"Well," Uncle Sid was not wholly satisfied, "perhaps by the time I'm your best friend, you'll be ready to tell me."
"I think that may be very soon," said Helen soberly, as she finished her orange.
"Have another?" Uncle Sid held out the bag cordially.
Helen was morally certain that Uncle Sid's New England thrift was dwelling on the five cents apiece; but she took the proffered orange. Uncle Sid rose clumsily to his feet.
"Now for the Christopher Sawyer."
The mist was rapidly clearing. Without visible means of locomotion, wisps of fog rose from the ground in the distance, trailed along like a sea-bird rising from the water, then melted in the air. They were standing on the edge of a mesa. Below them, tall cottonwoods rose in a straggling, sinuous line, their trunks matted with clinging vines, their branches loaded almost to the breaking point with clusters of parasitic plants. A line of shrubs, filling in between the trees, were bowed in a mat of tangled verdure that was dotted and sprinkled with rainbow colors. White-rimmed ditches appeared from behind projecting promontories of yellow sand, crawled under wire fences whose crooked, ghostly sticks, like the legs of some gigantic centipede, straggled around patches of wheat and barley. Outside these patches of green, adobe huts were surrounded by other scraggly sticks, driven into the ground and held upright by wires which were stretched out to them from occasional cottonwoods.
Back of them, Ysleta was lost to sight behind a rising grade of yellow sand, dotted by clumps of chaparral and cactus. Across the barranca, over the tops of the highest cottonwoods, the rolling mesa stretched as barren and forbidding as that on which they were standing.
"I bet that's the Christopher Sawyer!" Uncle Sid was pointing to the tangled mass of vegetation. "These are the first things I've seen that look as if they'd had enough to drink."
Helen was looking in another direction.
"How queer those cattle are acting."