Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

After a moment of reflection Coronado added, "You will stay with us and take care of mules. I will do well by you."

"Thanks, Señor. Many thanks."

Coronado rejoined Thurstane and told his news. The officer looked grave; there might be another combat in store for the train; it might be an affair with both bands of the Apaches.

"Well," he said, "we must keep our eyes open. Every one of us must do his very utmost. On the whole, I can't believe they can beat us."

"Nombre de Dios!" thought Coronado. "How will this accursed job end? I wish I were out of it."

They were now traversing the cañon from which they had been so long debarred. It was a peaceful solitude; no life but their own stirred within its sandstone ramparts; and its windings soon carried them out of sight of their late assailants. For four hours they slowly threaded it, and when night came on they were still in it, miles away from their expected camping ground. No water and no grass; the animals were drooping with hunger, and all suffered with thirst; the worst was that the hurts of the wounded could not be properly dressed. But progress through this labyrinth of stones in the darkness was impossible, and the weary, anxious, fevered travellers bivouacked as well as might be.

Starting at dawn, they finished the cañon in about an hour, traversed an uneven plateau which stretched beyond its final sinuous branch gullies, and found themselves on the brow of a lofty terrace, overlooking a sublime panorama. There was an immense valley, not smooth and verdurous, but a gigantic nest of savage buttes and crags and hills, only to be called a valley because it was enclosed by what seemed a continuous line of eminences. On the north and east rose long ranges and elevated table-lands; on the west, the savage rolls and precipices of the Sierra del Carrizo; and on the south, a more distant bordering of hazy mountains, closing to the southwest, a hundred miles away, in the noble snowy peaks of Monte San Francisco.

With his field-glass, Thurstane examined one after another of the mesas and buttes which diversified this enormous depression. At last his attention settled on an isolated bluff or mound, with a flattened surface three or four miles in length, the whole mass of which seemed to be solid and barren rock. On this truncated pyramid he distinguished, or thought he distinguished, one or more of the pueblos of the Moquis. He could not be quite sure, because the distance was fifteen miles, and the walls of these villages are of the same stone with the buttes upon which they stand.

"There is our goal, if I am not mistaken," he said to Coronado. "When we get there we can rest."

The train pushed onward, slowly descending the terrace, or rather the succession of terraces. After reaching a more level region, and while winding between stony hills of a depressing sterility, it came suddenly, at the bottom of a ravine, upon fresh green turf and thickets of willows, the environment of a small spring of clear water. There was a halt; all hands fell to digging a trench across the gully; when it had filled, the animals were allowed to drink; in an hour more they had closely cropped all the grass. This was using up time perilously, but it had to be done, for the beasts were tottering.