“Not much—but a young lady who was here said she’d like to have one and I promised to send it,” he replied with the air of a man whose promise is always equal to performance, and went on to regale us with other weird stories of adventure with deadly reptiles.
“Any mountain lions in this section?” I asked, thinking to afford him subject-matter for further stories of his experiences.
“Never heard of any,” he promptly answered.
“Roosevelt in his new book tells about hunting them near the Grand Canyon,” I began, but he interrupted me with a snort of disgust.
“Roosevelt is the biggest —— faker in the whole country. You can bet your life he never hunted mountain lions in Arizona.”
“But I read it yesterday in his new book,” I insisted.
“Mebbe you did—he may write about it, all right, but I’ll gamble this Ford agin a copper cent that he never did it.”
I saw there was no use trying to defend the veracity of our strenuous ex-president to a man with such a righteous horror of a faker and therefore desisted.
In the meanwhile the Ford had scrambled up a short incline to the verge of a gigantic chasm and paused. From the gorgeous colorings—the vivid dashes of red, yellow, purple, orange, and all the gamut of the mingling of these—we might have fancied before us a section of the Grand Canyon in miniature, save that the floor of the great depression was comparatively level. Looking westward down this weird prismatic valley, our view was unobstructed for twenty-five miles or more and the vivid color belts gradually melted into a lavender haze which formed the horizon.
“That’s a corner of the Painted Desert,” said our guide, “and those black stumps and blocks you see down yonder, a mile or so, are pieces of the petrified trees. There’s a trail so you can walk down if you want to.” Nobody exhibited any keen anxiety to hit the trail and the driver confirmed the general disinclination by saying that the trip was hardly worth while; we should see the other forests, far larger and more interesting, at close range. So, after due contemplation of the scene—for this stretch of the Painted Desert is far more worth while than the forest at this point—we gave word for the return.