She turned against me raging. "What air you waiting for? Has you jest got to stand round all day? Yo're scart—that's what's the matter with you-all—afraid to even carry a warning! What d'ye want to pack the kitchen for? I'm shut of you. Stay thar!"
She jumped to her horse, she sprang to the saddle, she lashed her spurs for blood, and whirled away to the northward.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE STRONGHOLD
My words are only crawling for lack of wings; my brain's like ashes when it needs to be live fire. I have no brains or words to talk of what I've seen, and I reckon I'm a lot incompetent. The men who wrote the Bible ought to be turned loose on this earth again to make another book. Then folks who have not seen might understand such places as the Painted Desert, the Rock City, and the Grand Cañon of the Colorado.
What with delays in packing and driving I had to track Curly for maybe thirty miles before I caught her up at Clay Flat by the edge of the forest. Her horse was dead, and she sat beside him, her stone-white face set cold, staring straight ahead. Below us lay the Painted Desert, so wide that the further edge was lost in mist. We rode down to the trickle of water at the bottom, then up the further side, and all the rock lay in belts red as flame, yellow as gold, purple as violets, which seemed to shine of their own light, burning us. The men who stop in that country mostly go mad, the which is natural. Beyond we came out on a mesa of naked rock and sand-drifts, where we found a pool between high cliffs, splashed through it, and maybe a dozen miles beyond found after nightfall a few plants of grass. We had covered a hundred and ten miles at a tearing pace that day, changing horses, robber fashion, at every halt we made.
Next morning we met up with small bunches of Navajo Indians, a strange breed of people, dressed up in their private brown skins, with great plenty of turquoise necklace, silver harness, and a wisp of breech clout, riding with bows and arrows to hunt rabbits. They handed a few arrows after us; but their ponies could not run, so we quit their company.
Then we came to the City of Rocks, flaming red, and high as mountains; their thousand-foot walls sheer to the desert, all carved in needle spires, towers, castles, palaces. The street was six miles wide, I reckon, and we rode along it maybe fifty miles, like crawling flies in the sand.
Beyond the city we curved around by a gap in the desert, a sort of crack half a mile deep, with a river along the bottom. It swung about like a snake, getting deeper and deeper; but we kept to the level desert, until we reached a little side cañon, where there was feed and water. We resaddled there, taking Curly's buckskin and my pet horse Sam. The rest of our bunch we turned down into that pasture, and left them, riding on along the rim rock.