“What’s that?”
“I dunno—yet. I’ve got to do somethin’ for that blister.”
Hashknife limps down to the bunk-house, dragging his saddle.
“What do yuh reckon he found out?” asks Windy. “Why is he satisfied?”
“Don’t ask me, Windy, and it won’t do yuh no good to ask him. A clam is a howling hyena beside that jasper, when he wants to keep still about his thoughts.”
Then he wants to see the place they calls the Devil’s Dooryard; so Windy guides us to that place. It sure looks like it might ’a’ been. Once on a time it was a volcano which busted out the side of the mountain and it sure made a barren spot out of a piece of country about two miles wide and three miles long.
Man, that must ’a’ been a hot place at one time. There ain’t a danged thing growing there. She’s just a humped-up mass of pillars, boulders and jagged rocks, kind of red and yaller and melted-like. The floor of it is solid rock, where the lava spewed over the side of the mountain. This rock is kinda like glass, having been heated so blamed hot.
We rides up one side of it, almost to the top, but she’s all alike. It ain’t no place to ride a horse on account of the sharp rocks. At the top is just one high cliff of the same rocks, sticking two or three hundred feet high into the air. The whole divide is one series of cliffs. We rides back to the foot of it and sits down to rest in the shade of a pillar.
“This place is sure well named,” opines Hashknife. “I reckon it was too hot for the devil, so he moved to his present location. This is where that Bar 20 puncher got shot, eh?”
“That’s what they say,” nods Windy. “It’s about five miles to the Bar 20 from here. I reckon he just hung on and let his bronc take him home.”