the underlying beds of coarse sandstone pebbles and gravel. Sprague kicked the edges from a dozen of the little ditches, secured a few handfuls of the soil, and came back shaking his head.
“I don’t wonder that these people don’t want to advertise their land, Billy,” he commented, climbing, with a nimbleness astonishing in so large a man, to the back of his mount. “As they say down in Tennessee, you couldn’t raise a fuss on it. Let’s amble along and see what they are doing at the head works.”
At the head of the wash the valley of Mesquite Creek came in abruptly from the right. On a bench above the mouth of the valley they found the construction camp of the irrigation company, a scattered collection of shack sheds and tents, a corral for the working stock, and the usual filth and litter characterizing the temporary home of the “wop.”